Michel Bauwens on the Shift Towards a New Post-Capitalist Value Regime

Video via https://youtu.be/CltUp19s9lc

Lecture for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University ; intro by Yochai Benkler

Description

"Every 500 years or so, European civilization and now world civilization, has been rocked by fundamental shifts in its value regime, in which the rules of the game for acquiring wealth and livelihoods have dramatically changed. Following Benkler's seminal Wealth of Networks, which first identifies peer production, the P2P Foundation has collated a vast amount of empirical evidence of newly emerging value practices, which exist in a uneasy relationship with the dominant political economy, and of which some authors claim, like Jeremy Rifkin and Paul Mason, that it augurs a fundamental shift. What would be the conditions for this new regime to become autonomous and even dominant, and what are the signs of it happening? As context, we will be using the Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks framework of David Ronfeldt, the Relational Grammar of Alan Page Fiske, and the evolution of modes of exchange as described by Kojin Karatani in The Structure of World History. We will argue that there is consistent evidence that the structural crises of the dominant political economy is leading to responses that are prefigurative of a new value regime, of which the seed forms can be clearly discerned."

(https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/05/Bauwens)

Discussion

Excerpted from the introduction by Yochai Benkler:

"It’s a real pleasure to welcome Michel Bauwens to the Berkman Luncheon Series. We first met about a decade ago in Budapest, at a re:activism conference that brought together people exploring how the world is changing.

Michel is perhaps the most active and wide-ranging thinker on peer production and the commons—how these forms can reshape our economies and societies. He is the founder and director of the P2P Foundation, which recently received an award from Ars Electronica for its work in online communities.

Currently, he’s spending a semester at the Havens Center at the University of Wisconsin, a key home for “real utopian” thought—radical yet grounded visions of how life could genuinely be different, inspired by the work of Erik Olin Wright.

Importantly, Michel embodies the principles he studies. Rather than working through traditional academic or nonprofit channels, he has cultivated a global, networked intellectual and activist presence—collaborating with people across borders who care about cooperation and the commons.

Today, he’s here to share how these practices we observe “on the ground” might point toward a genuine alternative to capitalism as we’ve known it in the late 20th and early 21st centuries."