[p2p-research] what to think of p2p conservatism?

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear Nikos,

just in case this could inspire you to a reply, Andy makes the argument that
conservatism cannot really become p2p,

Michel

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 9:25 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Another thought...  On the question of whether there is such a thing as
> peer-to-peer conservatism.
>
> The reason Blond cannot be peer-to-peer is his complicity with
> neototalitarianism (outlined previously).  While his aspirations aim towards
> a type of 'community' which has some horizontal aspects (as would also be
> true of Stalin!), the means to this end are fundamentally hierarchical, and
> rely on vertical forms of agency.
>
> In practice, conservatism tends not to be very 'peer-to-peer' because it
> relies on a prescriptive moral position connected to social
> authoritarianism: people are expected to conform to traditional prohibitions
> in fields such as sexual morality, to defer to 'superiors', to obey those in
> authority and so on.  However, it has also never been as single-mindedly
> vertical as some varieties of authoritarian socialism.  Conservatives such
> as Burke and Oakeshott tend to emphasise society against the state, and want
> power to be located primarily in social networks which are viewed either as
> more natural or moral than the state (expressing God's will, organic
> society, etc), or as more beneficial (social forms which persist in time are
> treated as more trustworthy responses to social problems than state 'social
> engineering' from first principles).  A consistent conservative, therefore,
> should not support totalitarian or intrusive states (though in practice
> conservatives very often weigh the benefits of authoritarianism for social
> morality as outweighing its costs for social composition - particularly if
> they take the situation to be one of social breakdown).  Tradition,
> including customary entitlements, is thus the conservative answer to the
> problem of how to limit the state.
>
> It also would not tend to support peer-to-peer, horizontal, autonomous,
> voluntary kinds of society for two reasons: firstly, conservatives tend to
> privilege time-honoured forms of social life over newly invented ones, and
> are suspicious of relations which fail to preserve tradition; secondly,
> conservatives usually favour societies which, while possibly informal and
> not state-dominated, are also deeply hierarchical.  Conservatism in its
> traditional form is connected to 'concentrated informal sanctions' (the
> power of social elites), against both the 'concentrated (or diffuse) formal
> sanctions' of various state regimes and the 'diffuse informal sanctions' of
> horizontal forms of life.  This means that conservative networks tend to be
> 'reactive' networks rather than affinity-networks; they have some node of
> identity in them which acts as an ersatz verticality.
>
> In practice, something like a 'peer-to-peer conservatism' can be observed
> empirically in the practice of societies which are diffuse and acephalous in
> social form (hence reliant on the network form), but doctrinally
> conservative - the Pathan/Pashtun of Afghanistan/Pakistan being a
> particularly apposite instance of this combination of attributes.  In
> societies of this kind, tradition can be an iron law, but only to the extent
> that it is upheld by communities in the present.  It is dependent on the
> power of interpreters of tradition whose position is rather like that of
> Clastrean chiefs; they are dependent on their 'soft' power over those who
> accept their authority, for their 'hard' power to enforce conservative
> standards against deviants.  In social terms, this leads to a degree of
> looseness - taboo practices can persist in informally tolerated ways,
> power-holders cannot accumulate unconditional power, often being turned in
> practice into mediators as much as authorities, and 'traditions' can be
> rewritten when there is widespread consensus for doing so - but its cruel
> edge should not be minimised - societies of this kind can be viciously
> repressive of certain kinds of difference (e.g. women who deviate from
> patriarchal standards), prohibited in concentrated informal ways such as
> decisions of traditional elders and village councils, but enforced in
> diffuse, 'peer-to-peer' ways which actualise such centralised power (e.g.
> codes of honour enforced violently through kinship systems).  The Taleban,
> incidentally, are an outgrowth of Pashtun society, but of its 'restive
> youth' stratum particularly, and hence combine an appeal to social
> conservatism with a sociological position rather distant from it - they
> actually have a residue of 'modernity' about them in many regards.
>
> I have also seen arguments that groups such as the Ecuadorean indigenous
> movement CONAIE should be viewed as 'militantly conservative', in that their
> aim is to preserve traditional forms of society, even while it is subversive
> of the dominant order within their nation-state.  I think this is slightly
> inaccurate, because indigenous societies are typically too reliant on
> diffuse informal (rather than concentrated) sanctions and too open to
> interconnectedness with other forms of life to be considered truly
> conservative.  It does, however, raise the question of the relationship
> between conservatism and communitarianism, as the Ecuadorian movement in
> particular is strongly communitarian.  The paradox is that it is
> communitarian about communities which are not strongly repressive, so that
> the content of its communitarianism is more formal than prescriptive (i.e.
> an emphasis on the importance of community, rather than the universal
> validity or unquestionability of certain community preferences).
>
> I'm inclined to view communitarianism as a conservative trope arising
> within some movements which are not inherently conservative, and as a
> defensive outcome of the colonial onslaught on forms of life.  In extreme
> cases (Fiji comes to mind), the corrosion of indigenous lifeworlds does give
> rise to forms of social conservatism which emerge out of the transmutation
> of indigenous cosmologies.  This arises when immanence is replaced with
> loss.  The nexus of conservatism typically focuses on a lost Golden Age and
> the attempt to restore it by fetishistically performing its external/formal
> attributes (clinging to tradition, rejecting 'modern' innovations, etc).
> This nexus is rather different from that of indigenous cosmology, which is
> lived as immediate intensity.  It is easy to see, however, how indigenous
> cosmologies connected to lifeworlds which are lost and can no longer be
> performed immanently, can transmute into conservatisms.  The transmutation
> involved is that the immediacy of indigenous cosmology - which is quite
> rightly remembered as intensity - is constructed as lost, and its recovery
> connected to formal performativity of its external attributes (which, while
> they may have been automatic in its immanent and ecological context, are
> connected to lifestyle regulation and psychological repression when
> performed outside this context).  Of course, such external performance
> cannot actually reproduce the lost immediacy and immanence, since its
> generative structure is transcendental, and repressive both socially and
> psychologically.  Rather, its reconstruction requires the recovery of the
> relationality of its context, either through a more thoroughgoing,
> ecological restoration of its conditions of existence or through the
> recreation of this immanent relationality in new contexts.  This is why the
> other possible pole of indigenous reconstruction intersects with autonomous
> social movements and with anarchism and autonomism.
>
> The Golden Age myth is actually extremely widespread in ideologies of the
> right, including conservatism, reaction/ultraconservatism, and fascism, and
> its significance should be understood in terms of its relationship to the
> transcendental function of the elevation of past over present and the
> psychologically and socially repressive basis for its performance (in
> Britain today, this would be the ideal of the 1950s; one can also compare
> cases such as *hindutva*, *salafiya*, Nazism, Serbian ultranationalism,
> etc).  It should *not* - as is commonly done by non-conservatives and
> anti-totalitarians - be taken as evidence that seeking a better world is as
> such unjustified and is a socially dangerous myth, and/or that progress is
> always better than a romanticised past.  The Golden Age myth is often a way
> of handling real experiences of loss and trauma, albeit in a distorting way,
> and the affirmative energies underlying it need to be released into
> affirmative forms of 'propulsive utopia' (see Bonanno), rather than simply
> dismissed because they can sometimes be captured by reactive forces.  What
> should, rather, be abandoned is the repressive modality of producing social
> performativities which conservative and related ideologies *share* with
> progressivist modernisms and anti-perfectionist centrisms.
>
> This is connected to peer-to-peer and networks on a deeper level than the
> sociological - the various reactive ideologies also depend on the denial of
> horizontality at the level of flows within the self (insisting on the molar
> self as referent, rather than molecularity of becomings), and working to
> protect the molar self from decomposition by warding off flows which exceed
> the self and carry it away from its imagined purity into the chaos of
> unregulated networks (see Theweleit's excellent study of Freikorps
> discourse).  Strong identities thus implicitly preclude transversal
> connections by regimenting connections to the world in line with
> transcendental/despotic signification and the maintenance of a hierarchy of
> values (the self / pure / integrated / class / race / dominatory masculine
> 'heroism' at the top, and difference / impurity / floods / the
> undifferentiated mass / women at the bottom).  In concrete terms, this
> limits reactive networks in their ability to form transversal connections
> across certain kinds of difference.  A *hindutva* network for example may
> be internally horizontal, and so might a *salafi* network, but a *hindutva
> * activist and a *salafi* could never form horizontal connections to one
> another, without shattering their respective identities.  In this sense, a
> hierarchy operates as the outer limit (even if only conceptual/imaginary) of
> the network.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 9:42 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> any commentary to add to blog excerpts would be very welcome
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: james burke <lifesized at gmail.com>
>> Date: Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 4:07 PM
>> Subject: link
>> To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
>>
>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/opinion/19brooks.html
>>
>>
>> Red Toryism as peer to peer conservatism<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=7876>
>> [image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
>> Michel Bauwens
>> 20th March 2010
>>
>>  *David Brooks* explains<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/opinion/19brooks.html>the ideas of the Conservative British writer Phillip Blond:
>>
>> *“Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two
>> revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local
>> associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural
>> revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution
>> that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare
>> revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and
>> self-organized associations.*
>>
>> *Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of
>> deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global
>> financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a
>> town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away.
>> Unions withered.*
>>
>> *The two revolutions talked the language of individual freedom, but they
>> perversely ended up creating greater centralization. They created an
>> atomized, segmented society and then the state had to come in and attempt to
>> repair the damage.*
>>
>> *The free-market revolution didn’t create the pluralistic decentralized
>> economy. It created a centralized financial monoculture, which requires a
>> gigantic government to audit its activities. The effort to liberate
>> individuals from repressive social constraints didn’t produce a flowering of
>> freedom; it weakened families, increased out-of-wedlock births and turned
>> neighbors into strangers. In Britain, you get a country with rising crime,
>> and, as a result, four million security cameras.*
>>
>> *In a much-discussed essay in Prospect magazine in February 2009, Blond
>> wrote, “Look at the society we have become: We are a bi-polar nation, a
>> bureaucratic, centralised state that presides dysfunctionally over an
>> increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry.” In a separate
>> essay, he added, “The welfare state and the market state are now two defunct
>> and mutually supporting failures.”*
>>
>> *The task today, he argued in a recent speech, is to revive the sector
>> that the two revolutions have mutually decimated: “The project of radical
>> transformative conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and
>> creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people
>> who form it to their proper central and sovereign station.”*
>>
>> *Economically, Blond lays out three big areas of reform: remoralize the
>> market, relocalize the economy and recapitalize the poor. This would mean
>> passing zoning legislation to give small shopkeepers a shot against the
>> retail giants, reducing barriers to entry for new businesses, revitalizing
>> local banks, encouraging employee share ownership, setting up local capital
>> funds so community associations could invest in local enterprises, rewarding
>> savings, cutting regulations that socialize risk and privatize profit, and
>> reducing the subsidies that flow from big government and big business.*
>>
>> *To create a civil state, Blond would reduce the power of senior
>> government officials and widen the discretion of front-line civil servants,
>> the people actually working in neighborhoods. He would decentralize power,
>> giving more budget authority to the smallest units of government. He would
>> funnel more services through charities. He would increase investments in
>> infrastructure, so that more places could be vibrant economic hubs. He would
>> rebuild the “village college” so that universities would be more intertwined
>> with the towns around them.*
>>
>> *Essentially, Blond would take a political culture that has been oriented
>> around individual choice and replace it with one oriented around
>> relationships and associations. His ideas have made a big splash in Britain
>> over the past year. His think tank, ResPublica, is influential with the
>> Conservative Party. His book, “Red Tory,” is coming out soon.”*
>>
>
>


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