[P2P-F] Reflections on Trump, and the role of the commons as an alternative

Michel Bauwens michel at p2pfoundation.net
Fri Feb 10 08:58:35 CET 2017 

Dear George,

here is a first attempt at such a page,

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons

Input more than welcome,

Michel

Political and Policy Developments Around the Commons
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons#mw-head>
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons#p-search>


Contents [hide
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons#>
]

   - 1 Context
   <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons#Context>
   - 2 Key themes and developments
   <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons#Key_themes_and_developments>
   - 3 Links to Material on Ongoing Developments
   <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons#Links_to_Material_on_Ongoing_Developments>
      - 3.1 Topics
      <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons#Topics>
      - 3.2 By source
      <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons#By_source>
         - 3.2.1 External Links
         <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons#External_Links>
         - 3.2.2 P2P Foundation Blog Posts
         <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons#P2P_Foundation_Blog_Posts>
         - 3.2.3 P2P Foundation and Commons Transition wiki updates
         <https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons#P2P_Foundation_and_Commons_Transition_wiki_updates>

Context[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons&action=edit&section=1>
]

Given the ecological and political/ social emergencies of the current
conjuncture, the emergence of more and more commons initiatives and
understandings, but still in the context of progressive forces being too
much wedded to the market/state duopoly, we call, with George Por
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/George_Por>, for the launch of a newsletter
that would cover more adequately political and policy developments around
the commons.

In this page, I will, with others hopefully, add pointers to recent
developments that should be covered in such a newsletter.


Key themes and developments[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons&action=edit&section=2>
]

   - the emergence of urban commons and urban commons politics. This refers
   to developments with the new municipal coalitions in Spain, developments
   around the Bologna Regulation and its spread in Italy, commons transitions
   project such as those in Ghent Belgium; the emergence of urban Assemblies
   of the Commons mostly in France; groups like the Commons Transition
   Coalition in Melbourne; civil political revolts such as in Saillans or
   Frome; commons-oriented political inspirations such as Grenoble


   - progressive parties and movements that are open to commons
   understandings; this would involve seeing the commons' aspects of movements
   like the Corbyn and Sanders campaigns, new parties that are emerging such
   as Podemos/Syriza; parties / movements with explicit openings towards the
   commons, such as the Left Party in Italy, Diem in Europe; the Pirate
   Parties, especially in Iceland


   - European and other continental and transnational convergences,
   specifically the European Commons Assembly and its potential national and
   regional derivates.


   - Emergence of transnational civic and generative networks ?


   - How to deal, through commons-oriented approaches, with the
   authoritarian and right-populists surges a la Trump


Links to Material on Ongoing Developments[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons&action=edit&section=3>
]Topics[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons&action=edit&section=4>
]By source[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons&action=edit&section=5>
]External Links[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons&action=edit&section=6>
]P2P Foundation Blog Posts[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons&action=edit&section=7>
]P2P Foundation and Commons Transition wiki updates[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Political_and_Policy_Developments_Around_the_Commons&action=edit&section=8>
]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 2:41 PM, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>
wrote:

> Dear Kevin,
>
> Thank you so much for this perspective, I wholly agree and I want to
> commend you especially for your efforts in knowing the dynamics of the
> opposite camp, as I would not have the time to do this. I urge you to keep
> on working on this track, and to become a real expert in this, god knows we
> need people like you willing to do this. We would also welcome your
> perspectives and writings on the p2p and CT blogs, and you will have seen
> george por's proposal for a political and policy oriented commons
> newsletter,
>
> I want to make a little point of localism, and Occupy; obviously, at least
> for me, it doesn't work to critique them from the outside as many
> post-Marxists do, and seeing them as the enemy either. These are both great
> and massive social mobilisations, moving into a necessary but not
> sufficient direction. Localized initiatives are not bad, just insufficient,
> swarm based mobilizations are not bad, just insufficient. At the same time,
> for those who have a more integrative understanding and understand 'power'
> and 'institutions' cannot be ignored, it's cleary not enough, and it is
> important to also point that out.
>
> One point here is that recently at the P2P Foundation I have been pointing
> at the need for our language to reflect this. So I have been introducing,
> in the context of our work on the cosmo-local DGML based forms of physical
> production, to stress, not localism, but the 'subsidiarity of material
> production' instead. I.e. we need a lot more local production, but always
> also in a trans-national framework.
>
> If ever you had some energy to maintain a newsletter of the kind george
> and I are wishing for, that would cover political commons convergences like
> the ECA, the assembly of the commons that are emerging, the policy work
> being done in so many urban settings,
>
> I would put a lot of my energy of assembling such info in a way that would
> be accessible to the editor of such a newsletter,
>
> we really need this, but at p2p-f, we are overwhelmed with our existing to
> do lists,
>
> Michel
>
> Michel
>
>
>
>
>
> <<<From: Holy Mountain <kev.flanagan at gmail.com>
> To: P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>
> Cc: "staccotroncoso at p2pfoundation.net"
>         <staccotroncoso at p2pfoundation.net>, Ann Marie Utratel
>         <amu444 at gmail.com>, George Pór <george.por at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Reflections on Trump,      and the role of the commons
>         as an alternative
> Message-ID:
>         <CACpSwUdZqSw4ACPO1VXL1B7s3XO1aELUz09My4yeFuUc-zbn2A at mail.gm
> ail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> I completely agree Michel with your analysis of how the left have been
> co-opted into supporting the neoliberal agenda. The other trend on the more
> radical left over the last 30 years has been the rejection of parliamentary
> politics in favour of localism. The risks of a puritan anti-state left
> politics are that they have no organised opposition to challenge the
> capture of the state by reactionary right wing forces. If the left is not
> occupying those seat the right will.
>
> Liberals have successfully co-opted aspects of the left into the
> institutions of capitalism, with the collapse of the soviet union, the end
> of history, the establishment left that includes academics without a
> serious alternative assumed liberalism was a given and committed to working
> for change from within a liberal framework.
>
> No one expected a resurgence of fascism. Spend any time researching this
> and you quickly realise it is huge. It is important to think about the
> young people who are being recruited to extreme right, what paths have lead
> them to participate in these communities.
>
> The extreme right have not had the privilege of access to government,
> academic institutions or mainstream media and so they waste no time trying
> to get papers published or to lobby governments to support their policies,
> no they are entirely focused on recruiting online not through reason but
> through myth, tapping into young peoples anxieties and offering them
> insurgent narratives, vision and mythology.
>
> Where do young people go to learn about the world. Youtube. The extreme
> right have made really effective use of this as a medium for recruitment.
> Unlike academics, politicians so on who mostly talk to each other. The
> right engage with these young people in 'debate'.
>
> The problem is also the narrative. Liberals and the left offer complex
> narratives. Liberal politics has become a bureaucratic and there are
> establishment gatekeepers. The extreme right offer simple narratives with
> naive hero myths which appeal to young people who the right claim are
> raised being taught left politics of victimhood and blame in universities.
>
> The promise of figures like Trump is that he does not care for checks and
> balances, he is the image of the authoritarian who overcomes, the
> complexities of politics, the cynical power plays of bureaucrats and
> experts, he does this by sheer force of charismatic will, cheered on by his
> followers who have simply lost patience with the status quo.
>
> This is the modus operandi of fascism.
>
> This has emboldened the far right, those who previously entertained these
> ideas in private for fear of social censure are coming out and organising.
>
> Berger is an expert on online extremism and has done significant work on
> how Isis use social media to recruit and organise at scale. In this video
> he explains how the far right are using the same tactics but do not face
> the same kinds of limitations as Isis. He talks about the relative impact
> of small groups on shaping public discourse. He is not at all convinced
> that western governments have the capacity to effectively deal with this
> turn.
>
> We are looking at highly organised fascist recruitment and propaganda
> machine. It cannot be tolerated and must face full resistance that means
> alliances of everyone committed to democratic process.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YJmfRbbPw
>
> https://cchs.gwu.edu/sites/cchs.gwu.edu/files/downloads/Nazi
> s%20v.%20ISIS%20Final_0.pdf
>
> Part of that is offering real alternative political imaginaries, and making
> those imaginaries available and accessible to young people is essential.
> What would a popular alternative movement look like? One that moves beyond
> the horizontalism of Occupy and aims effectively to get hands dirty, to
> take power and put it to work for the kind of world we want to live in.
>
>
> --
> Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at:
> http://commonstransition.org
>
> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>
> <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>
> #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
>



-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org


P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
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