Category:Mutual Coordination

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Key hypothesis: What market pricing is to capitalism and planning is to state-based production, mutual coordination (i.e. Stigmergy) is to commons-based peer production!

Please check out our report P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival, for the vision of the P2P Foundation, as well as the Cosmo-Local Reader for practical examples.

We are asking you to imagine the following emerging reality:

  • a first layer of production and distribution involves direct mutual coordination, through open and shared supply chains, with integrate accounting and metrics to recognize both positive and negative social and ecological externalities
  • a second layer involves generative market transactions involving the various players in entredonneurial (generative entrepreneurs working together) coalitions that share common infrastructures and circular economies
  • a third 'planning' layer that involves biophysical accountability, using tools like Kate Raworth's Doughnut, or the Global Tresholds and Allocations developed by initiatives such as Reporting 3.0

The aim is to achieve a Resource Balanced Economy, characterized by Perma-Circularity. See the report by Simon Michaux about the nature of this transition. [1]. For details, see Simon Michaux on the Transition Towards a Resource Balanced Economy [2]

We suggest the following key historical interpretation:

  • More or less 5,000 years ago, humanity underwent a first bifurcation in information processing for resource allocation, shifting from the gift and commons mechanics of the tribal organizations, to the markets and state allocation systems of craft-agrarian civilizations; the markets became dominant after the industrial revolution
  • with the advent of computerized cybernetic technology, humanity stands at a potential second big bifurcation, moving from exclusively market and state allocation mechanisms, to introducing stigmergic mutual coordination through signalling in open ecosystems, with the post-world-war context of:

- the failure by the Soviet planning systems to adapt to cybernetic planning

- the failure of the first attempt at democratic cybernetic planning by Chile's Allende government with Cybersin and Stafford Beer

- the post-1993 democratizing of digital networking through the internet and the development of open source coordination systems, followed by the development of the crypto economic open ecosystems

  • the second bifurcation is necessary to manage human needs within planetary boundaries and acceptable social contracts between the managerial and productive classes. We believe this will happen (in part) through the development of open crypto-economic infrastructures for mutual coordination, stronger mutualization of provisioning systems at the local level, the cosmo-local organization of production (interaction between relocalized supply and global knowledge cooperation), and Magisteria of the Commons, a new type of institution that can protect the reproduction of human and non-human life over the long term, by a more judicious use of scarce resources.


Our key report introducing a global infrastructive for collaborative production

* P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival: Towards a P2P Infrastructure for a Socially Just Circular Society. By Michel Bauwens and Alex Pazaitis. Foreword by Kate Raworth. P2P Foundation, 2019.

URL = Draft text ; draft illustrations

How shared perma-circular supply chains, post-blockchain distributed ledgers, protocol cooperatives, and three new forms of post-capitalist accounting, could very well save the planet.


Introduction to the potential for Mutual Coordination through Peer Production

Our approach marries 'mutual coordination' mechanisms in the commons, such as open and contributive accounting and shared and circular 'eco-systemic' supply chains, perhaps using REA accounting and verification through shared universal shared ledgers like the holochain; just pricing and exchange mechanisms in the sphere of the ethical and generative market; and a planning framework based on Thresholds and Allocations proposed by global resource commons institutions.


0. What market pricing is to capitalism and planning is to state-based production, mutual coordination is to commons-based peer production!

1. Today we have the emergence of a new proto-system of production, Commons-Based Peer Production in which contributors are free to contribute to a common pool of shareable knowledge, code and design, which may be associated through physical production in microfactories using distributed machinery such as 3D printing.

2. This emerging new system of value creation and distribution is not sustainable if contributors need to find work as labour for capital, so contributors need to be able to generate livelihoods for themselves, keeping the generation of surplus value within the sphere of the commons and its contributors.

3. To achieve this, we advocate the use of Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses such as the Peer Production License. This allows for the creation of a non-capitalist 'counter' economy based on Open Cooperativism and other forms of an ethical economy. In this proposal, the commoners or peer producers, i.e. the contributors to the commons, are also cooperators of their own corporate entities, which create livelihoods and insure the surplus value remains within the commons. So, in between the sphere of the accumulation of the commons (open input, participatory process, commons-oriented output), and the sphere of capital accumulation, there is a intermediary sphere of cooperative production, which regulates physical production and the social reproduction of the commoners-cooperators.


4. The production of immaterial common pools is already regulated through mutual coordination and stigmergy, i.e. coordination based on open and transparent signals of what is needed by the system; but physical production cannot be coordinated without similar signals, i.e. the coordination of production through information. It is therefore a next logical step to advocate and practice, within the ethical entrepreneurial coalitions that coalesce around particular commons through their shared adherence to the commons-based licenses, to also practice open accounting and open supply-chains and logistics. This means that within these coalitions, physical production can also be coordinated through stigmergic signals; and negotiated coordination and even voluntary common planning can take place on the basis of the shared production information.


In conclusion: We Need To Evolve Towards Fifth Magisterium of the Commons, based on a Contributory Value Regime, in order to create a steady-state Mutual Coordination Economy.

It could be argued that since the Industrial Revolution, our societies have been managed by four relatively autonomous magisteria (a science regulating empirical production, a culture regulating public discourses, a politics regulating state allocation, and an industry regulating private/pragmatic production. In our previous work, P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival, we have described a shift from a commodity value regime to a contributory regime, which is co-emerging with three new types of accounting (contribution/impact; flow/ecosystems; and thermodynamic matter/energy), which on the one hand expand the sphere of free and open coordination to the sphere of material production, while creating a new magisteria, that through accounting can be integrated in contextual (bioregional) decision-making at every level of subsidiarity, i.e. a relatively autonomous informational commons (f.e. a global thresholds and allocations council) that reflects the limits set by the interests of the interdependent web of life. In other words, we need to institutionalize the human and natural commons and give them a proper Voice. We will explore our further findings about such a potential cyber-physical infrastructure through which Anthropocene humanity can produce for its needs, in the context of a vocal and orchestrated voice for the interdependent web of life to which it can be held accountable.

Projects of particular interest to the P2P Foundation

Most crypto-ledger and blockchain applications intend to create distributed markets, which tend to oligarchic concentration over time. The P2P Foundation is partial to commons-oriented approaches in which market dynamics serve the common good and more egalitarian outcomes. In the context of this section, blockchain and other crypto-ledger applications could be a vital tool for open supply chains.

Some criteria to look for (via Dick Bryan and Akseli Virtanen):

  • 1. "Programmable organizations enable production to be organized in a way that makes social criteria the rationale for production; not a constraint on it."

[3]

  • 2. "The rise of ‘networks’ as modes of corporate organization breaks down the conventional means that differentiate one corporation from another and challenges the principle of ‘competition’ as the driver of corporate rationale. These are both issues that feature prominently in decentralized applications."

[4]


* 3. Mechanisms, like tokens, that allow surplus value to be retained by the workers, not capital.

"Changes in the nature of work (precarization, casualization, subcontracting, the rise of the gig economy) see workers carrying greater risks and break down the attachment of work and living standards to employment. There is growing interest in alternative ways of organizing work." [5]

4. "the real potential is cryptocurrencies as units of account: as modes of measuring economic activity that are conceived differently from those intrinsic to fiat money. Fiat money has become tied to conventional framings of profit and loss, income and expenditure, and a market-centred calculus. Non-fiat monies have the potential for developing new ways to calculate economic activity; ways that represent different social and economic values, and measure performance by criteria other than profit. Think about it for a moment. The unit of account potential signals the importance of the crypto economy developing ways (not a singular way, but coin-specific ways) of accounting and measuring the activities supported by each token. We see this as central to giving tokens a material basis in the crypto economy; not just leaving them as speculative stores of value. .... "Exchange is often between parties of unequal power, so mutual gain cannot be presumed. An important issue of the crypto economy is how blockchain can and cannot countermand asymmetrical power in trade. We see blockchain not facilitating frictionless markets but rather frictionless capital: distributed capital."

[6]


Interesting projects in this sphere are:

Key Quotes

Bob Haugen and William McCarthy:

"The Internet as a means of coordination is driving supply chain collaboration very quickly, but there is no accepted standardized semantic model that can actually encompass all supply chain activities. A standard, non-proprietary semantic model can make supply chain collaboration more like a public utility (the semantic Web) that businesses plug into than the current slow and expensive collaboration projects."

(http://www.jeffsutherland.org/oopsla2000/mccarthy/mccarthy.htm)


Viktor Glushkov on the Two Historical Information Barriers

"In Vitaly Moev’s book-interview “The Reins of Power”, Viktor Glushkov proposed the idea that humanity in its history has passed through two “information barriers”, as he called them using the language of cybernetics. Two thresholds, two management crises. The first arose in the context of the decomposition of the clan economy and was resolved with the emergence, on the one hand, of monetary-commercial relations and, on the other, of a hierarchical management system, in which the superior manager directs the subordinates, and these the executors.

Starting in the 1930s, according to Glushkov, it becomes clear that the second “information barrier” is coming, when neither hierarchy in management nor commodity-money relations help anymore. The cause of such a crisis is the inability, even with the participation of many actors, to cover all the problems of economic management. Viktor Glushkov said that according to his calculations from the 1930s, solving the management problems of the Soviet economy required some 1014 mathematical operations per year. At the time of the interview, in the mid-1970s, already about 1016 operations. If we assume that one person without the help of machinery can perform on average 1 million operations a year, then it turns out that about 10 billion people are needed to maintain a well-run economy. Next, we will present the words of Victor Glushkov himself:

From now on, only ‘machineless’ management efforts are not enough. Humanity managed to overcome the first information barrier or threshold because it invented monetary-commercial relations and the pyramidal management structure. The invention that will allow us to cross the second threshold is computer technology.

A historical turn in the famous spiral of development takes place. When an automated state management system appears, we will easily grasp the entire economy at a single glance. In the new historical stage, with new technology, in the next turn of the dialectical spiral, we are as if “floating” over that point of the dialectical spiral below which, separated from us by millennia, was the period when the subsistence economy of man was easy to see with the naked eye."

- Vasiliy Pikhorovic, paraphrasing Viktor Glushkov [8]


Elin Whitney-Smith on the Historical Role of the Press in the Development of Markets and Capitalism

"Capitalism developed where and when it did because there was high information access. There was high information access because of a major advance in information technology - the press. Where the technology was not controlled by the ’’powers that be” there was economic growth and a shift in the entire social structure. Where it was controlled there was no structural change and there was economic ruin. The development of capitalism is a major step change in economic growth. It is also a major change in the way people organize themselves into groups. Major step changes in the growth and in the organization of cultures are found to be related to the introduction and use of information technology. The limit to growth is the limit of effective use of information or the variety limit. Economies are able to grow once the variety limit is raised. Information technology allows people to increase their individual variety in relation to the amount of information processed. This increase in individual variety allows the entire society to grow. Where there is high access to information through technology there is much growth and where there is less information access through control of technology there is less economic growth. When a high access economy is in competition for resources with a low access economy the high access economy will be more economically successful."

- Elin Whitney-Smith [9]


The Free Software Model

The Soviet model retained a contradiction between production and circulation, i.e. the alienation of the worker from his product, since he had to buy the products from the market, using the 'general equivalent' of money. In free software, this is not the case, a continuum of producers and users both produce, circulate, and use it. As feedback it does not use the price mechanism, but knowledge. Copyleft ensures its circulation, thereby preventing scarcity, i.e. a market.

(source unknown, booknote by Michel Bauwens [10]


Engage Global, Test Local, Spread Viral

John Boik:

"No matter how promising the design of a new system might be, it would be unreasonable to expect that a nation would abruptly drop an existing system in favor of a new one. Nevertheless, a viable, even attractive strategy exists by which new systems could be successfully researched, developed, tested, and implemented. I call it engage global, test local, spread viral.

Engage global means to engage the global academic community and technical sector, in partnership with other segments of society, in a well-defined R&D program aimed at computer simulation and scientific field testing of new systems and benchmarking of results. In this way, the most profound insights of science can be brought into play.

Test local means to scientifically test new designs at the local (e.g., city or community) level, using volunteers (individuals, businesses, non-profits, etc.) organized as civic clubs. This approach allows testing by relatively small teams, at relatively low cost and risk, in coexistence with existing systems, and without legislative action.

Spread viral means that if a system shows clear benefits in one location (elimination of poverty, for example, more meaningful jobs, or less crime) it would likely spread horizontally, even virally, to other local areas. This approach would create a global network of communities and cities that cooperate in trade, education, the setup of new systems, and other matters. Over time, its impact on all segments of society would grow.

Cities, big and small, are the legs upon which all national systems rest. Already cities and their communities are hubs for innovation. With some further encouragement and support, and the right tools and programs, they could become more resilient and robust, and bigger heroes in the coming great transition."

(https://medium.com/@JohnBoik/an-economy-of-meaning-or-bust-2aa46457b649#.1i09j8lv3)


The Coordination Problem

Ian Wright:

"To solve the coordination problem we need to operate the economy at the correct activity levels such that final demand is satisfied without over or under production. A fully coordinated economy produces the population’s consumption bundle without wasteful accumulation, or unsustainable depletion, of stocks. Of course, final demand continually changes, and so do the techniques of production. So a complete solution of the coordination problem requires discovering, and re-discovering, the correct activity levels, and ensuring that the economy conforms to those levels."

(https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2017/03/12/a-theoretical-solution-to-the-coordination-problem/)


Why Neoliberalism Overtook the Soviet Model

"The great experiment of communism failed in the twentieth century because it had a feeble mathematical imagination. It thought in terms of the geometry of empire with its single center of command and control, and its periphery of resources. With this sort of world-view, communism was archaic and Pharaonic, and it was no wonder that it got taken over by genocidal tyrants like Stalin and Mao. Capitalism outlasted communism because its mathematical imagination was one of complexity and self-organization from noise. ... Capitalists who think of physical objects in markets, and hypercapitalists who think of algorithmic trading and accelerations of time and manipulations of price and currency differences do not understand life. Capitalism as well as hypercapitalism will both fail in this century because a market is not a good model for a planetary ecology."

- William Irwin Thompson [11]


On the crucial difference between Math-Based Cybernetic Planning vs Systems-Based Cybernetic Planning

"There is an "abyss between a more “math”-oriented branch of cybernetic planning and a more “systems”-oriented branch of cybernetic planning: (math-based approaches) lack serious discussions of implementation at different levels of organization, and provide little flexibility for multivariate accounting systems, ones which could work better at smaller scales and are more consonant with the environment. This is something the “systems”-oriented planning methods do much better: they focus on supervising the existing self-organized systems rather than managing society. However, these methods often fall into localism without providing a viable answer on how to organise the world."

- Renato Flores [12]


""Within the planning discourse two poles have materialised over the last decades: a participatory ideal guided by substantive rationality, opposed to an algorithmic governmentality subordinated to instrumental reason."

- Max Grunberg [13]


On Wrong-Headed Participatory Planning Proposals

"Many authors dedicated to a participatory planning process call for consumers to write down their desires in the form of wish lists. As a response to this epistemically questionable discovery procedure, the state of the art in capitalist demand-forecasting at enterprises like Amazon is presented, where machine-learning algorithms excel at modelling interrelated time series on a global level by extrapolating demand patterns in real-time."

- Max Grunberg [14]


Jack Ma of Alibaba on the Prospects of Planning

"Over the past 100 years, we have come to believe that the market economy is the best system, but in my opinion, there will be a significant change in the next three decades, and the planned economy will become increasingly big. Why? Because with access to all kinds of data, we may be able to find the invisible hand of the market. The planned economy I am talking about is not the same as the one used by the Soviet Union or at the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China. The biggest difference between the market economy and planned economy is that the former has the invisible hand of market forces. In the era of big data, the abilities of human beings in obtaining and processing data are greater than you can imagine. With the help of artificial intelligence or multiple intelligence, our perception of the world will be elevated to a new level. As such, big data will make the market smarter and make it possible to plan and predict market forces so as to allow us to finally achieve a planned economy."

- Jack Ma [15]

Key resources

Articles

Failed Cybernetic Planning in the Soviet and Other Planning Systems

  • InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network. By Slava Gerovitch. History and Technology Vol. 24, No. 4, December 2008, [16]: "This article examines several Soviet initiatives to develop a national computer network as the technological basis for an automated information system for the management of the national economy in the 1960s–1970s.
  • Why the Soviet Internet Failed? By Benjamin Peters. 2009. [17]: "Why wasn’t there a Soviet equivalent to the US ARPA NET? Building on fresh archival evidence, this paper examines several surprising leads


Left Cybernetic Approaches

Big Data and Cybernetics Today

  • Katharina Pistor, Rule by Data: The End of Markets?, 83 Law and Contemporary Problems 101-124 (2020)

[21]: "explores data as a source and, in their processed variant, as a means of governance that will likely replace both markets and the law." See: Rule by Data as the End of Markets

  • Democracy, ecology and Big Data. Can they be combined into a 21stcentury socialism? Kees van der Pijl.

]https://www.academia.edu/40678009/Democracy_ecology_and_Big_Data._Can_they_be_combined_into_a_21st-_century_socialism?]. See: Digital Socialism and the Preservation of the Biosphere: “This paper discusses the urgent need to define a socialism of the 21st century based on the achievements of the Information Revolution.

  • Red Plenty Platforms. By Nick Dyer-Witheford. CULTURE MACHINE VOL 14 • 2013 [22]: "This paper takes Spufford’s novel as a starting point from which to embark on an examination of the computing platforms that would be necessary for a contemporary ‘red plenty’."

Market Issues

  • How Hyper-competition leads to inefficiencies in the supply-chain [23]

Planning Issues

  • The Planning Daemon: Future Desire and Communal Production. By Max Grünberg. Historical Materialism:1-45 (forthcoming 2024) [24]: "Within the planning discourse two poles have materialised over the last decades: a participatory ideal guided by substantive rationality, opposed to an algorithmic governmentality subordinated to instrumental reason. This rift within socialist thought is also observable when it comes to the discovery of needs." For more, see: Planning Communal Production on the Basis of Individual Consumer Preferences
  • From red spirit to underperforming pyramids and coercive institutions: Michael Polanyi against economic planning. By Gábor István Bíró. History of European Ideas, Volume 48, 2022 - Issue 6, Pages 811-847, 2021

[26]: "mathematics is not sufficient in itself to properly address the economy. Eventually, Polanyi developed an institutionalist approach in order to be able to address both the variability of market economies and the failures of socialist ‘super-planners’." For more, see: Michael Polanyi's Critique of Economic Planning

  • The 'libertarian' free market critique from Ludwig von Mises: [27]

Emergent Stigmergic Infrastructures of Mutual Coordination


Political, Governance and State-Related Issues

Miscellaneous (including Fictional Treatments)

"This article connects the recent flourishing of economic science fiction with the increasing technicity of contemporary financial markets, to pose questions about computational economies, both historical and fictional, and their ambiguous utopian currents. It explores examples of computational economies and societies in which economic resources are largely defined and allocated by computational systems to challenge — if not entirely dispel—assumptions about the inextricability of computation and the dystopian specters of capitalism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. The article puts insights from the histories of cybernetics, computer science, and economics into dialogue with sf novels."

Books

On Cybernetic Planning

Background

  • Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetics History. Thomas Rid, is considered to be a good treatment of the history of cybernetics.


The Failed Cybernetic Experiments in the Soviet Union

  • Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford is a 'faction novel' about the invention, and abandonment of the Russian internet for cybernetic planning.

"How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone"

[31]: "In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science."

The weaknesses of the 20th Cy Planning Economies

  • Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism. Edited with an Introduction and a Concluding Essay by F. A. Hayek. Contributions by N. G. Pierson, Ludwig von Mises, Georg Halm, and Enrico Barone. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1935.

pdf. See: Critical Studies on Collectivist Economic Planning. This is the market libertarian critique of planning the economy as such.

  • Recommended by Katarina Pistor: "For a comprehensive analysis of the weaknesses of the socialist system", see JANOS KORNAI,THE SOCIALIST SYSTEM: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COMMUNISM (1992). [32]


Defenses of Planning Approaches

  • Solving the Global Crisis Requires the Approach of Economics Cybernetics. By Elena Veduta. "The book researches the mythology and practice of UN National Accounting Systems, the economic planning of the USSR and the World Bank. It contains a presentation of the dynamic model of interbranch-intersectoral balance as a system of algorithms which coordinates the orders of final customers (state, households, exporters) with producers' production possibilities. Only this system of algorithms can be used as a cybernetic digital platform for efficient decision making of state and global management."

On Market Mechanisms


Post-Monetary Coordination

  • Society After Money. A Dialogue. By: Project Society After Money. Bloomsbury, 2019 [34]: "How can we conceive modes of production and coordination that no longer rely on money, markets and the state?"

* Stefan Heidenreich. Money. Merve Verlag, 2017. [35] See: Stefan Heidenreich on the Post-Currency Non-Money Economy


Today: Platforms, Crypto and Beyond

  • Platform Socialism, from James Muldoon; and Blockchain Radicals from Joshua Davila discuss the potential of respectively platform cooperatives and crypto networks for economic planning and distribution.
  • Peters, M. A., Besley, T., Jandrić, P., & Zhu, X. (2020). Knowledge Socialism. The Rise of Peer Production: Collegiality, Collaboration, and Collective Intelligence. Singapore: Springer.


Neo-Socialist Approaches

  • Computers and Socialism. by Stephen Bodington. Spokesman Books, 1973: "Will computers be the agents of a new authoritarianism, more thorough and unassailable than anything yet known? Or will they open the way to human liberation?"
  • The Classless Society in Motion. A New Theory of Communist Economy. By Donal Costello and Tom O’Brien.

[37]: See: The History of Socialist Economic Planning

  • The Rise of Technosocialism. By Brett King and Dr. Richard Petty. [38]: on "the rise of a technology-driven collective social consciousness and purpose".

Podcasts

Reports


Videos


Encyclopedia of the Key Topics

C for Cybernetics

  1. Cybernetics
    1. Cybernetic Communism
    2. Cybernetic Planning
    3. Digital Planning in the Soviet Union
    4. Economic Cybernetics
    5. Neo-Cybernetic Politics
    6. Soviet Cybernetics and Planning


D for Democracy

  1. Multilevel Democratic Iterative Coordination


E for the Environment and the Ecology

  1. Automating Environmental Interventions

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