Category:P2P State Approaches
This section will be further developed:
Introduction
David Bollier writes:
"This is a very complex subject, but in general, one can say that the state has very different ideas than commoners about how power, governance and accountability should be structured. The state is also far more eager to strike tight, cozy alliances with investors, businesses and financial institutions because of its own desires to share in the benefits of markets, and particularly, tax revenues. I call our system the market/state system because the alliance – and collusion – between the two are so extensive, and their goals and worldview so similar despite their different roles, that commoners often don’t have the freedom or choice to enact commons. Indeed, the state often criminalizes commoning – think seed sharing, file sharing, cultural re-use – because it “competes” with market forms of production and stands as a “bad example” of alternative modes of provisioning.
Having said this, state power could play many useful roles in supporting commoning, if it could be properly deployed. For example, the state could provide greater legal recognition to commoning, and not insist upon strict forms of private property and monetization. State law Is generally so hostile or indifferent to commoning that commoners often have to develop their own legal hacks or workarounds to achieve some measure of protection for their shared wealth. Think about the General Public License for software, the Creative Commons licenses, and land trusts. Each amounts to an ingenious re-purposing of property law to serve the interests of sharing and intergenerational access.
The state could also be more supportive of bottom-up infrastructures developed by commoners, whether they be wifi systems, energy coops, community solar grids, or platform co-operatives. If city governments were to develop municipal platforms for ride-hailing or apartment rentals – or many other functions – they could begin to mutualize the benefits or such services and better protect the interests of workers, consumers and the general public.
The state could also help develop better forms of finance and banking to help commoning expand. The state provides all sorts of subsidies to the banking industry despite its intense commitment to private extraction of value. Why not use “quantitative easing” or seignorage (the state’s right to create money without it being considered public debt) to finance the building of infrastructure, environmental remediation, and social needs? Commoners could benefit from new sources of credit for social or ecological purposes – or a transition to a more climate-friendly economy — that would not likely be as remunerative as conventional market activity." (http://trise.org/2017/04/30/the-future-is-a-pluriverse-an-interview-with-david-bollier-on-the-potential-of-the-commons/)
For more on these topics, David Bollier recommends:
- “State Power and Commoning: Transcending a Problematic Relationship,” a report about how we might reconceptualize state power so that it could foster commoning as a post-capitalist, post-growth means of provisioning and governance. (http://commonsstrategies.org/state-power-commoning-transcending-problematic-relationship)
See also:
- Hilary Wainwright:
- Co-Creative Labor, Productive Democracy and the Partner State; a very important text to reset government policies for the p2p age. The 3 parts cover: 1 A value revolution in labor; 2 Re-constituting industrial strategies based on co-creative labor; 3 The Co-Creative Economy needs a Partner State
- Michel Bauwens:
- The basic orientation of p2p theory towards societal reform: transforming civil society, the private and the state
- To the Finland Station: the political approach of P2P Theory
- M. Bauwens & V. Kostakis' new book:
Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy
- Tommaso Fattori:
- The Public - Commons Partnership and the Commonification of that which is Public.
- Towards a Legal Framework for the Commons
- Vasilis Kostakis:
- At the Turning Point of the Current Techno-Economic Paradigm: Commons-Based Peer Production, Desktop Manufacturing and the Role of Civil Society in the Perezian Framework. tripleC 11(1): 173-190, 2013. URL = http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/463/447
- The Parody of the Commmons. tripleC 11(2): 412-424, 2013. URL = http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/484
- The Political Economy of Information Production in the Social Web: Towards a “Partner State Approach”. TUT Press, 2011. URL = http://digi.lib.ttu.ee/i/?610
Key Concepts
- The key concept we propose is that of the Partner State
- David Ronfeldt: Bauwens and the Partner State
Help us develop the following concepts:
Other key concepts:
- David Ronfeldt on the Assurance Commons
Quotes
Public-commons partnership is a means of de-privatization while public-private partnership is a means of privatization.
- Poor Richard (Facebook, October 2012)
What Lies Beyond the Nation-State
"We no longer believe in the figure of a State totally invested in the power of reason, technology and science. This state, which almost everywhere became a nation-state during the 19th and 20th centuries, whose action was to homogenize and standardize, has exhausted its resources. He had placed himself above the multitude of beings and things by designating the common good and the general interest, from a position outside the common society, through the mouths of experts, bodies of engineers, administrators or lawyers. The problem with experts is that they don't know what they don't know (Nassim Nicholas Taleb). The era of the avant-gardes directing society, inaugurated in the first half of the 19th century by the Saint-Simonians, heirs to the Enlightenment, is now behind us. We no longer want to obey this myth, even though this myth has shown itself to be fruitful and effective. And Karl Jaspers tells us: when the myth is gone, no effort of the will will regenerate it. That is to say, we cannot resuscitate the blessed time when the myth worked, including the myth of Modernity taken to its extreme, that of Doctor Faust! Cornelius Castoriadis confirms this: the problem before us is that of overcoming the imaginary meaning of the Nation-State towards another form of collective identification – and the difficulties that this overcoming encounters."
- Olivier Frerot [1]
We need to evolve Super-Competent Democracies
""Super-Competent Democracies will emerge when the people, their leaders and the technical professionals learn how to use ensembles of participative, management cybernetic and soft-systems processes (i.e. ‘Super-Competencies) to co-create increasingly just, sustainable and super-competent communities, organisations, enterprises, services, cities and states."
- Roy Madron [2]
Commons-Public rather than Public-Commons
"We should link up social-public partnership and Commons-Public Partnerships. The important point to highlight is that social or commons must precede the state. Our elected representatives need to become again public servants and arrogant masters need to be rapidly recalled." (email, February 2014)
- Pat Conaty
David Graeber on Markets and States
"This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don’t owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it’s a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today." (http://p2pfoundation.net/First_Five_Thousand_Years_of_Debt)
Once the polity population gets to roughly 200 thousand, it must have sophisticated government institutions
“We love to hate bureaucrats, but large-scale societies cannot function without professional administrators. Our Seshat data says is that once the polity population gets to roughly 200 thousand (and certainly by the time you exceed a couple of millions), it must have sophisticated government institutions, including professional bureaucrats. A society numbering in millions simply can’t function without specialized administrators. Societies that try to do it, instead fall apart, which is why we don’t see them today, or (much) in history. The conclusion from this is that the way forward to sustaining and increasing the well-being of large segments of population is not to abolish government, but to evolve institutions that keep bureaucrats working for the benefit of the population, rather than themselves.”
- Peter Turchin [3]
Key Resources
Key Articles
- Towards a New Reconfiguration Among the State, Civil Society and the Market. An outline of the general aspects of a political agenda for a gradual transition to a commons-oriented, social knowledge economy. By Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis. Commons Strategies, May 23, 2015
- Civil Power and the Partner State. By John Restakis. Draft text of a keynote address to the 2nd Good Economy conference in Zagreb, Croatia. 18 March 2015.
- Evolutionary Pathways to Statehood: Old Theories and New Data. By Peter Turchin, Harvey Whitehouse , Andrey Korotayev et al.
[5]: “Our analysis identifies polity population size as the main evolutionary driver of state-formation.”
- On the Differences Between State Sovereignty and Public Services. Pierre Dardot, Christian Laval (part of a plea for 'global commons', https://roarmag.org/essays/dardot-laval-corona-pandemic/?
- War and Violence in Classical Sociology. By Sinisa Malesevic: one cannot look at the state form while ignoring conflict, war and defense externalities. These features got attention by sociologists until WWII, but were ignored later on.
Key Books
- John Restakis. Civilizing the State: Reclaiming Politics for the Common Good (2021)
"Civilizing the State displays three segments: how we got this systematic crisis from political and economic powers; what alternatives we can learn from divergent communities; and, finally, the inception of the Partner State".
- Reclaim the State. Adventures in Popular Democracy. By Hilary Wainwright. Seagull, 2009
How unions and social movements are fighting the market state.
- Toward a Bioregional State. Mark Whitaker, 2005.
An integrated proposal for territorial re-organisation around bio-regional provisioning.
- The Desktop Regulatory State. The Countervailing Power of Superempowered Individuals. Kevin Carson [6]
"The subject of my previous book — The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto — was the way in which falling capital outlays required for both information and material production was eroding the rationale for large organizations, and shifting the balance of power toward individuals, small groups and networks. In particular, I focused on the radically reduced capital outlays required for manufacturing were giving rise to a low-overhead micromanufacturing economy in which the large quantities of land and capital to which the privileged classes had access were becoming increasingly irrelevant, and the material basis for the factory system and wage employment was collapsing.
In this book, my subject is how the same phenomenon is empowering individuals against the large, powerful institutions — both state and corporate — that previously dominated their lives. The implosion of capital outlays associated with the desktop revolution, and the virtual disappearance of transaction costs of coordinating action associated with the network revolution, have (as Tom Coates has said) eliminated the gap between what can be produced within large hierarchical organizations and what can be produced at home in a wide range of industries: software, publishing, music, education, and journalism among them.
The practical significance of this, which I develop in this book, is that many of the functions of government can be included in that list. The central theme of this book is the potential for networked organization to constrain the exercise of power by large, hierarchical institutions in a way that once required the countervailing power of other large, hierarchical institutions."
- Anarchy as Order: The History and Future of Civic Humanity. Mohammed A. Bamyeh. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (May 16, 2010)
Left Approaches
See chapter 12 of the book by István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control, i.e. "The Mountain We Must Conquer: Reflections on the State"
- Hardt and Negri’s Empire.
- Meiksins Wood’s Empire of Capital.
- Harvey’s New Imperialism.
- Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire.
Historical Approaches
- Society Against the State. Pierre Clastres: how First People's maintained relatively egalitarian structures over millenia. This book looks in particular at the techniques used in the Amazonian region to avoid state and class formation.
- The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change. Hendrik Spruyt. Princeton University Press, 1996. [7]: "The present international system, composed for the most part of sovereign, territorial states, is often viewed as the inevitable outcome of historical development. Hendrik Spruyt argues that there was nothing inevitable about the rise of the state system, however. Examining the competing institutions that arose during the decline of feudalism--among them urban leagues, independent communes, city states, and sovereign monarchies."
- The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically. by Franz Oppenheimer, 1908. Republished by Andesite Press, August 8, 2015: A classic from 1908, which influenced Karl Polanyi's work. For details, see: History and Development of the State
- Before the State: Systemic Political Change in the West from the Greeks to the French Revolution. Andreas Osiander. Oxford University Scholarship Online, 2007
- The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History. by Philip Bobbitt: a order of state is also a order of technology for defense; as technologies advance, it renders older social orders obsolete and forces other forms to update and adopt to the new standard of the victor states. Bobbitt distinguishes 6 forms of the modern state since the Renaissance, each reacting and formed by challenges of warfare.
- See also: Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990 - 1992. Charles Tilly: "In this pathbreaking work, now available in paperback, Charles Tilly challenges all previous formulations of state development in Europe. Specifically, Tilly charges that most available explanations fail because they do not account for the great variety of kinds of states which were viable at different stages of European history, and because they assume a unilinear path of state development resolving in today's national state."
- Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistorical Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire, 2012;
- Against The Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. James C. Scott. Yale Un. Press, 2017 [9]
- James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South-East Asia, 2009; Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, 2017.
Books documenting the importance of government
By William Berkson [10] :
"While the short-term impact of government spending is difficult to disentangle from other factors, government investment in the economy is what actually has grown economies in the long term. Successful long-term economic growth has never come from government getting out of the way of the private market. Growth has always come from government leadership that leverages private sector growth. Government investment in public goods and services, targeted and sustained over decades has in fact always been necessary for sustained growth of the private economy and increasing opportunity for all.
Recent books documenting the critical role of public investment include:
- Land of Promise by Michael Lind (2013),
- Success in Agricultural Transformation by Isabelle Tsakok (2011),
- State of Innovation by Fred Block and Matthew Keller (2011), and
- The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato (2013). And new this March, 2016:
- Concrete Economics, by Stephen Cohen and Bradford DeLong and American Amnesia, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson."
Source: http://evonomics.com/countries-never-thrive-without-activist-government/
Key Videos
Pages in category "P2P State Approaches"
The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 486 total.
(previous page) (next page)A
- Accountable Algorithms
- Acqua Beni Comuni Napoli
- Against the Grain
- Agenda Colaborativa de Porto Alegre
- Algorithmic Regulation
- Alternatives to the Market and the State
- Althing
- Anatomy of Revolution
- Andean Social Movements and the Refounding of the State
- Anti-Statist Traditions Within Marxism
- Asset Transfer
- Assurance Commons
- Austro-American Group Struggle Tradition
B
- Balaji Srinivasan on the Emerging Network State
- Before the State
- Beyond State Capitalism
- Beyond the Technological Revolution
- Bioregional Democracy
- Bioregional State
- Bitcoin and the State
- Bitcoin Cannot Serve the Necessary Function of Networked Public Money
- BitNation
- Blockchain as an Alternative Institutional System to the State
- Blockchain Government
- Blockchain-Based Government
- Bologna as a City of Collaboration
- Brazilian Local Development Community Banks
- Brian Miller on the Self-Made Myth
- Brickstarter
- British Digital Cooperative
- Bruce Yandle on the Tragedy of the Commons and the Implications for Environmental Regulation
- Brutocracy
- Building Public Capabilities Post-Covid - France
C
- Cape Light Compact
- Case for New Models of Public Ownership
- Causa en Común
- Central Planning
- Chris Marsden and Ian Brown on Better Regulation in the Information Age
- Cities as Commons
- Citizen Central Banking
- Citizen-Centered Governance
- Citizen-Centric Perspective on New Government Models for Europe after 2030
- Civic Councils
- Civic Crowdfunding
- Civic Democratic Institution
- Civic eState Network
- CivicSponsor
- Civil Power and the Partner State
- Civil Regulation
- Civilization Practice Centers - China
- Civilizing the State
- Clay Shirky on How the Internet Will Transform Government
- Climate Change and the State
- Cloud Country
- Co-Creative Labor, Productive Democracy and the Partner State
- Co-op Models for the Production of Health and Social Services
- Co-Production and New Public Governance in Europe
- Co-Production of Public Services
- Co-Production Wales
- Collaborative Design, Open Innovation and Public Policy
- Collaborative Planning
- Collaborative Rationality for Public Policy
- Commodity Ecology Institutions
- Common Property vs Public Property
- Commoner State
- Commonification of Public Services
- Commonification of Water Services
- Commons - Regulation
- Commons Beyond Market and State
- Commons Enabling Infrastructures
- Commons Institutional Gap
- Commons Movements and Progressive Governments as Dual Power
- Commons State
- Commons Transition Plan (FLOK version)
- Commons-Based Model for Energy Production
- Commons-Based Multilateralism
- Commons-Public Partnerships
- Commonwealth of Networks
- Communal Councils
- Communal State
- Community Choice Energy Aggregation
- Community Knowledge Hub for Libraries
- Community Managed Libraries
- Community, State, and the Question of Social Evolution
- Conception of Value in Community Economies
- Conceptual Components of Global Commons
- Conflict Theories
- Conservative Nanny State
- Contract State
- Cooperative Approaches to Energy, Water and Rail
- Cooperative Commonwealth and the Partner State
- Critique of One-Sided Capitalist Contracts
- Crowdsourcing the Public Participation Process for Planning Projects
- Cryptoeconomic Systems as Institutions with Social and Algorithmic Governance Feedback Loops
- Currencies, Governments, and the Commons
- Cybernetic Planning
- Cybernetic Revolutionaries
- Cybernetic Self-Management
- Cybernetic State
- Cybersyn
D
- Dale Carrico on the Democratization of the State as a Necessary Tool Against Social Violence
- David Ronfeldt in Dialogue with the Partner State Concept
- David Ronfeldt on the Assurance Commons
- David Ronfeldt on the Chamber of the Commons
- Decentralization, Popular Democracy and Governance from Below in Bolivia
- Decentralized Borderless Virtual Nations
- Decentrally Planned Economy
- Declining Rate of Profit
- Decolonization and State Refounding in Ecuador
- Deep History of the Earliest States
- Deep State
- Democratically Accountable Ownership Model for Health and Care Services
- Demoradical Regulation
- Deskilling of the State
- Desktop Regulatory State
- Digital Commons as Drivers of Sovereignty
- Digital Public Assets
- Distributist Approach to the State
- Diversifying Public Ownership for Participation and Social Empowerment
- Dooyeweerd's Christian Philosophical Approach to the State and Civil Society
E
- E-Estonia
- EARN Inter-Nation Conference 2018
- Economics and the Near-Death Experience of Democratic Governance
- Ecopolitical Nation
- Electronic Government as a Service
- Ellen Brown on Public Banking
- Empire of Disorder
- Enacting Community Economies Within a Welfare State
- Enclosures of Essential Medicines
- Endowment Zones
- English Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 as Institutional Phase Transition
- Entrepreneurial State
- Erik Olin Wright on the Role of the State, the Market and Civil Society
- EU as Collaborative State
- Evolution of the Means of Destruction
- Evolutionary Pathways to Statehood
- Extitutional Processes
F
- Felix Stalder on Public vs Commons Resources
- Financial Extraction and the Global South
- Finnish Open Ministry Platform
- FLOK Society Project
- Formal Rules for a Society Neutral Among Communities
- Forms of Economic Organization
- Fostering New Governance through Participatory Coordination and Communalism
- Four Ages of Organization
- Four TIMN Forms Compared
- Framework for European Crowdfunding
- Francis Fukuyama on the Origins of the State
- Free Software in the Public Sector - WOS 2004
- Froide
- From Nomadism to Empire to Capitalist Nation-States
- Future of the Commons Beyond Market Failure and Government Regulation
G
- German Sociological Libertarianism
- Global Auction of Public Assets
- Global Public Goods
- Global Race To Reinvent the State
- Governance Across Borders
- Governance Futures Lab
- Governance Report
- Governance Types
- Government 2.0 Initiatives
- Government as Platform
- Government Innovation Labs Directory
- Government Support for Coworking
- Government Support for the Commons
- Government Support for User Innovation
- Green State
- Guild and State
H
- Health and Healthcare Institutions as Commons
- Hegemony
- Hilary Wainwright
- History and Development of the State
- History and Future of Civic Humanity
- History of the State
- Hollow State
- How Globalization and the Network State Transform the Insights of Poulantzas on the State
- How Neoliberal Informationalism Succeeded in Increasingly Managing Complexity
- How the Italian Juridical Experience with the Commons Created a New Dimension of the State as a Non-Sovereign State-Community Open to All
- How to Disarticulate the State
- Human-Machine-Ecological Deep Growth
- Hybrid Vigor Projects
I
- Ibn Khaldun on Empire as a State Form
- Ideology and the Evolution of Vital Institutions
- Immanuel Wallerstein on Going Beyond the State as Unit of Analysis
- Imperio-Genesis
- Imperium
- Innovation State
- Inquiry into the Sovereignty of the State in the West
- Institutions
- Integrative Public Governance
- Intellectual History of the Modern State
- International Association for Public Participation
- International Law of the Sea as Public Domain versus Private Commodity
- Internet and the End of Monetary Sovereignty
- Investigating Capitalist State Power
- Istvan Meszaros on the State and Civil Society