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

[Michel Bauwens]

any commentary to add to blog excerpts would be very welcome

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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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