[P2P-F] Fwd: Journey to Earthland (GTN Discussion)

Tue Nov 1 06:24:45 CET 2016

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Great Transition Network <gtnetwork at greattransition.org>
Date: Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 7:45 AM
Subject: Journey to Earthland (GTN Discussion)
To: michelsub2004 at gmail.com

>From Michael Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

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[Moderator’s note: Please note that today is the last day of the discussion
period, after which Paul will have an opportunity to respond. Final
comments will be spaced out over today and tomorrow.]

By Michel Bauwens, Celine Piques and Xavier Rizos:

Our response at the P2P Foundation has been particularly triggered, not
just by the great work and proposals of Paul Raskin, but by the specific
commentary of Ruben Nelson of Foresight Canada, who stresses that what we
are and must undergo, is a true civilizational transition.

Nelson writes that:

“In the past, all transitions in the forms of civilization were slow,
local/regional, exclusive, optional and unconscious. Today, we are faced by
the need to undertake a GT in our dominant form of civilization that, in
contrast, must be fast (by any historic standard), scalable to the whole
planet, inclusive of all 7.4 billion of us, recognized as required and
conscious. This last requirement also implies that today we must not only
be conscious about change at every scale, but must develop a capacity for
meta-consciousness about change at every scale.” (www.greattransition.org/
forum/gti-discussions/178-journey-to-earthland/reply/2125 )

Several macro-historians have provided interesting maps of such
civilizational transitions (1), but a very sound overview is The Structure
of World History by Kojin Karatani (2), which suggests that a key element
of such a transition is a reconfiguration of modes of exchange, and that a
key aspect of a future civilization is the return to prominence of both the
commons and reciprocity mechanisms as key drivers for the exchange of human
value and natural resources. Like Alan Page Fiske in ‘Structures of Social
Life’ (3) and David Ronfeldt with his TIMN framework (Tribes, Institutions,
Markets, and Networks), Karatani takes a multi-modal approach. This means
he recognizes and shows that at least four modes of exchange have existed
throughout history and throughout all regions of the world, but what
matters is their internal configuration, and especially, what is the
dominant mode of exchange in any given system, which acts as an ‘attractor’
for the others. Karatani starts with
describing the dominance of pooling in early nomadic societies based on
kinship bands, the dominance of reciprocity and the gift economy in tribal
federations; the dominance of state and rank-based redistribution
(‘Authority Ranking’) in pre-capitalist class formations and finally, the
dominance of the capitalist market. This means that civilisational
transitions, marked by the evolution of one dominant exchange system to
another, are regular occurrences in world history, and they are quite
systematically described in Karatani’s remarkable synthesis. On the
European continent, the two last of such transitions were the 10th
transition of the post-Roman plunder economy into the feudal land-based
economy, brilliantly described in Robert Moore’s First European Revolution,
and the 15th century start of the transition to a market-based economy.

Karatani makes a special argument that networked technologies bring back
pooling and the commons as central exchange mechanisms, and at the P2P
Foundation, we have focused for the last ten years on the observation of
precisely that transition, and specifically, on the emergence of
commons-based peer production, which was first identified by Yochai Benkler
in his answer to Adam Smith, i.e., The Wealth of Networks. Peer production
is a proto-mode of production which is marked by open input into
contributory systems, participatory modes of governance, and
commons-oriented output. While it has emerged in the field of immaterial
production such as free software and open design, it is now moving towards
physical production, through its combination with networked modes of
financing and distributed capital goods (distributed manufacturing). This
mode of production and exchange exists either in a context of
profit-maximisation, when the contributive productive communities are
surrounded by
extractive corporations, as is the case for example in most of free
software production, or in a context of the emergence of generative and
ethical entrepreneurial coalitions. These are coalitions of mostly
mission-oriented, purpose-driven entrepreneurs who are take on legal forms
from the cooperative and solidarity economy and are starting to practice
shared open and contributory accounting, as well as taking first steps in
participatory eco-systems of production and distribution that are using
open supply chains. Examples of such models are the ones of Enspiral in New
Zealand, Las Indias in Spain, Sensorica in Canada, and more. A recent
3-year study of 300 such peer production communities, called P2P Value and
funded by the EU, came to interesting conclusions. For example, nearly all
of them qualified as imaginary communities (cfr. Benedict Anderson’s work
on the emergence of the ‘nation’-state), marked by both a generative desire
(make the world a better place and solve
social and environmental issues), an identification with global networks of
belonging, the use and planning of contributory accounting mechanisms (in
78% of the cases), and the use of peer-based reputation mechanisms. In
other words, this new model that combines open contributory productive
communities and their livelihood organisations are part and parcel of the
now necessary transition from extractive/degenerative modes of production
and exchange, to regenerative models, as described also by John. D. Liu.

Our conviction that peer production models based on the commons are central
to the GTI is also strengthened by the 3,000-year comparative study
undertaken by Mark Whitaker (4), which shows how the mutualization of
knowledge, the mutualization of infrastructures, and the relocalization of
productive capacity have been central to the ‘civilizational transitions’
in the past, in Europe, Japan, and China. But whereas religious reform
movements were at the core of the past transitions, the historical agent
now seems to be more secular-minded productive communities, as the open and
free software and design movements, the cooperative and solidarity economy
movements, and the attempts at relocalized production prototyping by the
fabbing communities.

So what is most interesting in this context, is the potential environmental
impact in terms of the material footprint:

1. First of all, none of these design and production communities practice
‘planned obsolescence’, which is not a bug but a feature of market-based
production; they focus instead on sustainable open source circular economies
2. The generative entrepreneurial coalitions are motivated by the creation
of ‘open, fair, and sustainable’ livelihoods, and take into account
externalities, unlike capitalist markets
3. Nearly all these projects are based on the principle of
cosmo-localization, i.e., design global, manufacture local, under the
principle ‘what is light is shared globally, what is heavy is produced
locally’. Given that the GDP of transport is higher than the GDP of
production and that some studies point to a 3 to 1 expenditure of energy of
transportation vs making, this alone has huge ecological implications in
terms of footprint.

This potential is well-argued in a recent article, by Stephen Quilley,
Jason Hawreliak et al. (5):

The authors write:

“For example, if it were ever possible to 3D print computer chips and
construct/repair/upgrade telecommunications technology in a domestic or
community setting, it is possible to envisage a massive reduction in the
associated metabolic footprint (the ‘unit transformity cost’) of mobile
telephony or computing. The possibility of reducing the metabolic cost of
complexity goes to the heart of the left-green dilemma. Social emancipation
has hitherto depended on forms of technological and social complexity that
involve an economic scale (the throughput of energy and materials) that is,
in the long term, unsustainable. It is an open question as to whether a
reMaker society might eventually make complexity affordable.
Such a society would be much more decentralised with a great deal of active
participation in the making, repair, and recycling of everyday goods, thus
possibly presenting a significant growth in the informal economy. The
potential for a modern green distributive political economy is one in which
the goods produced are much cheaper and sustainable to make, relies on open
design and flexible fabrication, collaborative design and funding
(crowdsourcing), modularity, and electronic re-invention based on need,
rather than want. The potential primary social and economic outcomes of
such a new society emerge from the interplay of new social milieu and
re-focusing of technological innovation.”

Of course, we are not claiming that all this potential is fully reached
right here and now, but making the more general argument that a shift
towards commons-based peer production, and thus to the centrality of
pooling and the commons, is a key feature of the next Great Transition.
Peer production is the right structure for the transition, as it combines a
productive civil society based on contributions to the commons, a
generative post-capitalist market economy (which includes a framework of
reciprocity and mutual coordination in participatory eco-systems for open
source circular economies), and for-benefit institutions as enabling
mechanisms that maintain the infrastructures of cooperation, and prefigure
a future ‘partner state’, which creates the general conditions for societal
cooperation. In other words, this is not just a micro-structure, but also a
macro-structure for societal organization.

The Blaqswans Collective - in association with the P2P lab, a specialized
research unit linked to the P2P Foundation -, with Xavier Rizos and Celine
Piques as coordinators, has made a first attempt to illustrate the
potential gains in material footprint, if an integrated transition towards
this new mode of production and exchange would take place, taking case
studies from agriculture and food production to industrial manufacturing
and renewable energy.
The early results of this preliminary study and review of the potential and
actual gains in the thermodynamic necessities of food production, were it
to undergo a shift through regenerative practices confirm our hopes. Xavier
Rizos confirms that “The feasibility is unequivocal and the thermodynamics
efficiencies proven: all studies and multiyear live experiments show that
agro-ecology not only delivers the required regeneration of the ecosystems,
but also produces between 30% and 80% efficiencies across metrics ranging
from yield, to energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.”

However, our research team also insists that such a shift must be
integrative, including the various practices of peer production and
mutualization of productive resources; that it must take place place under
a growth regime of maximum 1% to be effective at all; and that the changes
have strong requirements for structural transformation.

In other words, our conviction is that there cannot be a Great Transition
without a systemic transformation from a market-centric to a
commons-centric form.

Some references:

1. Macrohistory and Macrohistorians. By J. Galtung, and Sohail Inayatullah
(eds), Praeger, New York, 1997
2. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of
Exchange. By Kojin Karatani. Duke University Press, 2014
3. The Structures of Social Life. Alan Page Fiske. Free Press, 1993
4. Ecological Revolution: The Political Origins of Environmental
Degradation and the Environmental Origins of Axial Religions; China, Japan,
Europe. by Mark D. Whitaker. LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2010
5. Finding an Alternate Route: Towards Open, Eco-cyclical, and Distributed
Production. By Stephen Quilley, Jason Hawreliak, Kaitlin Kish. Journal of
Peer Production, Issue #9: Alternative Internets, 2016 ;
peerproduction.net/issues/issue-9-alternative-internets/
peer-reviewed-papers/finding-an-alternate-route-towards-
open-eco-cyclical-and-distributed-production/

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Thursday, September 1, 2016

>From Paul Raskin

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Dear Friends:

Our series of thematic discussions has been uncommonly rich and animated.
Still, from time to time we’d best step back to a whole-system panorama,
lest we lose sight of the forest for the trees. After all, it is the big
question of how to shape the global social-ecological future that brings us
together.

In that holistic spirit, our next discussion will consider my new
essay—“Journey to Earthland: Making the Great Transition to Planetary
Civilization” (or “JTE,” for short). I wrote it as a sequel to “Great
Transition,” the 2002 treatise that launched GTI. The new volume has four
central aims. First, it updates and develops GTI’s overarching conceptual
framework. Second, it introduces the idea of “Earthland” for the latent
supranational community now stirring in the Planetary Phase. Third, it
describes the integrated planetary praxis and global movement needed to
carry the transformation forward. Fourth, it paints a granular picture of
the kind of flourishing civilization that might await us on the far side of
a Great Transition.

To get your copy of JTE, go to www.greattransition.org/
publication/journey-to-earthland. From there, you can either download a
free pdf or order a paperback through Amazon for $12. (If neither of these
options works for you, please request a complimentary copy by emailing
info at tellus.org with your mailing address.)

In light of JTE’s sweeping scope, I suspect many of you will wish to
elaborate certain formulations and take issue with others. I welcome your
comments in the spirit of a collective exploration with ample room for
difference within a canopy of unity.

NOTE: This discussion will go on for TWO full months—SEPTEMBER and OCTOBER.

Looking forward,
Paul

Paul Raskin
GTI Director

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