Introduction to the Autobiography of Michel Bauwens
Context
Michel Bauwens:
William Kelly has been instrumental in getting a autobiography done, by interviewing Michel Bauwens over the course of a dozen online sessions and then transcribing these interviews. Here is his assessment of the work done. Huge thanks also for the further editorial assistance of Jan Krikke.
Jan Krikke writes:
"I've been assisting Michel Bauwen with his forthcoming autobiography. Michel is the founder of the P2P Foundation and one of the world's leading thinkers on the Commons. The book is based on interviews with another dear friend, William (Bill) Kelly, former lecturer of culture studies at UCLA. Michel's life is a magnificent intellectual and philosophical journey.
Bill writes in the Introduction:
"There is much to admire about the person who comes alive in these pages: the sheer brilliance of his mind and the depth and breadth of his ideas, his great energy and persistence in pursuing his ideals, his ability to explain not just his concepts and vision but where they come from, and his skill in facing the challenges of founding and then leading a social movement. I have experienced a level of intellectual excitement and discovery that I have rarely felt.... This book of interviews provides an accessible, although necessarily truncated introduction to Michel’s ideas. But it does much more. The autobiographical reflections are notable for their contribution to our understanding of ourselves, the global civilization in which we live, and the relation between individual and society."
The editing of the manuscript is nearing the finish line, but a sneak preview chapter is available on the P2P Foundation website [link]."
Text
William Kelly:
"After interviewing Michel Bauwens and editing the interviews, I would like to discuss this book’s significance. There is much to admire about the person who comes alive in these pages: the sheer brilliance of his mind and the depth and breadth of his ideas, his great energy and persistence in pursuing his ideals, his ability to explain not just his concepts and vision but where they come from, and his skill in facing the challenges of founding and then leading a social movement. I have experienced a level of intellectual excitement and discovery that I have rarely felt. And how could he speak so articulately without preparation on whatever subject I asked him and with so much insight? Surprisingly, I almost never had to ask for clarification or greater elaboration and very little editing was required. Remember, too, that these interviews almost always took place after he had put in a day of non-stop activity for over 12 hours!
Michel is a formidable public intellectual, indefatigable activist, and far-sighted visionary. In the last interview, he warns that for the human species to survive the challenge of ecological collapse, a new global system must be established based on a postcapitalist economy. In providing the contours of this new system, he shows himself to be a master of theory and practice like Karl Marx. In fact, there are echoes of Marx in Michel’s latest book, Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto. Just as Marx realized that British factories were the harbinger of a new capitalist form of society, Michel has observed the present-day seeds of capitalism’s successor, a socioeconomic form in which production is peer-based, property relations are organized around the Commons, and resources are used in a sustainable manner.
This book of interviews provides an accessible, although necessarily truncated introduction to Michel’s ideas. But it does much more. The autobiographical reflections are notable for their contribution to our understanding of ourselves, the global civilization in which we live, and the relation between individual and society. In the process, he takes us on a tour of childhood deprivation, various quests for self-knowledge, and a business career. We also get an inside look at how an influential social movement (P2P) has come into being and flourished. His rich and varied experience and never-ending personal development contain epiphanies and much drama.
Michel interprets how, why, and under what conditions his own ideas have taken shape with genuine insight. But his skill lies not only in his ability to analyze the ways in which his working-class origins and feelings of abandonment facilitated his embrace of revolutionary Marxism and then his pursuit of self-knowledge. Equally important is his lack of attachment to his persona, a quality that makes him one of a rare breed, a reliable narrator. As he tells the story of his life, he is neither defensive about his shortcomings nor prone to exaggerate his achievements. What’s more, he doesn’t attempt to settle scores.
Michel’s interpretations of his life and thought give us some valuable keys to unlocking the secret of an individual’s ability to make history as well as be shaped by it. Having experienced very hard times as a child, Michel uses William James’s notion of “twice born” to account for how such early suffering was a catalyst for his unconventional and highly productive life. According to James, the people who have created original religions and philosophies such as Michel suffered greatly but having overcome their afflictions, they were “reborn” at a higher level of integration than those who grew up happy and lived within the approved parameters of their society. To this explanation, Michel adds Erich Neumann’s concept of centroversion. Neumann believes that in the first phase of life, the focus is on adapting to the outside world. But there comes a time when a person like Michel decides that instead of reacting to others, the world will adapt to him. That is the second phase.
We also read about the sometimes harrowing events and complex processes that were stages on his way to balance and equanimity. There was a stint in a sex commune that lifted much of his sexual and emotional repression. He also underwent therapy designed for drug addicts that put him under the most extreme conditions: blindfolded among 30 people for three days without sleep which led to hallucinations. Sampling many forms of somatic and humanistic therapies, he gained confidence and became self-determining rather than reactive. After such intense experiences, he felt the need to address the existential questions of life, finding in spirituality a more mature form of inner exploration than psychology could provide.
At the age of 42, after a successful career in business as a corporate Internet consultant and the founder of start-ups, he had a severe breakdown when everything in his life turned to dust at the same time. His recovery, followed by a second marriage and move to Thailand, was the time of his “rebirth” as he began to implement his vision of a new economic structure by building up the peer-to-peer network. Over a period of about 20 years, Michel was able to transform himself from a shy, introverted, weak, insecure, passive-aggressive, conflict-avoiding, beta male to a charismatic leader and visionary.
Looking back over his life, Michel sees his development from revolutionary activist to seeker of inner transformation and then to leader of a social movement as parallel to the historical changes occurring in the West over the same period. He precisely and persuasively fits his own journey into that of the larger society. As the neoliberal social contract took root in the 1980s, the welfare state was rolled back and the working-class was sacrificed. In return, the capitalist class was willing to expand rights for women, racial minorities, and eventually gay people while youth were given greater cultural freedom. Such political shifts reflected a turning inward to identity issues after the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But Michel holds that this social contract is clearly unworkable at present due to rising inequality, environmental threats, and a loss of meaning; therefore, a new compact must be brought into being in which economic relations are more horizontal than hierarchical and the Commons rather than capital ultimately becomes the source of ownership and property. In other words, the time is ripe for renewed social engagement, even though Marxism no longer serves as the central oppositional narrative.
Michel’s solid and refined understanding of the historical and cultural character of the West provides the floor for his strategies to promote a new global system. Based on exemplary sources, he outlines the history of child abuse and how it is only recently that a truly collaborative culture could come into existence in the West. Equally striking is his account of the origins of Christianity in a proletarian movement, its later institutionalization and loss of prophetic qualities, and then the invention of productivity by the monks in medieval times. And to take us through modern times, he provides an account of the development of capitalism that serves as a reference point for the growth of the Commons and peer production in our era.
But he doesn’t restrict his historical and cultural exploration to the West inasmuch as he also comes to terms with the character of Eastern societies. His attempt to grasp the differences between East and West has had a profound impact on his own outlook and the choices he has made in his life. In this respect, Keith Chandler’s Beyond Civilization played an outsized part. According to Chandler, chaos is viewed as negative in the West and the role of God is to create order from chaos. Since people are so indebted to this supreme being, they must live in accordance with divine rules and assist in the work of creation by making the world more ordered, that is, more just. In the East, the world of order is the world of illusion. The ideal is to remove the self from the world and to go beyond the self by not identifying with emotions or thoughts. This move away from an ordered and diverse world leads to nirvana where unity or emptiness alone exists. What Michel takes away from Chandler’s portrait is that only the West has placed an emphasis on social transformation.
Although Michel has lived in Thailand for much of the past twenty years and for a few years studied and practiced Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, Daoism, and Zen, he came to resolutely affirm his commitment to Western Enlightenment values of human emancipation and rational critique. After he crashed psychologically, he realized that only social engagement would restore his energy, vitality, and zest for life. This realization accelerated his journey to P2P, since he could reconcile himself with his own Western heritage. Michel’s account of his creation and nurturing of the P2P movement strikes a major chord. We learn what made it possible, how it came about, and the reasons for its success. Maybe the most intriguing part is his discussion of his personal qualities and characteristics and how they helped him to make P2P what it is. The catalyst for him was the breakdown, his ordeal by fire, which led him to get serious about finding his life’s purpose. Yet, he could never have become a leader who acts upon rather than is acted upon by his surroundings without emotional maturity, the fruit of his long psychological and spiritual quests. This emotional intelligence likewise has enabled him to function as the P2P arbiter so that this rather diffuse network can move forward.
Another explanation for Michel’s effectiveness as a leader is his abundant experience in many different life worlds. He was a member of a revolutionary organization (Marxist) and a government organization (USIA), a creator of start-ups, a player in large and small businesses, a student of technology and technological change, and a seeker of wisdom through radical therapies and both Eastern and Western spirituality. Once he got to the heart of each path, he critiqued it, absorbed what was of value, and moved on. For example, his dissection of corporate work conditions, hierarchy, and how economic value is created enabled him to become clearer as to the requirements of a new type of economy. But it took more than personal qualities to get his show rolling. Michel is a master at efficiently and effectively gathering, processing, and spreading information. P2P is the product of his thorough and systematic approach to knowledge-building plus the methodology of vision logic that he gained from Ken Wilber. Using vision logic, he takes current perspectives and organizes them into a system. By assembling the main viewpoints on a particular issue, he shines greater light on it while adding to our knowledge. Vision logic is accompanied by a commitment to pluralism, and Michel has always been open to examining varied information sources in order to understand them rather than ignoring the ideas with which he disagrees. By making the impressive results of his knowledge-building enterprise available on the Internet, he was able to attract collaborators as well as clients. It must be added, though, that success did not come easily, and he describes the many difficulties, financial and otherwise, that he had to face during the early days of his P2P activities.
In response to my question as to the reasons for the positive response in Europe to P2P, he described the career of the European left from its origins at the time of the French revolution to the present day. After the failure of the May 1968 movement and the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, the European left was in disarray. There was pessimism in the air and left-wing intellectuals influenced by postmodernism spoke of the impossibility of grand narratives, retreated from politics, and took residence in the universities. In this climate of defeat, Michel offered a new story that could inspire people and motivate them to act politically. The left with its promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity has been renewed in the P2P movement and other movements of a similar self-organizing character across the social order that confront our ecological and economic challenges.
Besides the astute interpretations of his life and times, his intellectual journey, and his creation and development of P2P, what captures our attention is Michel’s far-reaching analysis and provocative conclusions about the present civilizational crisis. Already, his organization has issued The Thermodynamics of Peer Production and P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival to supply guidance and examples of how to integrate planetary limits into managerial systems. Although he doesn’t want to predict how many people will perish in such a planetary transition, he points out that historical experience indicates that the numbers could be quite high . Yet, he is hopeful that mutualization and the introduction of commons-based peer production would mitigate the social chaos and then provide the economic foundation of the new global system that will emerge after the transitional period of chaos.
Identification of the engines of social change is a crucial and vexing issue for strategists like Michel who wish to move from the present global system to its postcapitalist successor. How has a new social order come into existence in the past? What has been the role of economic factors such as social relations of production? What has been the role of ideas? Michel adopts Wilber’s integral framework which allows him to sidestep the issue of whether ideas or economics play the decisive role in historical development. In Michel’s integral view, it is ideas that influence technology, and technology in turn influences culture, and culture then influences subjectivity. His claim is that ideas are a vital factor in bringing about social change as part of the feedback loop with the material world. Therefore, he is conscious of the need to coordinate intellectual creativity with practical efforts on the ground that alter material conditions.
Where I disagree with Michel is over the role of personal transformation. In P2P, the focus is on structural analysis and collective agency; as a result of this specialization of attention, inner and intersubjective change tends not to be publicly addressed. In addition, Michel does not feel qualified to address this issue on the basis of his own experience. For me, this approach reveals a weakness of the movement because I believe that benign neglect of the inner dimension makes communication pathologies within networks and communities more likely. But I am not implying that Michel has a negative attitude toward spiritually oriented thinkers, often identifying with the New Age movement in the United States, who are also radical critics of our global civilization. He recognizes the importance of tra nsformations of consciousness, but criticizes the New Age movement for mostly focusing on the inner work of individuals and for lacking a horizontal, community orientation. Michel’s political standpoint can be located within postwar European thought and contrasted with political positions more common in the United States. He has a working class background and considers class as the main source of oppression. But many on the left in the United States put their energies into combating racial and gender oppression. They do not highlight class struggle nor do they condemn identity politics for its excesses. Michel criticizes these proponents of identity politics for the divisions on the left that have weakened opposition to the status quo.
What are the distinctive accomplishments of Western civilization that can be bequeathed to the world that endures after the chaos transition period? Michel identifies himself with the Western Enlightenment and its emphasis on technological advance and progressive politics as twin sources of human emancipation. These two streams come together when Internet technology facilitates more democratic communication that supports the progressive ideals of freedom, equality, and community. An attractive feature of Michel’s thought is his groping toward ways of integrating the insights of both Enlightenment and romantic critics of our present civilization. The young Marx had already moved toward such an integration by adopting the romantic critique of industrial capitalism in his theory of worker alienation and combining it with an appreciation of technological progress and an insistence on radical social transformation. Similarly, Michel, proposes a new economy utilizing electronic technology that facilitates more democratic communication and provides meaningful work. And his championing of decentralized relations of production as well as non-alienated labor is reminiscent of the romantics who celebrated medieval craftsmanship while idealizing pre-capitalist social relations.
Since Michel’s highly pragmatic ideas on political economy can only be assessed by consulting his academic writings, it is enough to say here that his theory of “open cooperativism” is a major effort to incorporate the strengths of both capitalist and socialist economics while skirting their pitfalls. For example, by recognizing the need for complex interdependence, that is, for both individual autonomy and community, his approach avoids the excesses of both laissez-faire capitalism and bureaucratic socialism. But this does not mean that the interviews contain little of value on the subject of peer production and the Commons. For Michel informs us of the current status of peer production and Commons-type initiatives and finds two major examples of the maturity of the Commons. The first is the self-organizing social movements like Occupy, the students who have come after Greta Thunberg, and Extinction Rebellion. The second is the urban Commons of cities like Ghent, Belgium. Both of these examples offer much food for thought on the potential of peer production and the Commons.
Since the interviews nicely display Michel’s superb intellectual gifts, his contributions to the world of thought can be noted. The first is that he provides a sophisticated critique of the ideological position that race and gender are the major sources of oppression while showing the destructive consequences of current identity politics. In so doing, he supplies excellent reasons for rejecting postmodernist approaches that lead to greater social fragmentation. In addition, he uncovers the deleterious social consequences of reigning philosophies of inner transformation. His accomplishment in these cases is to point out the excesses and distortions of which many postmodern thinkers, advocates of identity politics, and spiritual practitioners have been guilty. But whether or not he shows sufficient appreciation of the ways in which they actually help us to make our way is open to question.
The second type of contribution is that Michel takes us beyond sterile arguments between the two poles of a binary opposition. He demonstrates that there is a viable third way beyond individualistic capitalism and collectivistic socialism, that of peer production. His distinction between left and right orientations concerning the circle of sympathy also enables us to get past the long-standing opposition between conservatives in the tradition of Edmund Burke and progressive thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition. Simply put, conservatives care deeply about their local communities but not so much for those outside it; progressives extend their sympathies to humanity but are less attuned to those closest to them. And we need to care about both.
Michel characterizes himself as an integrative thinker in the manner of Wilber, Gebser, Sorokin, and Aurobindo, but unlike Wilber who has aspired to a theory of everything, his own province is more modest, since he restricts himself to the techno-economic sphere. Still, he has an impressive grasp of the myriad ways in which this one sphere is related to various aspects of the social order. Because he has spent much of his life active in politics, business, and social movements, he has not elaborated his ideas to the extent of the great integrative thinkers. But he tells us that the next stage of his life may involve concentrated intellectual work. So his productivity in this realm may still take a large step forward, even though he has already formulated his central concept of Commons-based peer production as well as his historical theory of seed forms.
Michel is one of a small number of intellectuals and activists who has given transparency to his own Western heritage at the moment its very survival is at stake. He has identified the flaws in the Western project: the attempt to achieve transcendence through technology and through the limitless growth of capitalism that destroys our life-supporting environment. If we were to have a council of wise people to advise our political leaders on the steps they should take to preserve the earth and keep humanity intact, I would recommend Michel as a participant. He could assist in the design of a new techno-economic sphere that would facilitate sustainable development, greater community, a more peaceful world, and genuine equality. And with his interest in Asia, residence in Thailand, and recent activities in South Korea, he could also take part in the dialogues between Asia, the West, and other parts of the world that must occur for a consensus to emerge on the nature of our current predicament and how to address it."