[p2p-research] Fwd: Third Version of Article

[Michel Bauwens]

chris, can you forward this to steve and ralph, it's a good summary of our
approach to world-changing,

Michel


from james quilligan:


         Beyond State Capitalism:

                                          The Commons Economy in our
Lifetimes






                James Bernard Quilligan



In considering the essential problem of how to produce and distribute
material wealth, virtually all of the great economists in Western history
have ignored the significance of the *commons* -- the shared resources of
nature and society that people inherit, create and utilize. Despite sharp
differences in concept and ideology, economic thinkers from Smith, Ricardo,
and Marx to Keynes, Hayek, Mises and Schumpeter largely based their
assumptions on the world’s seemingly unlimited resources and fossil fuels,
their infinite potential for creating economic growth, adequate supplies of
labor for developing them, and the evolving monoculture of *state capitalism
* responsible for their provision and allocation. Hence, in the *Market
State* that has emerged, corporations and sovereign states make decisions on
the production and distribution of Earth’s common resources more or less as
a unitary system -- with minimal participation from the people who depend on
these commons for their livelihood and well-being. Because our forbearers
did not account for the biophysical flow of material resources from the
environment through the production process and back into the environment, *the
real worth of natural resources and social labor is not factored into the
economy*. It is this centralized, hierarchical model that has led to the
degradation and devaluation of our commons.



Over the past seventy years especially, the macroeconomic goals of sovereign
states -- for high levels and rapid growth of output, low unemployment and
stable prices -- have resulted in a highly dysfunctional world. The global
economy has integrated dramatically in recent decades through financial and
trade liberalization; yet the market is failing to protect natural and
social resources, the state is failing to rectify the economic system, and
the global polity is failing to manage its mounting imbalances in global
resources and wealth. Without a ‘unified field theory’ of economics to
explain how the commons is drastically undervalued and why world society is
amassing huge debts to the environment, the poor and future generations,
policymakers and their institutions lack the critical tools and support to
address the massive instability that is now gripping the global economy.
Businesses and governments are facing the Herculean challenge of reducing
climate change and pollution while alleviating poverty without economic
growth -- a task for which the Market State is neither prepared nor designed
to handle.



Meanwhile, the essential ideals of state capitalism -- the rule-based
systems of government enforcement and the spontaneous, self-regulating
social order of markets -- are finding direct expression in the *
co-governance* and *co-production* of common goods by people in localities
across the world. Whether these commons are traditional (rivers, forests,
indigenous cultures) or emerging (energy, intellectual property, internet),
communities are successfully managing them through collaboration and
collective action. This growing movement has also begun to create *social
charters* and *commons trusts* -- formal instruments which define the
incentives, rights and responsibilities of stakeholders for the supervision
and protection of common resources. Ironically, by organizing to protect
their commons through decentralized decision-making, the democratic
principles of freedom and equality are being realized more fully in these
resource communities than through the enterprises and policies of the Market
State.



These evolving dynamics -- the *decommodification* of common goods through

co-governance and the *deterritorialization* of value through co-production
-- are shattering the liberal assumptions which underlie state capitalism.
The emergence of this new kind of management and valuation for the
preservation of natural and social assets is posing a momentous crisis for
the Market State, imperiling the functional legitimacy of state sovereignty,
national currencies, domestic fiscal policy, international trade and
finance, and the global monetary system. Major changes are on the way. The
transformation of modern political economy will involve reconnecting with --
and reformulating -- a preanalytic vision of the post-macroeconomic global
commons. *Another world is coming: where common goods are capped and
protected; a portion of these resources are rented to businesses for the
production and consumption of private goods; and taxes on their use are
redistributed by the state as public goods to provide a social income for
the marginalized and to repair and restore the depleted commons.*



Although people’s rights to their commons are often recognized and validated
in smaller communities, scaling these lessons to the global level will
require a new dimension of popular legitimacy and authority. The world
community is rapidly evolving a sense of social interconnectivity, shared
responsibility and global citizenship, yet the sovereign rights of people to
the global commons have not been fully articulated. In declaring our
planetary rights for these commons, we shall be confronting many decisive
questions:



(1)  Are modern societies prepared to create a framework in which the
incentives behind production and governance are not private capital and
debt-based growth, but human solidarity, quality of life and ecological
sustainability?

(2)  How soon -- and how peacefully -- will the subsystems of the Market
State integrate their structures of value-creation and sovereign governance
with the greater biophysical system of ecological and social
interdependence?

(3)  Can the global public organize effectively as a *third power* to
develop checks and balances on the private and public sectors and establish
the *resource sovereignty* and *preservation value* needed for a commons
economy?



These issues will be filtering into mainstream discussion over the next two
decades. Already the system of state capitalism is breaking down,
threatening the entire planet, its institutions and species. When this
collapse can no longer be contained and a global monetary crisis ensues,
world society will have the choice of creating an economic system that
follows the universal laws of biophysics and commons preservation -- or
accepting a new version of 18th-20th century mechanistic economics, obliging
humanity to continue living off the common capital of the planet under
corporate feudalism and über-militaristic regimes. Our decision will likely
come down to this: *global commons *or *global autarchy*. As an economist, I
don’t pretend to speak for the conscience of humanity; but as a human being,
my heart tells me that we shall see the beginnings of a commons economy in
our lifetimes. The long-forsaken global commons are beckoning.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: James Quilligan <jbquilligan at comcast.net>
Date: Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 4:54 AM
Subject: Third Version of Article
To: Silke Helfrich <Silke.Helfrich at gmx.de>, David Bollier <david at bollier.org>,
Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


I've made a few more small changes. Here's the third and final version of
'Beyond State Capitalism':





James






-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20100807/8cec60c1/attachment-0001.html>