View source for Three Things We Need to Succeed in P2P Politics



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Excerpted from [http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/is-the-p2p-approach-utopian/2010/05/17]:


Michel Bauwens:

"The way I see it, we need three elements to succeed.

First, we need to construct the alternatives. I want to insist that this is not a reactionary struggle for say, pure relocalization, or small utopian communities, like the utopian socialists of the 19th century, what Marx called ‘dwarfish forms’. Rather we are building a new system of production which recombines an important amount of relocalization (because physical material globalization is a disaster for sustainability), but combined by a globally connected infrastructure of mutual coordination and collective learning, which can achieve a hyper-growth in human productive innovation.

At the same time, we need to build and associate with powerful social movements, that struggle against the attacks of the now ‘extreme neoliberal’ state, which attacks the very social fabric of society to save the predatory financial system. But for such social movements, it is not sufficient just to say no, and have a politics of refusal, and it is certainly not sufficient to return to socialist statist approaches, but they need an awareness of the alternative social and productive infrastructures that need to be strengthened in order to have a better alternative.

Finally, we need a political extension, one that, based on a commons-oriented policy framework, and a push towards replacing the corporate welfare state with a Partner State, that institutes commonfare (Andrea Fumagalli) and retakes control of the ‘commanding heights of the economy’, now in the hands of the destructive predatory factions that have taken control of the market states (as proposed by Nick Dyer-Whiteford).

It is the combination of constructive open communities, mobilized social movements, and a political extension of the power of both, in a grand alliance of the commons, which will be necessary to turn the maturation of open practices and infrastructures, into the necessary phase transition that can save us from the coming barbarisms."


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