[p2p-research] the political future of p2p work

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear friends,

This will not be published on the blog, but is an important statement on a
stronger strategic orientation that will take place outside the confines of
the p2p foundation, because it is based on a more explicit political stance;
the rapid intervention teams idea will be an initiative within the p2p
foundation remit, but the theoretical journal will be a more specific
initiative, see below for details,

Michel Bauwens


Report from Greece: the political future of p2p work



The reception of our p2p work is quite different amongst different national
cultures. For example, in the Netherlands, we are always invited to speak
about open business, and occasionally, open government. In Spain, the
reception is mostly cultural and our invitations consistently come from
media and urban labs, i.e. cultural institutions. In the U.S., when we
toured it two years ago, the interests was biased towards spiritual themes.
In Vienna, there is a strong focus on creating enabling infrastructures for
social innovation. (I’m writing this as the Enable conference has ended).
This may either be because of network effects, i.e. the first interested
persons have a network that determine interests for future events; or it may
be due to more objective factors in the national cultures, and where exactly
innovative and future oriented energies are located.

In Greece, the country where our ideas are most popular (not counting that
half our visitors used to come from California) and where a autonomous team
with George Papanikolau and Vasilis Kostakis keeps a Greek-language blog
that has a real impact, the reception is definitely political. A
particularity of Greece is also the existence of a excellent online journal,
Re-public, which co-publishes in English, and has carried a lot of articles
on themes dear to our heart (wikinomics, p2p and politics, p2p distributed
energy infrastructures, etc…), which has carried various articles and essays
by people interested in our approach.

Greece is also objectively the weak link in the chain of still neoliberal
Europe, and where a initially progressively motivated Papandreou, promising
more social justice, instead has been obliged to slash public expenditures,
in the typical IMF style that destroyed so many countries in the South. Of
course, in the current configuration and balance of power, there is little
else that can be done by those who cannot challenge the logic of the present
system. At the same time, apart from saying “no”, it is not clear that those
who protest such measures, have much of an alternative to present at this
time.

This explains that our interventions where almost always in political
contexts, and the questions geared towards structural and political
solutions regarding the meltdown of the neoliberal system.

Despite the positive reception and great interests in the political aspect
of the p2p approach, it also highlighted how much work needs to be done. In
my opinion, the p2p oriented practices are currently oriented towards long
term building of bottom up distributed infrastructures (however incomplete
those currently are), and making steady progress on that front, but when
major crises erupt, we have no real ‘fast’ answers to operate politically.

With George Papanikolau, we discussed some future orientations that we need
to take. First is the idea of rapid intervention teams. Indeed, there are
people with solutions to concrete national and international macro-crises.
Regarding financial crises, I’m thinking of people like Ellen Woods (Web of
Debt) and Bernard Lietaer (Future of Money),  with ideas regarding sovereign
credit and a new international monetary system respectively, which could be
coupled with the innovative financing ideas of Chris Cook, and the rapid
creation of business to business mutual credit systems advocated by Thomas
Greco. This is just to mention one field. Naomi Klein, in her book, The
Shock Doctrine, shows how in times of crisis, when the population is under
shock and paralyzed, the neoliberal destroyers are more than ready with
predatory political and economic solutions; the p2p world needs to be just
as ready to offer solutions, so that popular movements can say more than
just “no”, to the solutions offered by the dominant system.

Our second agreement was that we need a theoretical journal, to focus on
strategic and tactical issues regarding social change. This activity, which
unlike the p2p foundation will be much more specific and politically
oriented than pluralist research and internetworking, will need to function
separately in order to avoid conflicts of interest, but we will of course
also report on it, as we do with other initiatives that are related to p2p
developments. This journal will not be a academic journal, but a journal of
theory and practice expressing analysis and points of view on how to achieve
systemic change.



To repeat the basic political orientation of the p2p foundation:

-          We need to achieve sustainable practices of material production,
which do not harm (or minimize)  the earth and its inhabitants, human and
non-human

-          We need to eliminate legal and institutional practices which make
human cooperation and the sharing of social innovation difficult, and we
must insure that all innovations benefit the whole of humanity

-          The first two priorities need to be achieved in the context of
maximal social justice.



Hence our approach is geared towards achieving unity between the social
forces that aim to protect the biosphere, those that aim the creation of a
free culture of sharing and exchange, and those that aim for social justice.

There are clearly two aspects to this work. One is the continued and patient
work of creating open and distributed infrastructures, which combine open
knowledge/code/design communities and commons, and their associated
entrepreneurial coalitions aiming for sustainable production practices; the
other is the political work geared at structural reform taking place in the
public and political/institutional arena. So far, we have focused on the
first, neglecting the second. But the visit to Greece, and the accelerating
effects of the meltdown of the neoliberal model, clearly indicate that it is
now paramount to put serious attention to the second aspect.

As for myself, the crucial issue is available time to tackle all priorities
congruently, so if you have any interest in the necessary phase transition
of our political economy and civilization, please consider helping us and
associating with our efforts.


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

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

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

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