[p2p-research] Berardi essay

[Michel Bauwens]

This is indeed a very interesting and challenging text.

Thanks Andy for making these important points.

You will probably realize that what you describe below, is exatly what you
describe in the last paragraph. I sometimes use the concept of common-ism to
make sure it can'be be associated with totalitarian experiments of the past,
but even that is more loaded than peer to peer. But an important point is
not to see it as another totality, as a totalirian wish for something that
obliterates the totality of other social forms.

Then you challenge the timing.

This is a very important point. Indeed, I do not believe that is the end
game yet, and am more closely aligned wth Immanuel Wallerstein's
expectations.

Yes, ulitmately, an infinite growth system is condemned to its own
destruction and that of the world on which it operaties, as cancer does. and
yes, global warming is a sign that the endgame is in sight.

However, I do believe that we have one more upswing of a long wave in sight.
More than that, I believe that the implicit integration of p2p-inspired
policies that is being crystallized out of various debates, is the very seed
of such a long wave. Within that long wave, the dynamics in para one will
have the historical opportunity to achieve parity level.

I'm copying my own commentary on this below.

But first, another important point:

- is the alliance between creative labour and sectors of capital really
broken? I don't think it is, and that netarchical capital has congruent
interests with creative labour, both need each other for the new long wave
to kick in, and this will be the basis of the new social contract of the new
'accumulation engine' (see below)

One more thing: Bifo crimininalizes the whole ruling class. I think that's
extraordinarily counterproductive. Of course, yes, this system is destroying
the biosphere and the climate, and complicit in a expropriation of labour to
an unprecedented level as well as deep poverty, and also relies on massive
fraud. But they are playing a system just like most of us are doing, and
many of them have an interest in not destroying their own lives and
families. Think of our very own Ryan, who calls himself neoliberal and likes
markets, or Kevin. This shows the enormous complexity and variation of
people whether they support or oppose the current paradigm wholly or in part
...

Antagonism may be inevitable, but we have to take great care in identifying
our allies and enemies. Bifo has a point though about physical
demonstrations of power. Barring total opposition from the great mass of
people (the likes of which brought down the Soviet system of oppression),
the treshold is now much higher than in the past, as they have indeed
learned to contain them. So in this historical juncture, it is the positive
realization and internetwork of the counter-logic, which is much more
important, and in this context, building alliances around all the concrete
advances that we need.

Similarly, I object to the affirmation that peoples lives are dead, that all
affect has been commodified etc ... Without denying the moral crisis caused
by consumer capitalism, people are still loving and sharing, building their
lives and realizing many dreams, and this positive energy can be tapped.

Michel

here is the excerpt on the temporality of change:


The following is a response to a contribution of Andreas Wittel on our p2p
research list, an update of our previous comment on ‘peer money as solution
for Sudden System
Stop<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/peer-money-as-the-solution-for-sudden-system-stock/2009/05/14>‘,
and finally an expanded commentary on the following essay:

*Badalian L., Krivorotov V., “Technological shift and the rise of a new
finance system: the market-pendulum model”, European Journal of Economic and
Social Systems, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2008, p. 231-264.*

Here are my own thoughts, on how ‘p2p’ is connected with such a transition
to a new ‘long wave of development’:

The authors continue the work on understanding ‘long waves’, pioneered by
Kondratieff, continued by Schumpeter and recently summarized and updated by
Carlota Perez.

The important thing is this, every long wave of appr. 50-60 years has been
based on a combination of 1) a new form of energy (f.e. the UK domination =
coal, the US domination = oil); 2) some radical technological innovations
(no more than 3 according to the authors); 3) a new ‘hyperproductive’ way to
‘exploit the territory’; and 4) an appropriate financial system. An
important insight in the latter, is that what enables growth in a first
phase, becomes an unproductive burden in the second declining phase of the
wave.

Each wave has been dominated by a particular great power as well. And each
wave ends with a Systemic Sudden Stop (3S), like the one we are in now. In
addition, since each transition needed a war, as this seems impossible and
suicidal today, it will probably the global struggle against the climate
change catastrophes that will mobilize the global energies.

So we have to think, what new combination is in the works now?

For energy, in the context of Peak Oil, it can only be renewable energies,
like solar and wind etc… What kind of new technologies are available:
essentially it will be based on the global internetworking, augmented by
what it enables (bio, nano, etc..). That much is clear, but then the
question is: how can we more efficiently ‘exploit the territory’.

What we will loose in terms of ‘gross power’ that we had with oil, will have
to be compensated by IT-generated greater precision, in the application of
that power, once we have renewables.* In other words, the engine of growth
will be the systematic integration of artificial and human intelligence in
our productive activities.*

They also say that a post-3S transition, the cost of the transition is to
high for the market and requires state intervention.

So now my take on this. What global internetworking enables is open and
global design communities. This means that information is no longer
physically constrained, but can flow ‘anywhere’, and this is crucial, be
used by local communities. Second, the same technological developments lead
to more precision manufacturing, that can be done in a distributed fashion.
This means again, that the cost of capital is dramatically declining and
becomes affordable for the ‘periphery’. Again this empowers local
communities. Finally on the energy level, distributed energy machinery can
also empower the local communities. And finally there is the new financial
system, and here is where the peer money movements come in, to create flows
of financing right where they are needed, and not just in the unproductive
casino capitalism that enriched the current oligarchy.

Each long wave is also marked by a changing of the guard in the kind of
institutions and the kind of ruling elite. My expectation is that the
current financial oligarchy, will be replaced by the netarchical
capitalists, i.e. those that understand, enable, and ‘exploit’, the new open
business models and participative modes of production.

Each wave was also based on more inclusion, for example the integration of
labour in the Fordist system was much broader than in the 19th Smithian
system, BUT, in the declining phase, the social contract breaks down and
this is what Richard Wolff
described<http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=139>as
what happened under the neoliberal financial system.

So:

- renewable distributed energy

- distributed manufacturing (linked to much more distributed ownership
modes)

- an organic farming revolution based on high info input instead of high
petrochemical input

- new stakeholder oriented global institutions

- a new elite of netarchical capitalists

- a new social contract based on broader inclusivity that will be beneficial
to global open design communities

- a new financial system, based on a redesign of the monetary system, a
diversity of localized and affinity-based community currencies, a new credit
commons and hopefully: a basic income (nobody by the way is suggesting
‘tinkering’ on that level, it needs a radical reformation)

- a geographic shift to the periphery, i.e. East Asia as the newly dominant
power of the next ascending wave

Many of the above things are strongly related to what we talk about under
the name of ‘p2p’ or distribution. I don’t expect this to be dominant, but I
expect that the new social contract will have to accept a major upgrade of
inclusion to achieve its hyperproductive aims, while in a later stage, a
phase transition may occur to a fuller p2p regime.

A crucial aspect is the combination of global open design and knowledge
communities, to the more distributed modes of precision manufacturing, which
because of their more distributed aspects (much lower capital requirements),
are favourable to the self-aggregation of smaller businesses, which could be
organized on a new basis (cooperatives, solidarity economics, etc…).

But can all this be tackled by ‘p2p alone’? Andreas Wittel doubts rightfully
that this can be done.

I think it needs a combination of three movements:

- the specific p2p movement for open and free exchange of innovation
(tackling artificial scarcity in innovation)

- the environmental movement, tackling the negative externalities creating
biospheric destruction (i.e. fighting the pseudo-abundance on which the
current system is based)

- the social justice movement (labour, agricultural, knowledge workers and
precariat), fighting for inclusion and against the current oligarchic
arrangements

It is the combination of these 3 social movements, and their mutual
interpenetration and infusion, which can have the necessary force to obtain
change and a new more favourable and inclusionary social contract, in
combination with the efforts of the netarchical capitalists. This sector of
capital is both friend and foe, depending on specific contexts, but I would
suggest that such an alliance is crucial for success. They are going to be
at the core of the next ‘accumulation engine’ (the concept used by the
authors above to denote the full integrated system).

These 3 movements need each other, and need to be fused in one global
effort. They can’t win without p2p, and ‘p2p’ can’t win without them.

None of the above is automatic, and the transition to a new ascending phase
is complicated by the global energy and climate crisis, but it has a
realistic chance of being achieved, which also depends on us, as the p2p
meme is a crucial variable in the success of that transition.



On 5/23/09, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Actually I think it's very clear.  Though, you have to have read Deleuze
> and Guattari to make sense of his use of "singularity".
>
> It's similar to Hakim Bey, or Colin Ward:  "communism" is the proliferation
> of free activity through difference, in which spaces of otherness involving
> intense, non-replicable connections occur at many localised sites, producing
> a world which is (locally) no longer subordinate to the logic of capital.
> As these spaces are also self-organised, self-reproducing, networked and
> produce reconnection in the ecological, social and psychological fields,
> they are generative of other ways of being - specifically, of inclusive
> affinity-networks without hierarchy.
>
> I found a lot of the article inspiring, but I'd challenge three things.
>
> 1)  can we really be sure this is the final crisis?  Marxism seems to find
> a "final crisis" every few decades - capitalism wasn't supposed to survive
> the First World War, the Second World War, the 70s crash, and the current
> reference to ecological disaster was formerly focused on the threat of
> fascism, then the threat of nuclear war...  If the system is going to get
> out of the crisis, it would have to be by doing something as yet unknown,
> unpredictable and new.  Which is how it got out of the other crises (e.g.
> Keynesianisn after WW2).  But, by definition we cannot know if it is capable
> of doing something as yet unknown, unpredictable and new.  The thesis of
> final crisis is based on the observed capabilities and actions of the
> system, whereas the possibility of systemic survival is based on the
> unknown, as is the possibility of antisystemic transformation.
>
> 2)  why has Bifo suddenly become so conflict-averse?  Why avoid
> confrontation with the conformist majority and the state?  The original
> hypothesis of autonomism - the necessity to vigorously defend spaces of
> autonomy to aid their proliferation - has never been falsified; it seems
> that, as autonomism got its fingers burned in the crackdown in Italy, it
> lost the courage of its convictions.  (That, and a lot of them became
> academics).
>
> 3)  there is a weird attachment to ideas of "general intellect" and
> "cognitive labour" - modern-day correlates of the old Marxist working-class
> - at the same time that resistance is theorised as minoritarian and as
> anti-conformist.  Why is the emergence of proliferating difference in
> radical opposition to the system deemed to have anything whatsoever to do
> with forms of production?  I think this is a shadow of aufhebung, the
> "passage through", the gravedigger created by the system itself, reasserting
> itself even as aufhebung is explicitly rejected.  Rather, I would argue that
> alternatives and resistance emerge from the "stars that fall out as the
> system tightens its grip", the emergence of entire strata of people outside
> the dominant system or marginal to it / alienated from it, hence the figures
> of the autonomous, the excluded and the indigenous (all of which are aspects
> of the "social principle" or affinity-network form as alternative to
> capitalism).
>
> bw
> Andy
>
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>
>


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