Michel Bauwens 2022 Interview with a Left-Accelerationist Cyber-Communist Group in Milan

Interviewer is Davide Dibitonto

Italian version at Michel Bauwens 2022 Intervista a un Gruppo Cyber-Comunista Accelerazionista di Milano

Interview

* Can you tell us about what, in your view, is the meaning of the words "P2P" and "Commons" and what their role is in an hypothetical postcapitalist transition?

Peer to peer is a social ‘relational’ logic. It occurs in any system where the agents are free to connect to each other, to self-organize and even to create systems of value creation and distribution. P2P is any social system where intermediaries are not in full gatekeeping control. Arguably there are no ‘pure’ peer to peer systems, as even the free choices of peers can consolidate in privileged paths of connection, which may stabilize over time. So it is important not to essentialize peer to peer, but to see it as a dynamic part of a overall social logic of exchange which may contain gift economies, hierarchical distributions, and market dynamics. Peer to peer dynamics can be inserted, and manipulated, by other social systems.

Historically, peer to peer occurred in geographically limited conditions, say in small hunter-gathering societies, in kinship groups, in neighborhoods, and small teams. But distributed digital technology has created a massive social reality of digitally enabled p2p socializing, although it massively happens in privately-owned platforms that are subject to surveillance and government control. Nevertheless, just as with the print revolution in 16th Europe, it has created a massive level of differentiation that is questioning the institutions that established themselves under earlier communication and organization paradigms.

Peer to peer can be connected to the specific social logic of commoning, an activity created whenever a human groups decides to construct , protect or maintain a common social object. Commons occur when there is a combination of a resource (which can be material or immaterial), with the human decision to govern it collectively (contributor communities, multi-stakeholder alliances), under their own internal jurisdiction. Physical commons have clear protective boundaries, in order to insure the reproduction of the good, while digital commons are non-rival or anti-rival, i.e. they benefit from network effects and encourage broader usage. Hence the emergence of shared knowledge, free software and open designs which can be linked to physical production as well.

I distinguish between the 'common', i.e. what we have in common, or should have in common, from the 'commons', the latter refers to real shared resources that are managed collectively, i.e. a human institution of governance. Hence, I do not consider here language, culture and 'organic' knowledge 'common(s) that are not managed collectively. Please bear in mind that every material commons is always also a knowledge commons, and vice versa, that no knowledge commons can exist without material infrastructure. In a similar way every material commons is also a social commons, as it involves commoning, a human activity. This is a history of the dominant 'material' and 'knowledge' commons as they evolve over time.

I think it is possible to formulate a stylized history of the commons:

Class-based societies that emerged before capitalism, have relatively strong commons, and they are essentially the natural resource commons, which are the ones studied by the Ostrom school. They coexist with the more organic culturally inherited commons (folk knowledge etc..). Though pre-capitalist class societies are very exploitative, they do not systematically separate people from their means of livelihood Thus, under for example European feudalism, peasants had access to common land.

With the emergence and evolution of capitalism and the market system, first as an emergent subsystem in the cities, we see the second form of commons becoming important, i.e. the social commons. In western history we see the emergence of the guild systems in the cities of the Middle Ages, which are solidarity systems for craft workers and merchants, in which ‘welfare’ systems are mutualized, and self government. When market-based capitalism becomes dominant, the lives of the workers become very precarious, since they are now divorced from the means of livelihood. This creates the necessity for the generalization of this new form of commons, distinct from natural resources. In this context, we can consider worker coops, along with mutuals etc… as a form of commons. Cooperatives can then be considered as a legal form to manage social commons. With the welfare state, most of these commons were state-ified, i.e. managed by the state, and no longer by the commoners themselves. There is an argument to be made that social security systems are commons that are governed by the state as representing the citizens in a democratic polity. Today, with the crisis of the welfare state, we see the re-development of new grassroots solidarity systems, which we could call ‘commonfare’, and the neoliberalisation and bureaucratisation of the welfare systems may well call for a re-commonification of welfare systems, based on public-commons partnerships.

Since the emergence of the internet, and especially since the invention of web (the launch of the web browser in October 1993), we see the birth, emergence and very rapid evolution of a third type of commons: the knowledge commons. The emergence of this practice of 'knowledge as a commons' coincides with the strong resistance to the second enclosure of the commons, due to neoliberal intellectual property practices, and free software itself, which is both a resistance against privatization, and a construction of new commons, shows the relationship between conflict and construction in this sphere.

We have reached, i.e. the ‘phygital’ phase in which the we see the increased intertwining of ‘digital’ (i.e. knowledge) and the physical.

The first location of this inter-twining are the urban commons. I have had the opportunity to spend four months in the belgian city of Ghent, where we identified nearly 500 urban commons in every area of human provisioning (food. Shelter, transportation).

Our great discovery was that these urban commons function in essentially the same way as the digital commons communities that operate in the context of ‘commons-based peer production’..

This means that they combine

1) a open productive community with

2) a for-benefit infrastructure organization that maintains the infrastructure of the commons and

3) generative (in the best case) livelihood organizations which mediate between the market/state and the commons in order to insure the social reproduction of the commoners (i.e. their livelihoods).

In our vision, these urban commons, which according to at least two studies are going through an exponential phase of growth (a ten-fold growth in the last ten years), are the premise for a further deepening of the commons, preparing a new phase of deeper re-materialization. This will be addressed in our answer to the 2nd question.

But first something important to explain ‘post-capitalism’.

The history of the world can be read as a ‘pulsation of the commons’. This means that the history of civilization (but even neolithic societies according to some researchers), can be read as emergent phases of civilizational construction, with class societies arising out of the extractive state and market institutions, overrun their regional ‘planetary boundaries’, and create a regenerative and healing counter-reaction from the productive sectors of the population, usually allied with spiritual reform movements, re-setting the territory for healthy, but paradoxically, the very success of this endeavour creates the condition for a new extractive cycle. But today, we have reached global overreach! This means we have to adapt a regime that can globally produce for human needs, within planetary boundaries. Hence we believe that the current competition between rentier capitalism and sovereignist regimes necessarily leads to self-destruction in rivalrous competition and needs to evolve towards a new global order, that of cosmo-localism. Briefly, this means first a phase of degrowth, following by a steady-state global system regulated by ‘global magisteria of the commons’. These however, are not organs of a hierarchical world -government and empire, but civil-led, commons-centric domain-specific institutions, organized as commons and to protect common resources. This is what we call cosmo-globalism.

* In your latest book "Cosmolocalism" you talk about a new system of global production based on the motto "design global, manufacture local". Can you explain in more detail what it is and its strategic value for the commons transition?

In this new form of material commons, which are heavily informed and molded by digital knowledge commons (hence ‘phygital’), the means of production themselves can become a pooled resource. We foresee a combination of shared global knowledge resources (for example, exemplified by shared designs, and following the rule: all that is light is global and shared), and local cooperatively owned and managed micro-factories (following the rule: all that is heavy is local).

This cosmo-local (DGML: design global, manufacture local) mode of production and distribution, has the following characteristics:

Protocol cooperativism: the underlying immaterial and algorithmic protocols are shared and open source, using copyfair principles (free sharing of knowledge, but commercialization conditioned by reciprocity)

Open cooperativism: the commons-based coops are distinguished from ‘collective capitalism’ by their commitment to creating and expanding common goods for the whole of society; in Platform coops it is the platforms themselves that are the commons, needed to enable and manage the exchanges that may be needed, while protecting it from capture by extractive netarchical platform

Open and contributive accounting: fair distribution mechanisms that recognize all contributions

Open and shared supply chains for mutual coordination

Non-dominium forms of ownership (the means of production are held in common for the benefit of all participants in the ecosystem.

In our opinion, the current wave of urban commons, is a prefiguration of the coming wave of scaled up material commons for the production and distribution of value in post-capitalist systems."

However, I do not believe such a transition will be a smooth one. To explain this, I refer to the transitional schemes of Peter Pogany, who looked at the evolution within the capitalism:

Pogany framed the stages of recent world history as Global System 0 (GS0), Global System 1 (GS1), Global System 2 (GS2), and Global System 3 (GS3). Each of these can be considered sub-epochs within modernity. Pogany saw each of these sub-epochs as self-organizing systems where the people embedded in them are so enmeshed socially, culturally, spiritually, economically, that it becomes their 'myth of the given.' They can't see other ways of being or organizing and the system itself reinforces what contributes to the system and squeezes out opposing forces and ideas. Therefore it's very difficult to change the system. Pogany’s views were in line with those of cultural philosopher Jean Gebser, who argued that system change only happens when the existing system goes into decay, and through a chaotic transition the next oncoming system "overdetermines" the previous system.

A kind of progression or cultural evolution can be observed through these different stages, gradually becoming more like an evolved, mature, dynamic ecosystem where dominator species do not thrive, and collaborative species thrive more and more. However, it is not a gradual progression. Pogany framed it as a series of abrupt bifurcations, along the lines Gebser outlined, and consistent with the disequilibrium thermodynamics of Ilya Prigogine.

“As elaborated by Ilya Prigogine, the father of modern disequilibrium thermodynamics, a material entity that gains in size while becoming increasingly complex (where complexification is defined as growing volumes of information generated and transmitted among the entity’s decision centers) must undergo an alternation between relative (dynamic) steady states and bifurcations (chaotic transitions).”

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After 2008, and certainly after Covid, we have entered this predicted stage of chaotic transition.

All of institutions have lost trust. Social fragmentation, hypercharged through social media, leads to polarisation. The current political situation in the US, echoed at a lesser level in Europe, shows the blockage at the local level, and the war in Ukraine shows the blockage at the geostrategic level.

There will be no smooth transition. In the US, civil war is a potential outcome, and due to the Ukraine conflict, Europe has to go back to coal and nuclear.

This makes an ‘exodus’ of larger sections of the populations, towards commons-centric cosmo-local forms, much more likely.

Today, we have a declining if not disintegrating global inter-state system, and we have a trans-local financial system.

The current choice is between the

Maritime, rentier-capitalist, anglo-saxon led, Global Reset of global private-public-NGO domain-specific global governance systems, as proposed by the WEF

The Eurasian, continental, sovereignist state-centric system of Russia and China

Both lead to rivalrous incomes.

The third option is to create bottom-up, domain-specific, mutualized provisioning ecosystems that combine local production with shared global knowledge. So this is not just a mode of production, but the fourth generational civilizational order, and a second axial age.

GS 2 brought us labor-capital welfare social contracts, but launched the Anthropocene. What we need for GS3 is a contract between humans and the web of life. This can only be done by new global commons-centric institutions, domain-specific, civic-led ‘Global Magisteria of the Commons’, which should be organically constructed from the mutualized provisioning organizations.

* On the concept of Partner State: you say that in this transition the State will have the role of partner, giving support to the commons in order to make them grow. Can you tell us more about it? Can you also tell us why this is the best path forward from a strategic point of view?

Civilization was a relation between the rural farming world and the cities, a particular organization of time and space with a class-based social order.

The digital challenges such a global order. The new priority becomes the relation between the geographic and the non-territorial, i.e. the virtual, digitally organized ecosystems.

But the geographic world order will not disappear. But geographic institutions, such as the nation-state, but more generally bioregional formats, will find new logics. They can become enabling institutions, in charge of the commons of capabilities, intent on attracting global knowledge for the cosmo-local production infrastructure.

Ostrom’s research insisted that all commons were also dependent on agreements with the local public authorities. There can be no human society without a public sphere, a government. And there are no signs that the nation-states are disappearing, they may even be revived and become stronger (this is what the Ukraine struggle is about, as I argued).

Thus I see public authorities in charge of the new policy of commons-based re-industrialization, creating coherent local production ecosystems, inter-linked with the global network of open design institutions. It could take the form of Leagues of Cities, using the governance methodologies developed in Italy , such as the Quintuple Helix model, which can exist in a fractal format, with the local support organization linked to a domain-supportive global organization.

The global cyber-physical infrastructure for this is in development in the post-blockchain ecosystems.

This occurs as the political system and movements enter into crisis as well, so I see the cosmo-local communities operating with networks of support amongst the public authorities.

At the global level, I see next to the Somewhere-Nowhere division, the potential of linking the local neo-guilds to global digital nomads, the Everywheres, who link the local production communities with the global open design communities. I also see new forms of ‘commons capital’. Thus, I believe in the emergence of innovative pragmatic alliances which do not mirror the politics of GS2.