Talk:Why the P2P and Commons Movement Must Act Trans-Locally and Trans-Nationally

I agree with the thesis, but trans-local and trans-national organizational structure did not save the US labor union movement which is all but dead now. The structural analysis is necessary but not sufficient. We must have narratives and memes that go viral across all demographics and sectors of societies around the world. The "Arab Spring", Occupy Wall Street, and similar revolutionary memes are sufficiently infectious but do not represent pragmatic structural models. We have to get the structural and psychological together, somehow. I think infectious memes can be incorporated into the phyles narratives but I don't see it yet. The Occupy "working groups" were somewhat equivalent to phyles or guilds but they all seem pretty dead at this point. BTW I think the "Chamber of Commons" is a meme with great potential. It is easy to envision a Chamber of Commons with a local, trans-local, national, and international architecture because the US public is familiar with such a structure in many NGOs and corporate entities including our Chambers of Commerce. The US is less familiar with the principle of subsidiarity, however. --Poor Richard (talk) 16:16, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Richard. The internationalism of the labor unions has always been very weak, they have always mostly acted separately as unions in their particular sector, and sometimes national in welfare state institutions, but there is little reality to their internationalism. Furthermore, unions are entirely dependent of capitalism, and working within it. What we are talking about is entirely different, it focuses on the creation of an economy that is relatively autonomous from capitalism, and regulates capital input on its own terms, and for which the 'trans' aspect is not an add-on, but its very mode of existence and organisation. Also the Occupy groups have nothing to do with phyles, however useful they may have been. Again, phyles are eco-systems of individuals and enterprises, that constitute a participatory business-ecosystem that sustains that community and its shared resources. Enspiral is an example, Las Indias is another (they are at least proto-phyles), they are both functioning and growting and operating trans-nationally as a matter of course. Actually the one thing that is not working right now is the Chamber, though there is a single one under slow construction in Chicago. The assemblies on the other hand, are starting up, with half a dozen in France alone, and they have a lively network.

Michel --MIchel Bauwens (talk) 19:45, 13 June 2016 (UTC)