[P2P-F] just fyi, where I am at in march 2022, four years after the blacklisting by identitarians

[Michel Bauwens]

Just a little note of 'where I am at' and 'where I am going', potentially,
and what it means for this forum. (refers to the p2p forum on fb)

A brief recall: after 20 years of activism, establishing an observatory, a
theory, and a network to observe and understand the current transition,
based on the hypothesis we need to move towards a commons-centric societal
order, I got cancelled and blacklisted after a conflict with the identity
'left' in August 2018.

This was for me, an important crisis moment, as I could not reconcile
myself with where the 'left' was evolving to. It was either embracing the
neo-racial and segregationist theories, denying their reality, or ignoring
their danger. For me, it was a story of identity crisis, since it was a
huge part of my own identity, but also stories of personal betrayal etc...
I had to take stock ... which pretty much coincided with the emerging COVID
crisis. I decided to restudy, first of all, all the intellectual traditions
that I had ignored; secondly, going back to a deeper understanding of
transitions, while also imperatively having to understand where this
degeneration of emancipatory thought (if you can call it thought), came
from.

As I was engaging with this new quest, helped by the time freed by the
blacklisting, and the COVID isolation, I discovered the work of John David
Ebert and the thread of civilizational analysis. But I was rather passive
in terms of new production, the reason being I had less confidence, since I
had a lot more questions than answers.

But, last weekend emerged some type of new integration in my framing of the
past , present and future of humankind. So I expect to be more active again.

But this may have some consequences on my curation. It <is> very time
consuming. What I have noticed is the following: 1) the 'liberal' (US
meaning) is becoming more and more hostile to pluralism and more and more
authoritarian and suppressive towards free and dissident thought, pushing
for censorship and even war; 2) while this forum is quite active, the
others I maintain are less so; to be precise, there is a lot of sharing
going on, perhaps 10 times more than in 2018, but in terms of reaction, no,
and I am starting to feel it is a waste of time. The problem is that I have
to choose between deep thought, and the more superficial short-term web
curation, which takes 4-5 hours of my time every day.

But here is also a more strategic issue, we need something new, something
that I would call provisionally 'integral commoning'. What I mean is that
we can no longer stay within partisan tribalisms, but need to create groups
of people willing to thinking freely and creatively across boundaries,
looking for what is useful and good in all traditions, from premodern,
modern, postmodern to what I would call transmodern. A movement which
stresses the need for reasonable social distribution, ecological balance,
but at the same time protects civil rights and pluralism, while making no
compromise at all with the new racial hierarchism. While the conservative
side is now the side protecting civil rights and legal equality, it is
still failing to come to grasp with the problems around the increasing
inequalities and ecological crises.

So we need to build something new. I am only interested in working with
people who support civil rights, human equality, while being sensitive to
the social and ecological crisis, AND, have a measure of realism about the
human condition. We cannot afford to be Rousseau-ists right now, we need to
think about power and property, alliances, and recognize the huge failings
of the human conditions, including the ones in ourselves. It is also by
recognizing our own projections, i.e. seeing evil outside ourselves and
scapegoating it, that we can hope to improve the conditions of our
interconnected world.
So, I'll stop here, but if you see some changes in my curation approach,
that is the reason, I will push more forcefully against the degeneration of
emancipatory thought, which next to destructive effects of unmanaged
capitalist growth, is the real and present danger humanity is facing, since
it is destroying the opposition to what is going wrong.

-- 
P2P Foundation: http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net <http://p2pfoundation.net>  -
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation

Updates: ; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

Curation of news on p2p/commons developments:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/p2p.open/
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