Basic Features of an Alternative Cosmo-Local Economic Order

* Thesis: Cosmo-Localism - Basic features of an alternative economic order. By Ralph Horat. Thesis University of St. Gallen, November 2019

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The long ToC is at the bottom of the document.

Contextual Quote

Assumptions about the image of man:

"The present work does not assume a specific image of man, such as the "homo oeconomicus" or "homo cooperativus", but rather on the assumption that the social system provides people with a structural matrix for action in which certain types of behaviour are more or less incentivised. It does not follow from this that people do not have a free choice in their decisions, but that the perceived scope of possibilities is strongly influenced by social structures and conventions and limited by socio-economic factors. The implicit question underlying this work is therefore not "How is man?", but "How could man develop under different systemic conditions?"."

- Ralph Horat (Thesis)

Review

Tiberius Brastanivaceau:

"My first reaction, I detect the pattern of the so-called left thinking or ideology, the more anarchic side of it. After I compared it with a summary from ChatGPT I realized that the mapping is actually perfect [1]

Here's an example of the watermark of left thinking found in the text:

1. Unconditional coverage of basic human needs

2. High level of local self-sufficiency & resilience

3. Freeing people from monotonous and undignified work

We cannot mandate these points, but we can create conditions so that people move in that direction. The so-called left likes to mandat "well being" :)

So this is a hybrid doc, one that integrates a lot of p2p features, but comes to these new ideas from the so-called left religion/ideology. So it's a mix of both, in that sense a hybrid. As such, it is a departure from the traditional anarchic left ideology, towards p2p, but doesn't fully develop the potential of p2p. This compromise is unfortunate because of its shortcomings. It doesn't come from a desire of potential optimization but rather from an integrated doctrine that the authors seem to not be able to fully leave behind, most probably unconscious about their bias.

The left heritage is seen in the presentation of a system, a blueprint, a predefined architecture of the future global society with details like sizes, scales and relations between scales, prescribed tools and processes at every scale, etc. A P2P presentation would be less prescriptive! It would lay out some seed forms (present in today's world) and a vision, and talk about boundary conditions and organizing principles that would help a complex social system to self-organize and move towards that vision, without pretending to know what shapes it will take during the course.

Economically speaking, like any text coming from those who identify with the left, the critique is good but they fall short of providing a credible model that can overcome the dominance of global market capitalism, and of proposing a viable path to implementation. Yes, they cite all these new p2p, participatory and collaborative patterns that we see today, but this is what we, Sensoricans, were doing 10 years ago. We used to point to these new patterns and justify our practice: see, there's a trend, so our actions are justified. But we could not really explain how these new patterns were building their own mechanisms of subsistance or to provide a clear and operational path out of capitalism and socialism. It is only recently, just before 2020, that we started to see a way out. Today, we're on it. So we moved on from practicing these new patterns and projecting a vision of the future to taking concrete steps, based on a path for transformation or trajectory that we see as viable.

Moreover, they still preserve the global market and capitalism at the global level: "(Cosmopolies) export of technological and social innovations on global markets". The circular cosmolocal economy that they propose, if pursued, would destroy market capitalism on which they seem to rely at the global level to ensure exchanges between cosmopolies. The metaphor that best suits their proposition is cutting the branch on which they're sitting, pulling the rug from under their feet.

Another problem that I see with this statement is that they seem to preserve commodification of technology, which will be "sold" by Cosmopolis on the global market for acquiring resources that are scarce locally. How can you do commons-based peer production at the global level, through the digital platform that connects Cosmopolis, while packaging intellectual property to sell on the global market? Perhaps using your P2P license, free to use by communities but requiring royalties for commercial use. I don't see massive adoption of it, because it's probably not so practical... Some things don't work with half measured... one needs to fully step into, otherwise it's futile. In order to reach "escape velocity" out of capitalism we need to adopt fully open innovation, in my opinion, let aside defensive attitudes and focus on innovation speed, knowing that innovation is what makes or breaks an institution today. It doesn't matter if corporations enclose (patent) some open development, we just divest from the patent system all together, disobey, stop playing that game and play the numbers game on them (let them prosecute 1 million people = impractical tactic).

The context of economic production that they propose is value production networks. For a moment I was thinking that they mean open value networks, but then I realized that this was not the case, since they propose as the main organizational structure the co-op. That's another watermark of the left and another evidence of their inability to fully grasp p2p. Co-ops and private corporations are organizations that evolved in the same era. They both inherited elements of the industrial era. Although they seem to be different, the difference between them becomes very small when compared to open networks (ex. Bitcoin, Sensorica, etc.). Open networks are creatures of the information era and they exhibit entirely new characteristics. Just think about the notion of property. Both co-ops and corporations implement property, shared and private, and in both cases it's a relation of exclusion. Open networks implement nondominium, which is fundamentally inclusive, as in permissionless access under a set of rules. You simply can't mix organizational structures that evolved in the industrial era with models of peer production, which they propose. There's something deep here that they don't grasp, and I explain that as left-thinking blindness.

Their presentation on currency is a bit scarry, very utopian. It also has disjoint elements, seems to be a collection of new trends with not much thought behind about how they could work together or oppose each other, or how some of them may even contradiction their proposal. They cover from programmable money like CBDC to something like Art Brook's concept of current-see... That section requires more thought.

Obviously their social structure proposal from the local village to the cosmopolis is so detailed that can't be taken seriously. I can't imagine a shift so drastic, at global scale, other than being imposed by a global technocratic totalitarian regime. The world doesn't change in that manner. Take a look at the world today, you'll see the entire history of humanity present today, all forms of social structures, governance systems, economic models, ... That's another watermark of left-thinking people, they like to propose whole systems. Marks did it and they can't stop doing it too. Those who follow the so-called right doctrine are not fo prescriptive of the future of society. But both ideologies stem from social contract theory, from an imaginary original state, leading to an imaginary future state. I understand p2p as seemingly from the understanding of complexity, we don't know what was before, how we got here and where we're going, but we'll iterate to maintain "social homeostasis", strive to maintain and improve our condition as we go, avoid Armageddon, etc.

In conclusion, I was a good read. I think these people are honest, they try to build a better world, but their minds are stuck in the old dichotomy, heavily biased towards the anarchic left. Nevertheless this is how things change. They dare to go beyond, to take into consideration new patterns and incorporate them with what they know and understand. Sooner or later they'll snap out of the chains of the doctrine that holds them back. " \ (email January 2025)