Henk Vandaele on the Work of Gustav Landauer and Michel Bauwens Compared

Source

* Article: BIBLIOGRAFISCH ESSAY DE RELEVANTIE VAN GUSTAV LANDAUER (1870-1919).Henk Vandaele. VABB-SHW Volume 33 (2020) Nummer 4, p. 287

Discussion

Henk Vandaele:

"Bauwens, and the new commons

When Boehm stated that he sees a future in craftsmanship, I found this difficult to place. It would be un-Landauerian to hope that we can undo three hundred years of modern technologization. History imposes itself, after all—although not totally, and here lies an opportunity.

While reading Landauer's libertarian and federalist work, I kept thinking of Michel Bauwens' book Saving the World: Towards a Post-Capitalist Society with Peer-to-Peer. In this work, Bauwens points out how contemporary digitalization can break through the modern tendency toward centralization. The concept of peer-to-peer comes from the computer world. It stands for a network of computers that function without a central server. Through peer-to-peer networks, users can find each other as 'equals' and in 'freedom,' share information and knowledge, and develop new applications as a group. These are open networks that seek a solution for a concrete problem, and this happens outside traditional organizations such as companies, NGOs, and government institutions. The strength of Bauwens' work is that he scales up the digital P2P model to politics. He too advocates for thorough federalization and recognition of different forms of cooperation at different levels, each with their specific purpose and their relational autonomy. Thus the state has its domain, but so does the neighborhood, the community, the central city... and in organizing these political structures, digitalization presents an opportunity. An old medieval concept that gains new strength in this digital dynamic is 'the commons'—as a local political category.

Bauwens' work situates itself in a growing current of thinkers who point to a certain ideology regarding Big Tech. This ideology holds that we as humans are at the mercy of the super-algorithms of Silicon Valley, that we are victims of the totally compelling notifications on our smartphone—implicitly stating that digitalization imposes itself completely. In this way, more power is attributed to Big Tech than is necessary. In the same slipstream, it is of course assumed that people react like computers and thus surf, swipe, click mindlessly... and in this way are a cog in one large centralist state (communist China) or one large global company (capitalist Big Tech), surveillance capitalism.

This ideology is an insult to Landauer's ontology, worldview, and image of humanity. A contemporary Landauer would state that digitalization, too, can never fully assert itself. Digital mathematical logic does not connect to reality as a continuous, never fully determined evolution. What we need, and this connects to Bauwens, is a new philosophy (of the mind). There is a need for education, a culture, a social-agogic work, a revaluation of the commons in which people can experience that they are not victims of the ever more forcefully imposing digitalization, that they can take their lives (including their digital lives) partly into their own hands. That the way Facebook programs its algorithms is also a moral and political choice. In this way, people can become aware of their topical possibilities and, in a group (or P2P), seek topical digital solutions of which they are co-owners. Perhaps you could also call this craftsmanship. Not that every village must once again have its medieval cartwright. Rather, we can think of a local digital craftsman who, for example, by means of a 3D printer, from globally shared and collectively managed knowledge, creates a solution for a local problem. You can think of a local mobility app that is also locally managed. Such an approach breaks with the utopian totalizing idea that (1) digitalization is 'the solution' to all problems and (2) all digital functions must be incorporated into one global system. Perhaps there is a greater need for a topical technology, based on a phenomenological-relational philosophy—with a balanced or relevant equilibrium between the local and the global.

Does this bring us to the political discussion of the coming century? Will there be a revaluation of 'the local'? Classical modern globalization is over. The only question is how we will understand this local? Which spirit is necessary and meaningful here? A politics that totalizes the local, such as the resurgent nationalism, and thus ultimately in turn kills the spirit once again? Such an evolution is possible. Then the anti-relational forces of destruction take over. Brexit is an example. Or will we witness a politics in which the revaluation of the local stands in relation (and openness) with the global? Perhaps such a politics requires a philosophy in which people learn to see how complex, layered, or multiple their reality is. This becomes a huge pedagogical and political challenge. How to develop an education that gives space to the 'humanities'? How to develop a legal, economic, and social framework that makes local communities or commons possible? "But one day," Landauer writes, "people will realize that socialism does not mean the expression of something new but the discovery of something that has long existed. As soon as the right building blocks have been found, the right builders will also be found." There is a need for a rediscovery of the relational human.

I conclude with a final quote. "If we want society, then we must build it, then we must put it into practice. SOCIETY IS A SOCIETY OF SOCIETIES OF SOCIETIES; A LEAGUE OF LEAGUES OF LEAGUES; A COMMONWEALTH OF COMMUNITIES OF COMMUNITIES; A REPUBLIC OF REPUBLICS OF REPUBLICS. There alone is freedom and order, there alone is spirit; a spirit that is independence and community, connection and independence."