[p2p-research] Is the p2p approach utopian?

[Michel Bauwens]

This will be published on the 17th, and calls for a 'triarchical' political
approach to social change, aligning constructing alternatives, social
mobilization, and commons oriented policy frameworks,

Michel



The critique that the P2P approach that we are defending in these pages is
utopian can come from two different quarters. One is the obvious one, the
conservative side. This approach suggests that humans are very flawed, and
that our societies reflect those flaws and that social rules should take
into account the basic fact that humans can’t be trusted, and that
institutions and ‘law and order’ are needed to keep them in check. Or, in
its liberal so-called free market version, that it is best to create a
society which takes into account greed, but assumes or tries to turn mutual
greed into a common good.

But there is also an opposite, more radical critique, which says the p2p
approach is utopian because it is too ‘soft’, doesn’t take into account
class dynamics and the fact that the power of the ruling elite needs to be
broken before any true change can be achieved.

In this mini-essay, I’d  like to deal with such criticisms.

First, I want to stress that in my mind, the p2p approach is NOT utopian,
but that at the same time, I do not see utopian approaches as necessarily
evil. Utopias and ideals can inspire humans to positive social action, and
have always been a driver of history. They CAN become evil when they become
coercive, and try to corral human diversity and social complexity, into the
utopian-established moral expectations. But many examples of ‘bad
utopianism’ may not be good examples. For examples, is Stalinism a perverse
utopia, or rather, was a new ruling managerial elite just using it as an
ideology to justify and strengthen its own power. In my analysis, the
socialist utopia is just a ‘front’, not the real cause of what was wrong.

So why is the p2p approach not utopian. First of all, because we do not
strive in any way for a vision of a perfect society. P2P is not about
achieving a classless society say, or universal brotherhood. It’s about
reversing the destruction of the biosphere by abandoning a system based on a
fake notion of natural abundance, and of reversing the increasing trend  of
artificial scarcity that hampers human social innovation.  While the second
may be a luxury, though we in fact really need it as well in order for su
sustainability oriented innovation, the second is absolutely crucial. Rather
than have a image of how society should be, and comparing any real trend
against this image, our approach is meliorist, improving where we can. Yes,
we are also for a more radical change in the logic of society, around the
commons as main institution and with a non-infinite-growth market as
sub-system for the allocation of rival goods, but this can be achieved only
by a time-dependent drive to maturity. Of course, society could evolve much
faster than expected, but this could also be a negative development. For
example, for the internationalist socialist movement of the 19th cy, the
Russian Revolution was a disaster, because it remained isolated in a country
which did not have the necessary material basis for the changes that they
wished for to occur.

So the approach of the P2P Foundation, as proposed by myself, and there may
be other views as we are a pluralist platform, is the internetwork all the
human initiatives towards open and free, participatory, and commons oriented
practices, and the open infrastructures needed to make it happen.

Our approach is subjective-objective, but the last term is very important.
Without the necessary maturation of objective modalities of production and
human organization, a subjectivist approach based on the human will, like
say the Negrian waiting for insurrectionist rapture, would not succeed. Open
infrastructures need to be build, social organizational forms and
institutions need to be built, while AT THE SAME TIME, human consciousness
evolves and becomes politicized.

In a recent seminar of the Universidade Nomada in Venice, Italy, where a lot
of post-autonomist thinkers and activists where present, some of the
speakers outrightly dismissed any open development as already coopted by
capital. Geert Lovink, not an autonomist himself, went even so far as
declaring the free culture movement as public enemy.

This is evidently not our approach. While we think that cooptation will
happen, and is happening, we also see it as a necessary maturation of the
new infrastructure of social production, of the new  sharing and
commons-oriented consciousness, and these are trends which are to the
advantage of the communities of peer producers and sharers. It is within
these trends, that social trends for autonomy need to take place, that
social charters need to be imposed or negotiated, which maintain the maximum
autonomy for the commons and their communities. But we are not waiting for
any ‘red dawn’, we are changing the maximum aspects of our life that we can,
interconnecting our efforts, learning from each other and our mutual
experiences. While the end goal is a restructuring  of our economy and
civilizational forms, we are not waiting for any rapture. Phase transition
will happen, needs to happen, as infinite growth systems cannot endure in
finite systems, but  it could be a transition that worsen humanity’s fate
and condition, or it could be the p2p transition we are hoping for. But this
doesn’t require as much shouting radical slogans from the rooftops, as
patient but continuous work in new infrastructures, while obviously
restructuring our own consciousness in the process, and thinking about the
necessary political forms that are needed.

The way I see it, we need three elements to succeed.

First, we need to construct the alternatives. I want to insist that this is
not a reactionary struggle for say, pure relocalization, or small utopian
communities, like the utopian socialists of the 19th century, what Marx
called ‘dwarfish forms’. Rather we are building a new system of production
which recombines  an important amount of relocalization (because physical
material globalization is a disaster for sustainability), but combined by a
globally connected infrastructure of mutual coordination and collective
learning, which can achieve a  hyper-growth in human productive innovation.

At the same time, we need to build and associate with powerful social
movements, that struggle against the attacks of the now ‘extreme neoliberal’
state, which attacks the very social fabric of society to save the predatory
financial system. But for such social movements, it is not sufficient just
to say no,  and have a politics of refusal, and it is certainly not
sufficient to return to socialist statist approaches, but they need an
awareness of the alternative social and productive infrastructures that need
to be strengthened in order to have a better alternative.

Finally, we need a political extension, one that, based on a
commons-oriented policy framework, and a push towards replacing the
corporate welfare state with a Partner State, that institutes commonfare
(Andrea Fumagalli) and retakes control of the ‘commanding heights of the
economy’, now in the hands of the destructive predatory factions that have
taken control of the market states (as proposed by Nick Dyer-Whiteford).

It is the combination of constructive open communities, mobilized social
movements, and a political extension of the power of both, in a grand
alliance of the commons, which will be necessary to turn the maturation of
open practices and infrastructures, into the necessary phase transition that
can save us from the coming barbarisms.


-- 
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Think thank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
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