Introductory Material

For the Bio of Michel Bauwens, see the Michel Bauwens page.

Following here is a list of pages on this wiki directly related to personal writings and work about peer to peer and commons topics.

See also the bibliography page here: Michel Bauwens' English Language Bibliography ; Some articles translated into spanish: [1]

Evaluation: Prophets and Advocates of Peer Production. By George Dafermos. Chapter 7: The Handbook of Peer Production. Wiley, 2020

[2]

I have produced a autobiography which is for the moment only available on a Google doc. William Kelly wrote an introduction: Introduction to the Autobiography of Michel Bauwens

Publications Overview

Update

P2P: The Commons Manifesto is now available in the Chinese language!

一本社会转型指南:《P2P共有资源宣言》 | 中译新书发布！

706 M-Lab 翻译小组与 Uncommons 合作完成的中译本《P2P共有资源宣言》（Peer to Peer The Commons Manifesto）正式上线！

本书是 Michel Bauwens @mbauwens，Vasilis Kostakis 与 Alex Pazaitis @AlexPazaitis

三位作者于2019年发表的小册子，广泛考察了构成数字时代的 “共有资源”(Commons) 的种种 P2P 技术——区块链、互联网、数字制造技术……从中提炼出一种“对等者生产”模式，探讨运用这种技术改变组织结构和价值创造，我们将如何进入一个以共有资源为基础的社会形态当中。

下载地址👇

https://zenodo.org/records/15464085

Our last 'mandala'presentation graphic

= Content of slides for lecture: “The Role of the Commons in Civilizational Transitions” delivered by Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation, September 2022, at Uppsala University

With thanks to graphic artist Juliane Höhle; website: julianehoehle.wordpress.com and twitter @JulianeHoehle

Introduction to P2P Theory

See: Introductory Course on P2P and the Commons

This video series was done, with excellent technical conditions, at Lignan University in Hong Kong, at the behest of Prof. Kin Chi Lau and colleagues, during the months of January 2019:

E-Lecture 1: Introduction to peer to peer and the commons, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glRE-J9xFbQ

E-Lecture 2: The interaction between the commons and the market, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtdftpR-7fA

E-Lecture 3: Public-commons cooperation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXIwdUJ-1E

E-Lecture 4: Distributed ledgers and shared supply chains, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suI7e0aNetg

E-Lecture 5: The spirituality and ethics of peering and commoning, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7t2-xadpCI

Michel Bauwens -- Life and Thought, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgI_TLgqdts

Our Structured Bibliographies

Sources of P2P Theory: the books that inspired our theorezing about the commons

What You Should Read To Understand the Commons: recommendations to understand the commons

Structured Bibliography on P2P and the Commons: selected essays

Video series: O.G. Rose has a series in which I explain in detail why the selected books and authors are important:

Playlist starts here

(Ep #1) w/ Michel Bauwens: "The Structure of World History" by Kojin Karatani [3]
(Ep #2) w/ Michel Bauwens: On Karl Polanyi, Peter Pogany & World System Cycles [4]
(Ep #3) w/ Michel Bauwens: On Macrohistorical Theories [5]
(Ep #4) w/ Michel Bauwens: Agency and Change in History [6]

This is related to my project on Civilizational Analysis:

An Annotated Bibliography on the Evolution of Civilization

Our introduction to the 'History of Human Civilization as seen through the eyes of the commons'

Our core curriculum: [7]

Syllabus on Civilizational History, Transition Dynamics and the Historical Role of the Commons by Michel Bauwens

In French

Seven-part French video series: Au-delà de la civilisation ? Entretiens avec Michel Bauwens. Episode 1.

Also available in podcast format: que peut-on dire de la civilisation à venir :

Michel Bauwens and the Evolution of the Integral Left

Erik Haines:

"Another major highlight of Portalpalooza was the presentation by Michel Bauwens—the renowned Belgian cyber-philosopher, commons theorist, and founder of the P2P Foundation. Bauwens brings a unique historical depth to the integral scene; having been deeply immersed in Ken Wilber’s work throughout the 1980s and 1990s before pioneering peer-to-peer (P2P) economic theory, his intellectual trajectory represents a vital bridge between American integral metatheory, European political economy, and Catholic social thought.

My own engagement with Bauwens deepened significantly through a series of correspondence exchanges leading up to the conference, which I mapped in my July 2026 essay, A Short History of the Integral Left & Varieties of Integral Traditions Today. In those dialogues, we compared notes on how the micro-level psychological flexibility of contextual behavioral science (and Ostrom-based Prosocial models) intersects with macro-level commons governance and peer-to-peer resource management. Our exchanges also explored the neglected tradition of Catholic integral human development—from Jacques Maritain’s personalism to Catholic social doctrine—revealing how deeply the Western tradition harbors integrative, non-statist alternatives to both raw capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism.

In his conference address, titled around the “resurrection” of the Integral Left, Bauwens mapped a rich historical arc tracing how left-wing thought and commons-based peer production can interface with integral theory. Drawing on Marxist theorist Loren Goldner’s thesis on the Hermetic Renaissance (”cosmobiology”), Bauwens highlighted how the conviction that matter and spirit are co-arising was forced underground by Cartesian dualism, only to re-emerge in radical political economics and P2P resource management.

While Bauwens’ talk offered an extraordinary historical synthesis, I find myself making a subtle but crucial conceptual distinction regarding his title. Bauwens speaks of the resurrection of the Integral Left—a term that carries connotations of bringing back a static, past model (such as the brief 2020 Growing Down milieu formed around Michael Brooks’ passing or early Hermetic paradigms). In my view, what we are witnessing—and what we must actively cultivate—is not a resurrection, but an evolution of the Integral Left.

An evolutionary framework recognizes that the Left cannot simply restore past developmental models or rely on pre-critical spiritual syntheses. Instead, it must adapt dialectically to the realities of the present moment:

It must integrate Dylan Shaul’s post-post-metaphysics to reclaim ontological and existential grounding—specifically anchoring human action in divine revelation and the pursuit of the Good—without regressing to pre-modern dogmatism.

It must incorporate Downs and Nance’s Sci-Fi Marxism and Faultline Theory to confront algorithmic governance, AI, and technocapitalism (”Robo-Cthulhu”).

It must ground its macro-political vision of the P2P commons (Bauwens) and cosmopolitan socialism (Brooks) in Fred Dallmayr’s integral pluralism (”democracy to come”) using Integral Epistemological Pluralism (IEP) as its meta-theoretical architecture, alongside the enactive, post-metaphysical discipline of IACT praxis (i.e., Integral Political Praxis).

Where “resurrection” looks backward to restore a lost coherence, “evolution” moves forward, synthesizing new theoretical tools to build an adaptive, multi-dimensional Left capable of out-thinking and out-organizing the New Right."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/dylan-shaul-returns-to-the-portal)

Recent Editorials

Editorials written in the Post-Corona period, since March 2020:

Somewheres, Nowheres, and Everywheres

Our Next Civilization Will Not Be Based on Unity Without Division, Nor On Division Without Unity, But On Unity With Maximum Differentiation

Ukraine Conflict as a Competition Between Rival Systems, Pointing to the Need for a Cosmo-Local Civilizational Framework

Michel Bauwens on the Conflicts Between Commoners, Capitalists and Intersectionalists

Public Ledgers as the New Institution of the Commons

When Are We ?

Understanding the Great Reversal in the Political Field

Three Spheres of Mark Stahlman vs the Three Spheres of Michel Bauwens

Post-2023 Substack Editorials

My 'Fourth Civilization' Substack newsletter is at https://4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/archive

1: Towards a Fourth Generation Civilization. Why this substack by Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation.
2: Towards Mutual Coordination Economics. Why we should pay attention to mutual coordination as a concept for the next civilization.

3: On the Importance of Seed Forms for the Next Civilization: An overview of fifteen years of research by the P2P Foundation.

4: Why We Need Real-Time Public Ledger Organizations: RTPLO's might be the 'commons-based' institutions that we need to change the value regime.

5: Why We Need 'Crypto for Real': A proposal to link up the open ecosystems for crypto coordination, with the real-life mutualization of provisioning.

6: The Fate of Tribes in a Cosmo-Local World: A more personal travelogue that starts in a Lebanese mountain community and ends up in a network nation.

7: The Transhumanist Technological Quest Is a Religious Quest: Recovering our technological unconscious.

8: Understanding the Emergence of Neo-Venetian Crypto-Networks: Why the prefigurative self-provisioning of mutual coordination infrastructures by the crypto-nomadic networks has a macro-historical importance.

9: Three Scenarios for a Turbo-Charged Crypto-Future.

10: Shifting from a Commodity-Based Value Regime to a Contributory Value Regime.

11: The Age of Trans-Local Self-Organized CoordiNations

12: Why Ordo-Communalism is Necessary: on the Ordo-Communal State.

13: Getting Ready for the Five Thousand Year Shift in Value Regime: An overview of signposts towards the civilizational shift in the direction of <contribution-based>, <thermodynamically informed> <mutual coordination> economics.

14: From the Commons for Capital to Capital for the Commons: How an important book, Assets in Common, introduces the shift towards a Stewardship Economy.

15: How Peer Production and Web3 Governance Mechanisms May Prefigure a Isonomic World Order: Is what we are waiting for perhaps not Democracy, but Isonomia ?

16: What Kind of Money Do We Need for the Next Value Revolution ?: Beyond fiat money and crypto, how do we measure and reward systemic contributions, i.e. contribution to common infrastructural and care value ?

17. Who Can Change the World Today ? Is there a new agent of historical change ? Could it be the commoners ? But if so: allied to who ?

18. What Would a Commons-Centric Society or Civilization Look Like ? (Ethical Economy + Partner State + Commons): Adding the commons institutions to the mix: Transforming societies from a national bi-institutional format (market+state) to a cosmo-local tri-institutional format (market-state + commons).

19: Why Human Contributive Labor Remains the Creative Principle of Human Society: The salvific and ex-tropic implications of the medieval Christian vision of human work as spiritual activity. (with excerpts from the study: “From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body".

20: The Construction of the Post-Civilizational Civium Has Begun: Why the confederation of more than a dozen translocal popup villages in Chiang Mai is a historical pivot

21: A Global History of Societal Regulation: Why commons-based institutions now need to regulate the market and state, ‘cosmo-locally’.

22: The Cosmo-Local Plan for Our Next Civilization. Towards a convergence of the local bioregional resilient production efforts with the global coordination and 'Capital for the Commons' capacities of Web3.

23: The Three Civilizational Priorities of the Next Societal Transition: Can We Truly Change Our Civilizational Model? What we can learn from Peter Pogany's 'Rethinking the World'.

24: AI and the Advent of the Age of the Brahmin Workers. The pivot towards P2P AI has just begun.

Quotes

The P2P Foundation as an left-integral offshoot

"As part of that exchange he shared a long autobiographical interview tracing his intellectual evolution, and reading it clarified why our paths converge as they do. He begins in a Marxist-revolutionary period, moves through the radical body-mind therapies of the 60s-70s, and passes into an extended engagement with Eastern spiritual traditions and then with the Western esoteric inheritance of Rosicrucianism, and the Hermetic line, before arriving at the work on commons-based peer production and the P2P Foundation for which he is now best known. Threaded through the middle of it is a serious, years-long immersion in Wilber and the Integral Institute. Having discovered Wilber in the early 1980s, he immersed himself in his writings for nearly ten years. He vividly traces the trajectory of falling under the spell of an all-encompassing system of thought and adopting a temporary ideological stance, until the very criticisms he had long brushed aside finally began to hit home. It is this lineage that leads him to frame his own peer-to-peer project as a left-integral offshoot."

Category:Michel Bauwens

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