Somewheres, Nowheres, and Everywheres

Discussion

Michel Bauwens (May 2022):

I reject both pure Rousseau-ism, i.e. humans would be good and equal if not for unequal structures, and Hobbesian-ism, i.e. people are bad and are only kept good by forceful institutions.

What matters most I believe, is the right balance between cooperation and competition, both are real, at the individual and collective level, and we as humans are a mixed and complex bag.

However, where capitalism and classic liberalism differ from the commons orientation is about what is considered primary. The former believes that if everyone acts selfishly, and society were organized around this, then these animal spirits will create wealth that creates a rich society. Commons theory would posit that competition is to a certain degree unavoidable, and has some important positive effects, but that is has to operate in a default setting of cooperative structures. It's really a discussion about what is the right 'default' setting, and we believe the liberal default setting should be overturned for the next post-civilizational phase (post-civilization because civilization was a particular arrangement between time and space, now transformed by the digital/virtual) But one can indeed go to far in this, and I see wokism as a return to group collectivism that suppresses individual differentiation, and competition is enshrined as a pure group competition, to be repressed by generalizing group allocation. But while the left is creating wokism, thereby destroying itself, the right is also creating a differentiation, and this is what the article below, I believe rather brilliantly, addresses by distinguishing horizontal from vertical solidarity, but where it errs in my view is to deny all vertical, i..e. competitive elements, as if they did not exist or were uniformly bad. This lack of recognition is what I think ails the contemporary doctrinaire left. It does that because it has over time adopted the prejudices of capitalist liberalism, which sees only abstract individuals, not people rooted in histories and territories. By failing to protect the working majorities, the somewheres, it drives them to the populist right, and it does this because they are 'nowheres', unrooted. It is precisely this un-rootedness, this up-rootedness, that makes them blind to the issues of the somewheres, and it is also what drives identity politics. Whereas somewheres may regress, if that is the right word, to the protection of 'historical' communities based on ethnicity, religion and nationality, those without roots, who do not believe in depth because their postmodernized subjectivities, can only regress (in this case that <is> the correct word), to the most superficial biological markers.

The commons offers a third solution, that of the everywhere's. The Everywhere's recognize and respect rootedness, but extend local identification to trans-local, transnational regenerative identification with global commons projects, that are not hostile or undermining the local, but help them thrive, combining distributed physicality to translocal support and solidarity. The role of nations and territories becomes the attraction of this trans-local knowledge, for the benefit of an open reterritorialization. Everywheres are the nomadic element, that create the glue between the territorially distinct, and help generate translocal identifications.