Pulsation of the Commons

Source

* Article: Placing the Commons in a Temporal Framework: The Commons as a Planetary Regeneration Mechanism. By Michel Bauwens and Jose Ramos.

URL = google doc version

Discussion

The general idea of this concept is that human history evolves in recurring patterns, whereby more extractive/degradative phases of human history, driven by competitive state elites, are followed by regenerative phases, during which the more strategic roles of the commons revives.

Human history starts with kin-ship based and nomadic tribal forms of organisation, which gradually led to the earlier forms of non-state agriculture, sedentarisation and urbanism (10,000 BCE ?). Around 5,000 BCE, we start seeing the earliest signs of state formation, which means the land has to be exploited in order to sustain a ruling class, specialized non-material producing groups of people such as priests, non-agricultural professions and the like. This sets in motion a spiral-like process of material and cultural development that involves the greater scale of political units. Mark Whitaker ususally distinguishes the processes of state formation and expansion as 'slow ecological revolutions', which gradually exhaust their core areas (over-use and degradation of soils around the center), and creates ecological degradation, which affects the health and prosperity of the local population. This then creates counter-movements, which take a religious-cultural-ideological form, and ushers in periods of 'fast ecological revolutions'. Once the effects of these revolutions consolidate, a new elite can undertake new phases of scale expansion and expanded state formation, using elements of these ideological reforms, to establish new rationales for the social order.

This has effects in terms of identity formation as well. People are originally attached to their local kinship, and the 'ethno-botanical' identity of their regions, but these are disrupted by the effects of state formation, requiring new forms of expanded identity which will be more humano-centric. Many of the counter-cultural movements aim to do precisely that, to achieve a deeper humano-centric identity, which is critical of the identity limitations of existing state forms.

Mark Whitaker describes one such process. The earlierst state formation originates with the Zhou kingdom, which establishes a state ideology in favour of the royal bloodline. But as the state expands, and as the core gets exhausted, the artistocratic bloodlines of peripheral zones become stronger than the core, until the system implodes in various statelets, constantly at war with themselves. Confucianism emerges, seeking a new identity in a conscious citizenship, that no longer is based on bloodlines but on personal virtue. It is an elitist but counter-cultural movement which appeals to city-based professionals (the 'shi') and the declassed Zhou aristocrats. A few centuries later, purged from its revolutionary aspects, it becomes the basis of an expanded state formation. This is how Mark Whitaker, critically evaluating the role of Karl Jaspers, sees the role of the axial religions, which everywhere set the basis of more human-centric identities. Whitaker stresses that accompagnying the humano-centric identities, also come environmental ideologies, which seeks to protect local ecological balance and human health. So both concepts are fused in the counter-cultural 'fast ecological revolutions', with the difference that the local is no longer identified with bloodlines and kinship, but is expanded to the inhabitants of a region.

My own hypothesis adds to these cyclical patterns by adding attention to the commons. The basic idea is that state formation and merchant pressures for profit tend to degradative outcomes and to eventual exhaustion of the territories of the states. The process is therefore accompanied by a pattern of decentralisation-recentralistion-decentralisation. In the regenerative periods, the role of commoning and the commons, i.e. co-producting and protecting local resources over the long run, take a more important center stage.

Peter Turchin and others have demonstrated how this pulsation occurs regularly in agricultural type civilisations. Capitalism however, has suppressed this pattern from the 16th cy onwards, because as the first truly global system, it had access to frontier areas, which could overcome temporary setbacks due to the exhaustion of certain areas. But the result is that the earth is now full, and that global resources are over-used in a systematic manner everywhere on the planet. We are now facing a downward spiral due to this global exhaustion, and we see the same reactive pattern occuring, for the moment primarily in the Western countries.

One reaction pattern, which we identify with the political right, involves a focus on ethno-national identities, and a desire to reinstate the primacy of the nation-state form and popular sovereignity, and it is specifically hostile to 'globalism'. The danger of this reaction in the current conjuncture is the heightened tension between nation-states, engaged in zero-sum games for access to ever-more scarce material resources. This form of social movement is gaining popular support, especially amongst the working classes in the materially productive sector (industrial workers, rural population, small businesses). This is a return to more ingroup-outgroup patterns.

The two other reaction patterns are identified on the left of the political spectrum. One is the traditional urban populism, that used to be associated with the originally world-centric socialist movement, which sought the unity of all working people in the world as its identity core, but has become associated with the urban populations within a nation-state setting. Think of Sanders and Corbyn. These forces are now attached to nation-state centric welfare policies, with a stronger ecological identity (Green New Deal). This group is however nowadays more associated with the service sector and cognitive sectors of the urban population and is under pressure from the next reaction pattern of identity politics. The more they associate with this new pattern, the more their old core of working class voters move to the ethno-nationalist camp.

The other reaction pattern is that of the identitarian 'left'. This movement focuses on the reallocation of resources within nation-states, based on group identity markers, advocates a caste-like social structure, with strong elements of segregation between groups and scapegoating of human groups based on their biological markers. This group also advocates a zero-sum competition game between human groups, but who are no longer in any way identified by their locality, only by their physical markers, which are seen to be associated with identity formation.

Note that the first two groups described here don't have any specific notion of the commons, and the second group makes commoning actively impossible through its stresses on the hierarchisation of resource allocation, as well as the rejection of the free personhood that is necessary for the new form of commons, that is based on the peer to peer association of equals.

So what I want to do here, in a very short space, is to advocate for a renewed human-centric view, that is based on a synthesis of the local and the global. This movement recognizes that what is needed for a new 'fast ecological revolution', is both a return to the local, in the form of bioregional management of local production for human needs within planetary boundaries, but it also stresses that such a societal form would be commons-centric, since preserving resources for the longer term, is now an absolute priority. It recognizes that every activity is cosmo-local, i.e. concerned with preserving resources but also with access to globally produced knowledge commons. This new social logic of networked citizenship means that identity formation is contributory and linked to common social objects that created shared passion, recognition and identity. This movement recognizes that territorial management is a necessity that won't disappear, at local, bioregional and even nation-state levels, but that is must be augmented with the new identity that comes from global cultural/technical cooperation. This is expressed by the co-construction of trans-national and trans-local institutions, that co-exist with the territorial level of governance, and must be meshed in a new cosmo-local order. This movement has the potential to be attractive to both left and right nation-state centered movement, but adds as core concern the expansion of that identity through the construction of cosmo-local commons. And that movement, because it is based on the diversity and inclusion of all contributions, regardless of biological markers, can give new hope for the expression of varied identities, but which are no longer seen as engaged in a zero sum game.