Introduction to the Autobiography of Michel Bauwens

* Book: Autobiography of Michel Bauwens (unpublished)

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Context

Michel Bauwens:

William Kelly has been instrumental in getting a autobiography done, by interviewing Michel Bauwens over the course of a dozen online sessions and then transcribing these interviews. Here is his assessment of the work done. Huge thanks also for the further editorial assistance of Jan Krikke.

Jan Krikke writes:

"I've been assisting Michel Bauwen with his forthcoming autobiography. Michel is the founder of the P2P Foundation and one of the world's leading thinkers on the Commons. The book is based on interviews with another dear friend, William (Bill) Kelly, former lecturer of culture studies at UCLA. Michel's life is a magnificent intellectual and philosophical journey.

Bill writes in the Introduction:

"There is much to admire about the person who comes alive in these pages: the sheer brilliance of his mind and the depth and breadth of his ideas, his great energy and persistence in pursuing his ideals, his ability to explain not just his concepts and vision but where they come from, and his skill in facing the challenges of founding and then leading a social movement. I have experienced a level of intellectual excitement and discovery that I have rarely felt.... This book of interviews provides an accessible, although necessarily truncated introduction to Michel’s ideas. But it does much more. The autobiographical reflections are notable for their contribution to our understanding of ourselves, the global civilization in which we live, and the relation between individual and society."

The editing of the manuscript is nearing the finish line, but a sneak preview chapter is available on the P2P Foundation website [link]."

Text

Introduction

William Kelly:

"After interviewing Michel Bauwens and editing the interviews, I would like to discuss this book’s significance. There is much to admire about the person who comes alive in these pages: the sheer brilliance of his mind and the depth and breadth of his ideas, his great energy and persistence in pursuing his ideals, his ability to explain not just his concepts and vision but where they come from, and his skill in facing the challenges of founding and then leading a social movement. I have experienced a level of intellectual excitement and discovery that I have rarely felt. And how could he speak so articulately without preparation on whatever subject I asked him and with so much insight? Surprisingly, I almost never had to ask for clarification or greater elaboration and very little editing was required. Remember, too, that these interviews almost always took place after he had put in a day of non-stop activity for over 12 hours!

Michel is a formidable public intellectual, indefatigable activist, and far-sighted visionary. In the last interview, he warns that for the human species to survive the challenge of ecological collapse, a new global system must be established based on a postcapitalist economy. In providing the contours of this new system, he shows himself to be a master of theory and practice like Karl Marx. In fact, there are echoes of Marx in Michel’s latest book, Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto. Just as Marx realized that British factories were the harbinger of a new capitalist form of society, Michel has observed the present-day seeds of capitalism’s successor, a socioeconomic form in which production is peer-based, property relations are organized around the Commons, and resources are used in a sustainable manner.

This book of interviews provides an accessible, although necessarily truncated introduction to Michel’s ideas. But it does much more. The autobiographical reflections are notable for their contribution to our understanding of ourselves, the global civilization in which we live, and the relation between individual and society. In the process, he takes us on a tour of childhood deprivation, various quests for self-knowledge, and a business career. We also get an inside look at how an influential social movement (P2P) has come into being and flourished. His rich and varied experience and never-ending personal development contain epiphanies and much drama.

Michel interprets how, why, and under what conditions his own ideas have taken shape with genuine insight. But his skill lies not only in his ability to analyze the ways in which his working-class origins and feelings of abandonment facilitated his embrace of revolutionary Marxism and then his pursuit of self-knowledge. Equally important is his lack of attachment to his persona, a quality that makes him one of a rare breed, a reliable narrator. As he tells the story of his life, he is neither defensive about his shortcomings nor prone to exaggerate his achievements. What’s more, he doesn’t attempt to settle scores.

Michel’s interpretations of his life and thought give us some valuable keys to unlocking the secret of an individual’s ability to make history as well as be shaped by it. Having experienced very hard times as a child, Michel uses William James’s notion of “twice born” to account for how such early suffering was a catalyst for his unconventional and highly productive life. According to James, the people who have created original religions and philosophies such as Michel suffered greatly but having overcome their afflictions, they were “reborn” at a higher level of integration than those who grew up happy and lived within the approved parameters of their society. To this explanation, Michel adds Erich Neumann’s concept of centroversion. Neumann believes that in the first phase of life, the focus is on adapting to the outside world. But there comes a time when a person like Michel decides that instead of reacting to others, the world will adapt to him. That is the second phase.

We also read about the sometimes harrowing events and complex processes that were stages on his way to balance and equanimity. There was a stint in a sex commune that lifted much of his sexual and emotional repression. He also underwent therapy designed for drug addicts that put him under the most extreme conditions: blindfolded among 30 people for three days without sleep which led to hallucinations. Sampling many forms of somatic and humanistic therapies, he gained confidence and became self-determining rather than reactive. After such intense experiences, he felt the need to address the existential questions of life, finding in spirituality a more mature form of inner exploration than psychology could provide.

At the age of 42, after a successful career in business as a corporate Internet consultant and the founder of start-ups, he had a severe breakdown when everything in his life turned to dust at the same time. His recovery, followed by a second marriage and move to Thailand, was the time of his “rebirth” as he began to implement his vision of a new economic structure by building up the peer-to-peer network. Over a period of about 20 years, Michel was able to transform himself from a shy, introverted, weak, insecure, passive-aggressive, conflict-avoiding, beta male to a charismatic leader and visionary.

Looking back over his life, Michel sees his development from revolutionary activist to seeker of inner transformation and then to leader of a social movement as parallel to the historical changes occurring in the West over the same period. He precisely and persuasively fits his own journey into that of the larger society. As the neoliberal social contract took root in the 1980s, the welfare state was rolled back and the working-class was sacrificed. In return, the capitalist class was willing to expand rights for women, racial minorities, and eventually gay people while youth were given greater cultural freedom. Such political shifts reflected a turning inward to identity issues after the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But Michel holds that this social contract is clearly unworkable at present due to rising inequality, environmental threats, and a loss of meaning; therefore, a new compact must be brought into being in which economic relations are more horizontal than hierarchical and the Commons rather than capital ultimately becomes the source of ownership and property. In other words, the time is ripe for renewed social engagement, even though Marxism no longer serves as the central oppositional narrative.

Michel’s solid and refined understanding of the historical and cultural character of the West provides the floor for his strategies to promote a new global system. Based on exemplary sources, he outlines the history of child abuse and how it is only recently that a truly collaborative culture could come into existence in the West. Equally striking is his account of the origins of Christianity in a proletarian movement, its later institutionalization and loss of prophetic qualities, and then the invention of productivity by the monks in medieval times. And to take us through modern times, he provides an account of the development of capitalism that serves as a reference point for the growth of the Commons and peer production in our era.

But he doesn’t restrict his historical and cultural exploration to the West inasmuch as he also comes to terms with the character of Eastern societies. His attempt to grasp the differences between East and West has had a profound impact on his own outlook and the choices he has made in his life. In this respect, Keith Chandler’s Beyond Civilization played an outsized part. According to Chandler, chaos is viewed as negative in the West and the role of God is to create order from chaos. Since people are so indebted to this supreme being, they must live in accordance with divine rules and assist in the work of creation by making the world more ordered, that is, more just. In the East, the world of order is the world of illusion. The ideal is to remove the self from the world and to go beyond the self by not identifying with emotions or thoughts. This move away from an ordered and diverse world leads to nirvana where unity or emptiness alone exists. What Michel takes away from Chandler’s portrait is that only the West has placed an emphasis on social transformation.

Although Michel has lived in Thailand for much of the past twenty years and for a few years studied and practiced Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, Daoism, and Zen, he came to resolutely affirm his commitment to Western Enlightenment values of human emancipation and rational critique. After he crashed psychologically, he realized that only social engagement would restore his energy, vitality, and zest for life. This realization accelerated his journey to P2P, since he could reconcile himself with his own Western heritage. Michel’s account of his creation and nurturing of the P2P movement strikes a major chord. We learn what made it possible, how it came about, and the reasons for its success. Maybe the most intriguing part is his discussion of his personal qualities and characteristics and how they helped him to make P2P what it is. The catalyst for him was the breakdown, his ordeal by fire, which led him to get serious about finding his life’s purpose. Yet, he could never have become a leader who acts upon rather than is acted upon by his surroundings without emotional maturity, the fruit of his long psychological and spiritual quests. This emotional intelligence likewise has enabled him to function as the P2P arbiter so that this rather diffuse network can move forward.

Another explanation for Michel’s effectiveness as a leader is his abundant experience in many different life worlds. He was a member of a revolutionary organization (Marxist) and a government organization (USIA), a creator of start-ups, a player in large and small businesses, a student of technology and technological change, and a seeker of wisdom through radical therapies and both Eastern and Western spirituality. Once he got to the heart of each path, he critiqued it, absorbed what was of value, and moved on. For example, his dissection of corporate work conditions, hierarchy, and how economic value is created enabled him to become clearer as to the requirements of a new type of economy. But it took more than personal qualities to get his show rolling. Michel is a master at efficiently and effectively gathering, processing, and spreading information. P2P is the product of his thorough and systematic approach to knowledge-building plus the methodology of vision logic that he gained from Ken Wilber. Using vision logic, he takes current perspectives and organizes them into a system. By assembling the main viewpoints on a particular issue, he shines greater light on it while adding to our knowledge. Vision logic is accompanied by a commitment to pluralism, and Michel has always been open to examining varied information sources in order to understand them rather than ignoring the ideas with which he disagrees. By making the impressive results of his knowledge-building enterprise available on the Internet, he was able to attract collaborators as well as clients. It must be added, though, that success did not come easily, and he describes the many difficulties, financial and otherwise, that he had to face during the early days of his P2P activities.

In response to my question as to the reasons for the positive response in Europe to P2P, he described the career of the European left from its origins at the time of the French revolution to the present day. After the failure of the May 1968 movement and the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, the European left was in disarray. There was pessimism in the air and left-wing intellectuals influenced by postmodernism spoke of the impossibility of grand narratives, retreated from politics, and took residence in the universities. In this climate of defeat, Michel offered a new story that could inspire people and motivate them to act politically. The left with its promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity has been renewed in the P2P movement and other movements of a similar self-organizing character across the social order that confront our ecological and economic challenges.

Besides the astute interpretations of his life and times, his intellectual journey, and his creation and development of P2P, what captures our attention is Michel’s far-reaching analysis and provocative conclusions about the present civilizational crisis. Already, his organization has issued The Thermodynamics of Peer Production and P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival to supply guidance and examples of how to integrate planetary limits into managerial systems. Although he doesn’t want to predict how many people will perish in such a planetary transition, he points out that historical experience indicates that the numbers could be quite high . Yet, he is hopeful that mutualization and the introduction of commons-based peer production would mitigate the social chaos and then provide the economic foundation of the new global system that will emerge after the transitional period of chaos.

Identification of the engines of social change is a crucial and vexing issue for strategists like Michel who wish to move from the present global system to its postcapitalist successor. How has a new social order come into existence in the past? What has been the role of economic factors such as social relations of production? What has been the role of ideas? Michel adopts Wilber’s integral framework which allows him to sidestep the issue of whether ideas or economics play the decisive role in historical development. In Michel’s integral view, it is ideas that influence technology, and technology in turn influences culture, and culture then influences subjectivity. His claim is that ideas are a vital factor in bringing about social change as part of the feedback loop with the material world. Therefore, he is conscious of the need to coordinate intellectual creativity with practical efforts on the ground that alter material conditions.

Where I disagree with Michel is over the role of personal transformation. In P2P, the focus is on structural analysis and collective agency; as a result of this specialization of attention, inner and intersubjective change tends not to be publicly addressed. In addition, Michel does not feel qualified to address this issue on the basis of his own experience. For me, this approach reveals a weakness of the movement because I believe that benign neglect of the inner dimension makes communication pathologies within networks and communities more likely. But I am not implying that Michel has a negative attitude toward spiritually oriented thinkers, often identifying with the New Age movement in the United States, who are also radical critics of our global civilization. He recognizes the importance of tra nsformations of consciousness, but criticizes the New Age movement for mostly focusing on the inner work of individuals and for lacking a horizontal, community orientation. Michel’s political standpoint can be located within postwar European thought and contrasted with political positions more common in the United States. He has a working class background and considers class as the main source of oppression. But many on the left in the United States put their energies into combating racial and gender oppression. They do not highlight class struggle nor do they condemn identity politics for its excesses. Michel criticizes these proponents of identity politics for the divisions on the left that have weakened opposition to the status quo.

What are the distinctive accomplishments of Western civilization that can be bequeathed to the world that endures after the chaos transition period? Michel identifies himself with the Western Enlightenment and its emphasis on technological advance and progressive politics as twin sources of human emancipation. These two streams come together when Internet technology facilitates more democratic communication that supports the progressive ideals of freedom, equality, and community. An attractive feature of Michel’s thought is his groping toward ways of integrating the insights of both Enlightenment and romantic critics of our present civilization. The young Marx had already moved toward such an integration by adopting the romantic critique of industrial capitalism in his theory of worker alienation and combining it with an appreciation of technological progress and an insistence on radical social transformation. Similarly, Michel, proposes a new economy utilizing electronic technology that facilitates more democratic communication and provides meaningful work. And his championing of decentralized relations of production as well as non-alienated labor is reminiscent of the romantics who celebrated medieval craftsmanship while idealizing pre-capitalist social relations.

Since Michel’s highly pragmatic ideas on political economy can only be assessed by consulting his academic writings, it is enough to say here that his theory of “open cooperativism” is a major effort to incorporate the strengths of both capitalist and socialist economics while skirting their pitfalls. For example, by recognizing the need for complex interdependence, that is, for both individual autonomy and community, his approach avoids the excesses of both laissez-faire capitalism and bureaucratic socialism. But this does not mean that the interviews contain little of value on the subject of peer production and the Commons. For Michel informs us of the current status of peer production and Commons-type initiatives and finds two major examples of the maturity of the Commons. The first is the self-organizing social movements like Occupy, the students who have come after Greta Thunberg, and Extinction Rebellion. The second is the urban Commons of cities like Ghent, Belgium. Both of these examples offer much food for thought on the potential of peer production and the Commons.

Since the interviews nicely display Michel’s superb intellectual gifts, his contributions to the world of thought can be noted. The first is that he provides a sophisticated critique of the ideological position that race and gender are the major sources of oppression while showing the destructive consequences of current identity politics. In so doing, he supplies excellent reasons for rejecting postmodernist approaches that lead to greater social fragmentation. In addition, he uncovers the deleterious social consequences of reigning philosophies of inner transformation. His accomplishment in these cases is to point out the excesses and distortions of which many postmodern thinkers, advocates of identity politics, and spiritual practitioners have been guilty. But whether or not he shows sufficient appreciation of the ways in which they actually help us to make our way is open to question.

The second type of contribution is that Michel takes us beyond sterile arguments between the two poles of a binary opposition. He demonstrates that there is a viable third way beyond individualistic capitalism and collectivistic socialism, that of peer production. His distinction between left and right orientations concerning the circle of sympathy also enables us to get past the long-standing opposition between conservatives in the tradition of Edmund Burke and progressive thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition. Simply put, conservatives care deeply about their local communities but not so much for those outside it; progressives extend their sympathies to humanity but are less attuned to those closest to them. And we need to care about both.

Michel characterizes himself as an integrative thinker in the manner of Wilber, Gebser, Sorokin, and Aurobindo, but unlike Wilber who has aspired to a theory of everything, his own province is more modest, since he restricts himself to the techno-economic sphere. Still, he has an impressive grasp of the myriad ways in which this one sphere is related to various aspects of the social order. Because he has spent much of his life active in politics, business, and social movements, he has not elaborated his ideas to the extent of the great integrative thinkers. But he tells us that the next stage of his life may involve concentrated intellectual work. So his productivity in this realm may still take a large step forward, even though he has already formulated his central concept of Commons-based peer production as well as his historical theory of seed forms.

Michel is one of a small number of intellectuals and activists who has given transparency to his own Western heritage at the moment its very survival is at stake. He has identified the flaws in the Western project: the attempt to achieve transcendence through technology and through the limitless growth of capitalism that destroys our life-supporting environment. If we were to have a council of wise people to advise our political leaders on the steps they should take to preserve the earth and keep humanity intact, I would recommend Michel as a participant. He could assist in the design of a new techno-economic sphere that would facilitate sustainable development, greater community, a more peaceful world, and genuine equality. And with his interest in Asia, residence in Thailand, and recent activities in South Korea, he could also take part in the dialogues between Asia, the West, and other parts of the world that must occur for a consensus to emerge on the nature of our current predicament and how to address it."

Excerpts

Ken Wilber, Integral Politics, and Identity Issues

Michel Bauwens:

Bill: What was going on with you intellectually during the time that you were thinking about leaving the business world? You have mentioned that you were very enthusiastic about Ken Wilber's work for quite a while and were involved with the Integral Institute. What was your ultimate evaluation of Wilber’s ideas and could you tell us more about your experience with the Integral Institute?

Michel: I must have discovered Wilber in the early 1980s with books like A Sociable God and A Theory of Everything. And I think in general what these integral thinkers bring to the table is they create unity in diversity. You’re searching, and Jung says this, Adler says that, and Freud says yet another thing; and then you look at spirituality and the Christians say this and the Buddhists say that. What you have is a bewildering sea of options that at least on the surface level seem very contradictory. I think that at that time of your life when you’re trying to really make sense of life and find a path, these more integral thinkers who bring together a vast amount of knowledge in an integrated system really offer something to you. And I found that liberating, to be able to say Jung is right in a way and Freud is right in another way, and actually it depends on how you look at it so you can actually consider them together and you don’t have to reject one or the other. And the same for spirituality when you can say that Buddhism says this and Hinduism says that, but maybe there’s an esoteric side to it where things that appear to be contradictory are actually not so contradictory as they appear. For me, what Wilber did was first of all make a synthesis of psychology, essentially Western psychology, and then he went further and created a synthesis of transpersonal development, which is the phases of development beyond the ego (which doesn’t mean the ego disappears, but the ego itself becoming an object of attention and consciousness). I found it immensely valuable, and if you go down in my library you’ll find the eight collected works of Ken Wilber. And I think what happens when you fall in love with a set of ideas is you become a bit ideological about it. You’re not so much interested in the critiques, you push them aside, you don’t have much interest in them, or you think they don’t understand it. I was certainly in that mood for a while, but then a few things happened which would make me more critical. The first thing is that concerning the things you know something about, what Wilber says is sometimes questionable. Let’s take Piaget. Wilber says there’s a consensus on Piaget’s work, which is the common knowledge of psychology. In like manner, there is also a common knowledge about Buddhism. And there’s actually quite a good book about this issue called Bald Ambition by Jeff Meyerhoff, which is a word play because Wilber was bald as well. It critiques him at a methodological level, and I will now describe this critique, which I agree with.

Wilber starts from what he calls orienting generalizations. For example, he is saying there’s a consensus about Piaget’s stages of development, but it’s actually not true. In other words, his synthesis is very contentious. Some people agree, some people don’t agree that Piaget said this, or they disagree that he’s right and with his premises. The danger of Ken Wilber is that he takes things that you haven’t read yourself and gives them an interpretation and puts that interpretation into an even higher synthesis. Then you’re relying on somebody else’s interpretation and you never encounter the primary works. I started seeing that as a danger; for example, reading Wilber rather than reading Jung. Now this is not to say that it wasn’t valuable because I still believe that his idea of four quadrants (interior, exterior, individual, and collective realms with each of these four quadrants representing an aspect of human life) is valuable. This is a good heuristic tool to make sure that you’re not reductionist. I also think what is unique to Wilber is distinguishing gross and subtle reduction. Gross reduction is reducing everything to matter, (nobody really says that but let’s use it as an example) reducing Shakespeare to the ink and the paper, the material basis of everything. But then more interestingly, very few people see what he calls “subtle reduction” which is a characteristic of complex systems theories (complexity, network, and chaos theories). They see agents as dots in a network, but these agents have no depth, because they always forget the interior development aspect. I think this is a valid critique and also a good heuristic mechanism to make sure you don’t get lost in these reductionisms. I also think that his analysis of postmodernism is quite seriously thought out. Furthermore, these new systemic approaches also usually evacuate human and societal history, which is the Marxist critique of a biologist like Richard Lewontin, which I also highly recommend for a critical approach towards system theories.

So my first movement of critique regarding Wilber was saying, “Well, you cannot actually trust all of his theories.” And I do think it also corresponds to a phase of maturity in my own thinking. In other words, you have a period in your life where you don’t know, you’re overwhelmed with choices, and then somebody who makes some kind of integration for you is doing something very, very valuable. But it should never be more than a stepping stone, because then what you have to do is think for yourself and go into the primary material and digest it for yourself. And then, what comes to me is the idea that, well, yes, it’s contradictory. Life is contradictory, we can’t solve everything. And it’s not our problem. It’s not our problem that Jung disagrees with Freud. So I reached a stage where I started thinking on my own. And as long as I was following Wilber, I was very much into this search for absolutes, and Wilber offers these absolutes. And when you give up this search, then you don’t really need an integrated theory like Wilber’s as much. But you can make your own, less total and always provisional integrations of what your own knowledge is. This is one thing, my own psychological or spiritual evolution led me to go beyond Wilber in important ways, although maybe some people will disagree that this is an evolution but that’s how I looked at it. And also, suddenly, Wilber was my last guru. This was the “murder of the father” if you like; you can’t really be on your own if you don’t kill the father. And I know in Buddhism they say you have to kill the buddha at some point, so for me it was liberating when I started being critical of Wilber and I started thinking on my own. And just to explain, in many ways my P2P project is a left integral off-shoot. And this is my second critique, although I must say that I changed my mind about this recently.

Now I’ll tell you the story of how this happened. At some point Wilber wrote this critical book about baby boomers, Boomeritis. He became very aggressive against the “mean green meme.” And it was also the time of the early Iraq war, around 2003 when there were all these integralists who were discussing in earnest whether it was ethical to bomb Iraq with nuclear bombs out of an interpretation that Israel was more developed than Iraq. The hierarchical aspect of this model is abused by many, many people because if you’re insecure it’s very easy for you to imagine yourself one or two stages higher and then you start putting down everybody else as being below you. But I had difficulty especially with his critique on the mean green meme, since I was just moving left at that time. I thought Wilber was moving right; at some point I even thought he was becoming a neoconservative. Since I was moving left, that didn’t work out in terms of following him. My profound conviction was that the problem is capitalism, and it is destroying the planet. There are a few crazy politically correct professors in academia but that doesn’t seem to me to be a major problem. However, more recently, seeing the rise to hegemony of intersectional identitarian politics with their racialist and segregationist theories, I did change my mind on this. I now do think that there’s a problem. The critical argument is the following: if you have a problem and the opposition is very bad, you can’t solve the problem. Yes, capitalism is destroying the planet, but these identitarians and their fragmentation-inducing politics are weakening the opposition to it. And that’s also very dangerous. So, that’s my reasoning today. Actually, sometimes I think about writing an open letter to Wilber and saying, “I’m sorry, I was wrong, and you were right.” Because he had seen some of the things that I didn’t see at the time which basically came to fruition as of 2015 and 2016 and now they’re everywhere. But at that time I didn’t see the “mean green meme” as really such a big problem.

Bill: Was there any more to your critique of Wilber?

Michel: This rightward tendency that I rejected was the second thing. The third and last thing is related to my being involved in the Integral Institute’s politics section. At some point Wilber got a promise of one hundred million dollars from a person called Joe Firmage, who was the head of US Web CKS, an at that time very successful web agency that was riding the internet boom of the late nineties. Since I was working for them, for their Belgian branch, he was my boss actually. He’s an original character who wrote a book called The Word is Truth, and he believes most of our beta technologies are reverse engineered from aliens. He was worth two billion dollars at the time and had promoted $100m to create the Integral Institute. And so what happened was that the promise of this money attracted people to Ken Wilber who were not interested in him before. I’ll just give you one example. I was corresponding with the scholar Allan Combs who was scathing about Wilber not being a bona fide academic. He was saying he’s not a scientist, he’s not to be taken seriously. Then the money comes in and suddenly you have the Wilber-Combs lattice, they had made this joint research. Suddenly they’re friends, and Don Beck also came to Ken Wilber, and all these people started flocking around. And it’s only a hypothesis, I can’t prove this, but I think something happened then. It made Wilber no longer a hermit. I was the first one to interview him at the end of his hermit period, when I went to Boulder.

At that time, he was getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning doing two hours of “corpse meditation” (his words!) which is some kind of Tibetan meditation, then he would do three hours of pumping iron, i.e. fitness/body building training, and three hours of reading. And the way he would read is he would read three books a day which is, I think, rather strange, but he obviously had some technique for rapid reading. Of course he was a brilliant mind with a huge capacity of absorption and synthesis, but I now believe many of his interpretative mistakes were a result of this technique. After that he would enjoy his afternoons. He was very disciplined, hardworking, but in these kinds of very short periods. And he went from that period of relative isolation to being suddenly the head of an institute with lots of money and lots of people. When people need money, they behave differently, they start to be sycophants and say, “You’re right, you’re right.”

I had an experience with Wilber which is probably worth telling. I was working in this company writing a report on cultural change in the corporation. Basically I was saying I will use this method which was developed by Ken Wilber. I described the four quadrants. I added that there were other people now working in business doing the same so I mentioned a few consulting groups. But after giving credit in this way, I used the method to show how to apply digitization in the corporation using the four quadrants and trying to create a feedback loop so that changes in any quadrant would support changes in the other quadrants. I applied the methodology and even adapted it. There was absolutely no questioning of plagiarism or not crediting where the original ideas had come from. I got a letter back from Wilber which said, “I’ve never seen such a blatant theft of intellectual property. If you don’t cease and desist, not only will I kick you out of the network but I’ll consider legal steps.” It didn’t make any sense really because I sent him the material to ask for his opinion. That’s not what a thief does. My theory to explain his exaggerated reaction was that I didn’t mention him enough in that text. I talked about him for one page and a half and then I mentioned a few other people before I actually applied the method. But then I was done with Wilber in the report, and I was talking about the subject from my own point of view. I thought then and still think it was totally appropriate and legitimate. And so I got into a few email exchanges and I saw words (which I remember because they were very shocking to me) like “bottom dweller” and “ankle biter.” And a few weeks later I saw the same language used by Don Beck. So my second interpretative theory is that Wilber was being edged on by Don Beck and other people that were circling around him now that he had funding. And to be honest I met Don Beck, and I did not have a very positive experience. I immediately felt that he was one of those people who look at you and size you up immediately, in order to establish dominance. So if they think you’re not important, they just look the other way and they don’t want to waste their time. This is how I felt about him. And nowadays I’m pretty sure about it, although it’s another hypothesis. So the deterioration in the social milieu of integral happened because of this money, because of his advisers. Here’s what I imagine. “Oh, Ken, don’t let yourself be fooled by these guys who are going to steal your ideas.” It came to me as a deep shock because for eight years I had been like a disciple. I was literally drinking his words as the truth, and this was the year where everything went south and then I wrote two things you can find on the internet that were critical of Wilber and they were amongst the early critiques from the “inside camp” (if you like). And I still think they’re quite succinct but really interesting critiques. And just to say one more thing. This was also at that time he wrote an article called “Wyatt Earp” that denounced his critics in a very aggressive and put-down way. I thought this is not the kind of person I want to associate with. He’s going off the rails there. And I was just reading today some exchange about Wilber with somebody saying (and I think this is probably true) there was a time when every third person knew what he was doing and what he was writing and now it’s about one-tenth, one out of ten. So I do think he lost a bit of his aura. I don’t think he has done a lot of intellectual innovation either. He had a golden period. And that’s not a critique because I feel the same about myself. I wrote a lot of things in ten years, and I feel like I wrote a synthesis about it. Now I’m going through applications, but in terms of my own theory I’m done. The scaffolding is done. You can’t innovate all the time. And that’s what I think happened with Wilber too. He set out in his first ten-year period to revolutionize how we thought of the world, and he said his most important things, and the rest is refining here and there.

Bill: You mentioned that over the years you have come to agree with Wilber’s strongly negative evaluation of postmodernism and identity politics. These days on the left there seems to be a division between those who emphasize the importance of class as a source of oppression and those whose focus is on race and gender. Why do you tend to side with those who see class as more important and why do you oppose identity politics so vigorously?

Michel: I have this fight today with identity politics, and a large part of this movement is the total rejection of anything that’s Western. This shift was from a Marxist view rooted in the labor movement in which capitalism is just one of the forms of class society and it’s associated with gender oppression, colonialism, and race oppression to another point of view which is, “No, no, we live in a white supremacist system.” In this view, it’s the white person that’s oppressing the black person and the male is oppressing the female. And for me that’s a very different vision of the world because you forget class. And that’s what the proponents of identity politics are doing. In theory they might say class is part of intersectionality, but in practice they will never ask you for your wealth privilege. They ask you for your male privilege and your white privilege, but never ask about your wealth privilege. So class is not a big part of that story, and it often means that it would be okay to go back to a pre-capitalist society. What about oppression then, is that okay? Can we say that colonialism is the only cause of oppression? Was everything really okay with the Aztecs? My point of view is that they’re already class societies and might be even more cruel than capitalist ones. So you see it’s a very different thing to say we’re in a class society and there have always been exploiting classes, and to say the West is the cause of everything negative. It’s a very different story. Because it entirely changes how you see emancipation: either as a liberation from all forms of oppression, and the central form is still class because it determines your capacity to survive as ‘owner’ or non-owner of the means of creating your livelihood. Or you believe, as Di Angelo claims, that all white people are racist regardless of behavior or intent; or as Ibrahim Kendi, you believe that any difference is by definition an outcome of racism, and that denying this is itself racist. The solution then is to allocate all resources in society around group identity characteristics and to segregate society in those groups.

Bill: How long have you been interested in these issues? How has your interest developed over time?

Michel: I’ll give you a chronological overview. Of course I’d heard about PC culture, but I thought of it as a silly thing. Like, “Oh, crazy Americans, they are always exaggerating and are a bit Puritan.” Now I’ve always had a difficult relationship with postmodernism. I tried to read and understand it, and I found some value in it. For example, I’m a big fan of the lectures of Foucault who is fascinating when he talks about history and is a great scholar working on archival material. But I always thought of postmodernism also as an ideology of defeat. You have 1968 with all these dreams which didn’t work, leaving people deeply disillusioned. A big part of the activist had been in Marxist movements, convinced of their scientific insights in the movement of history yet failing completely to win the political strugges. Historians like Michel Clouscard and Luc Boltansky have remarked that it ended with a double decision of the ruling elites. On the one hand, they would concede on the cultural demands made by the students, which were after all their children and the future elite themselves, but they also decide to break the power of labor through a policy of globalization and de-industrialization. Thus 1968 ended up destroying the class balance of power, in favour of the new middle classes and away from industrial labor.

Many of these student activists then retreated into the university, where they started talking about micro-struggles. Postmodernism became in my eyes a hypercritical tradition. And I even used to joke that there’s three ruling classes in the world: the right wing business people, the social democratic politicians who try to create a bit of a redistribution to keep the balance, and then the post-modernists who are in charge of demoralizing us. It also was my experience that when I talked to cultural publics and at fabrication-labs, maker-spaces, and co-working spaces, people were usually enthusiastic and had a constructive attitude about how to make things work, including new forms of producing and governance. They reacted positively to what I was bringing them, which is essentially an overview of what others like them were doing, as an observer of the scene. And often in academia it was the opposite, since they were just focusing on the negative.

Bill: How have you responded to identity politics which has become much more influential in Western universities and in leftwing circles?

Michel: What is important to remember is that I come from a tradition on the left that is very critical and very radical, with a strong belief in reason. So if you discuss with somebody and you quote them, you don’t invent quotes, you use their own quotes. And then you argue and maybe you give a class analysis or whatever, you check their statistics and may find some of your own, but it’s always a process of argumentation. I’m not saying everybody was doing this, but certainly the groups that I belonged to were very serious about it. Ernest Mandel who was my teacher and one of the Trotskyist leaders when I was in my twenties was a great scholar. Even if you disagreed with his interpretations, the material he collected to make up is mind was always of a stellar quality. I was used to studying with people like him who were remarkable scholars, so to see this new dynamic was shocking. In the conflict that developed between myself and the identity activists on our peer to peer forums, they would pretty systematically distort the opinions of the people they disagreed with, up to including fake quotations for example. There is little or no effort to have an empathic understanding of the other, it proceeds from a position of moral righteousness and which disagreement with what is ‘obviously true’ is seen as a moral failing.

Politically, what I saw was a real reversal, as has been noted by a series of progressive thinkers such as Matt Taibei, Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges and others. . I know this sounds like a radical conclusion, but think about it. In Berkeley fifty years ago we were demonstrating for free speech. Fifty years later two thousand people tried to burn down the same university because Bill Maher who is a leftist himself, was going to speak there. So suddenly you have this deplatforming movement with a fivefold rise in the number of cancellations in 2019 alone (UK), and with only one single university in England reporting zero attempts at speech suppression. There’s a database of the Heterodox Academy in the US which mentions something like three hundred incidents at US universities. And it’s not just affecting rightwing people like Milo Yiannopoulos or Ben Shapiro. It’s affecting mostly the radical feminists; but it’s affecting gay rights activists, especially lesbian communities. For example, there is a woman feminist who had made a few feminist documentaries and then made a documentary about the men’s movement in which she concluded, “They are not so bad after all, they have some issues to deal with, but most of them are not right-wing.” As a result, they boycotted the documentary in Australia. They didn’t want it to be shown in the movie theaters and succeeded in cancelling many of the planned public events.

Such actions make me think about the Catholics who would boycott movies until roughly the 1980s. All these behaviors were once not left behaviors, they were rightwing behaviors. The left used to be about universalism, and it was the right that was about diversity. From Edmund Burke onward, conservatives say, “Change should be organic, you should respect communities and their behaviors.” It’s the left that would say, “No, no, we want rights for all, we’re all human.” Now it’s the opposite, since you have the center right that says we have to keep true to the ideas of the Enlightenment and universalism and egalitarianism. And you have these people on the left who say, “No, no, no!”, “egalitarianism has to go”.

There’s a vision in this movement of a fully racialized and genderized society which I totally reject. In other words, you have to identify with your group, you have to speak for your group, and your experience is incommensurable. This is what was called standpoint epistemology in the original postmodern theorizing. What I understand now is that postmodernism, which I still accept as a very interesting approach, went through critical race and intersectional theories, and then it ended up being weaponized by a new generation of activists. It has become something which for me is not recognizable if you compare it to what it was thirty years ago. Cynical Theories, an excellent book-length analysis by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, gives a good genealogy of the evolution of these ideas. We can neither blame the historical left nor the original postmodern thinkers for this as the new movement is based on the bastardization and extremization of their ideas.

Bill: So are you saying then that this application of postmodernism to politics has weakened the opposition to neoliberalism?

Michel: Absolutely. Apparently, before his death, Immanuel Wallerstein declared that its emergence meant the loss of a whole generation in terms of being able to mobilize for genuine societal transformation. What I think it’s doing is that it’s fragmenting the left while ‘scaring’ the working majorities of the population so that they are moving to the right. It is creating camps within the left with a lot of identitarians saying, “Our main enemy is the mainstream left, not the right.” As they want a compensatory hierarchy in favour of those they deem the most oppressed, anyone, right or left, who insist on universalism or egalitarianism, is by definition a racist. There are a number of studies showing that the more that the left goes in that direction, the more it scares away the native working class, and the more they vote right-wing. And there’s even a booth by booth analysis done in Australia. There was this Pacific Islander who was a rugby player who is evangelical and against gays and he made homophobic statements on social media. I don’t condone his actions in any way, but this became headline news for three weeks before the elections. The Labor Party was going to win the elections, and what do you think happened? Well, they lost huge chunks of the evangelical and Pacific Islander voting bloc who started to vote massively for the right. And Labor lost the election. So, there’s a very pragmatic and political reason not to shift away from these egalitarian and universalist values because it’s a losing political proposition.

Let me give you another example to prove my point, i.e. the use of the concept of degrowth. I agree with the theory that we need to have negative growth in terms of material and energy usage. But I also believe that if you say this as the centerpiece of your political program, you lose elections. So I’m for the Green New Deal, not because I believe that this is the ultimate solution, but because this is the only way we can have a big majority of people supporting transitional measures. There are therefore two different arguments, one about theory and values, and the other about political effectiveness. And in both cases I leads me to reject identity politics.

Bill: Let’s get back to the ways in which identity politics is fragmenting the left. Can you give some examples of this trend?

Michel: I’ve been speaking to activists recently. This woman in Australia was a leader of the anti-fracking movement. She was very successful. I think in Victoria state they actually stopped it. And she said, “My strategy is no longer working because of identity politics. People are splitting.” Aboriginals and white farmers can no longer talk to each other, she explained Look at what happened to the US with the the Women’s March. At first, it had one million people attending, it was a huge demonstration. And then they started fighting. You had Tamika Mallory who was friends with Louis Farrakhan. And I can understand that if you work in the ghettos and in the poor neighborhoods, they do a lot of good things, but The Nation of Islam is also unfortunately anti-Semitic and racist. So they were critiqued by Jews and other people, and in their response, they said, “We’re not going to listen to you, white people.” So the debate became polarized around racial differences. The next march imploded, and then they were going to organize a California march. But they said there’s going to be too many white people in the march, so they canceled it. You can see this outlook is extremely dangerous for the left. Here’s another thing I would like to say, which relates to a profound psychological issue. It used to be that fear is what creates a rightwing personality. If you’re hopeful, you’re on the left. If you’re fearful, you’re on the right. So a typical conversation you could have between a leftwing person and a rightwing person is that the rightist would say, “Crime is up!” The leftist would reply, “I’m sorry, crime is not up. It’s actually down enormously, but the media has increased their coverage of crime by six hundred percent since twenty years ago.” But the choice to perceive negativity out of fear is a typically rightwing psychology that creates closed groups. And so I always thought the difference between the left and the right is the capacity to extend your care. The right wing cares a lot about people who are like them, and often more so than the left. If you have any problem in an evangelical church, they’ll come to the hospital to visit you when you’re sick. But I don’t think this is the case with the Sierra Club, a progressive ecological group. I don’t think they will come to visit you in the hospital. On the other hand, what the left will do is extend their solidarity, their care to people who are not part of their group such as workers, refugees, and migrants. And I think this has always been a polarity, and what I see now is that fear is moving to the left. I think there’s a trauma response on the left. For example, the feminist will talk about rape culture and black people will say they are in continuous danger. Evergreen State College in Washington state is the safest university in the world. It is also the most progressive university in the US. Yet, the students claim that they’re in danger every day. And it’s not true. It’s a subjective experience. But standpoint epistemology is saying that you cannot question the experience of another person. So you have to believe that person.

There’s an enormous number of issues here that I feel are very dangerous. Where I see the positive role of the commons in this kind of dynamic is that you care about a common object. You don’t focus on the differences, you focus on something that you all love together. And that creates linkages between people who love the same object. It just has become much more difficult to do once you have to deal with these identity issues. Because what you get then is that the commons will split. People will create ethnic projects instead of common projects. So I see this as a huge issue in the Western world especially. Identity politics works in settings where there is funding that can be allocated according to group membership criteria, but if there is no money or resource pool to draw form, that is often the case in the commons, then these types of demands, re not very operational.

Bill: What about the issue of power differences and power dynamics? How do you put that into your analysis and do you take account of the fact that objectively speaking there are power differences that exist as well as significant differences in income and wealth?

Michel: Yes, they exist but they are complex. In any meeting there’s going to be a lot of factors that play into your influence. Lots of minorities are doing better than the majorities, while others are doing badly, even though they are of the same race of gender. Being part of a majority population may give you a relative better place ‘on average’ than others, but that essentially depends on class factors. It is important to have diversity and inclusion according to various factors, while maintaining diversity of opinions at the same time, and not imposing any ideological straightjacket, nor to judge people on the basis of their ‘group membership’ and projecting on them our wishes and fears. You can be part of a so-called majority group, and be a very shy person with lots of mental challenges for example. In the peer to peer context, what you look for is equipotentiality, looking to help any person, considered as a complex human being that cannot be reduced to any external characteristic, to make sure they can fully participate in the contributory process. So when I organized the first P2P group way back in 2003, I was still in Belgium. This was the very first meeting I co-organized around the issue of peer-to-peer. What we did was we nominated a person to represent our voices. But that person wouldn’t look at race, he would just look at behavior. And that person could be a person of color, it could be a white person, it could be a woman. That person was in charge of encouraging people to speak up and participate. What this does is it includes people, but often with identity politics what you get is confrontation. And the end of cooperation means people split up and will avoid working together. I’ve seen this dynamic play out when I was living in Madison. I was invited to different meetings of activists, and the typical process was that people would be angry from the very beginning, and by lunchtime most people had left the room. Because what’s the point of being the target all the time. What is so problematic with this process is what is not happening, the left is not attacking capital. It’s a kind of auto-cannibalism. They’re fighting amongst themselves. It is the narcissism of little differences. It’s not that I’m negating power differences, I just don’t think this is the right way to approach them. Any politics that requires other people to change, instead of organizing yourself and finding the broadest possible coalition, is doomed to be counterproductive.

Bill: Do you have an analysis of the structural racism and structural sexism that exists, for example, in the United States? Do you focus at all on structural forces that have been around for a long time and have produced inequalities that are very difficult to diminish?

Michel: Of course, structural racism and sexism exist, in the US and elsewhere. Every national situation is different. I live in Thailand where they had temple slaves until the 1930s. In Europe, we have a colonial history but we don’t have a huge history of slavery on the continent itself, most of our minorities wanted to come because they believed in a better life, and they were discriminated but they weren’t slaves brought against their will. The US is of course very different in this regard. When you are faced with forms of institutional racism, you have to tackle them very specifically in the local national context. But fragmenting the movement into races and genders, in order to institutionalize permanent group allocation, is a really problematic option. And it’s the contrary of what we used to do. I would argue that all the big victories that we had around civil rights, women’s rights, etc., were always because of broad alliances. It used to be called the rainbow coalition. The idea was that the workers movement, the black movement, and the women’s movement had common ground upon which to fight together. And look at people like Martin Luther King who had a universalist message. We want the same rights that you have, we want to be included. Now that is certainly not the approach of the ‘group identity essentialists’. Instead, we have a kind of reversal. For example, you have the progressive stack, where in meetings you get basically numbers according to your situation of ‘relative oppression’. So if you’re Jewish and gay, you get one vote. If you’re black, lesbian, fat, you get three. The progressive stack is a set of cards that gives you speech rights where the hierarchy is reversed. If you look at practices like those at Evergreen State University, in the classroom they actively discourage white students from speaking up. And they’re now doing this with kids that are five or six years old. They’re going to say, “Because you’re white, you’re privileged, therefore now you have to be deprivileged.” And you’re simply guilty because of your skin color, you’re not guilty because of any behavior. One of the critiques of identity politics is also this epistemological closure. There’s no argument. You’re privileged, so everything you say is an expression of your privilege. If you don’t agree, it’s because you’re fleeing, because you are fragile. There’s nothing you can say or do that can change the perception. It’s a paradise for bullies and ‘cluster B’ personalities who are actively using identity markers to intimidate others. And the only thing you can do is what they call being an ally. But an ally is no longer what it used to be, you’re not a partner. You’re subservient, you’re somebody from the oppressor group who wants to redeem yourself by becoming a servant of the oppressed. It’s no longer about creating relations between equals. One of the things I would say subjectively is that I can no longer speak, because I am no longer a person. I am an expression of my categories. There are different forms of power: power with, power over, power under, etc., and people who analyze these different forms of power. But there are also other things: friendship, love, collegiality. That’s one problem, saying everything is power. What I’m trying to say is not that everything they say is without merit, but that when it becomes an absolute, it becomes a lie. If you take one thing from a complex reality and you say this is the truth, then you become fanatical and self-righteous and all the things that go wrong with that."