[p2p-research] Is the p2p approach utopian?

[Ryan Lanham]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:59 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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.
>
I suppose I represent the conservative side which is generally dismissed.  I
do believe humans are "flawed" or, rather, that there is no such thing as
perfection.  I don't think humans can be trusted (to share and be mutually
beneficial on their own) and I do believe law and order are necessary to
shape workable societies of any scale.  Personally, I would define those who
don't think so as "utopian" not as something other than conservative.  I
also think turning mutual greed to common good is a vein of conservatism but
not a very attractive one.  It is the one the left likes as a straw man.


> 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.
>
This is conventional Marxism of the modern European political variety.  I
personally will not discuss it.  It is and has been socially irrelevant for
more than generation, in my opinion.  I doubt it will again become relevant,
but I stay tuned hoping to hear new ideas from time to time.  So far, I have
been disappointed.  There is little or no innovation from that sector.
Their "critiques" are typically self-involved and narcissistic (which is
ironical to say the least.)



> 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.
>
I suppose what I would reject out of utopian is the idea of "end state."  I
doubt humans have an end state.  There is no perfection.  There is no goal.
We simply wander on evolving to meet changing circumstances.  I doubt
completely that there is any historicisty or some such work to any of
this...that is, I doubt (completely) that there is an end to history...left
or right.

The part of P2P that is decidely utopian is the side that hopes for certain
social institutions--like rural co-ops--as political solutions to the
disempowered poor.

The green vein is important and also slightly utopian in that it makes
assumptions that are convenient rather than scientific.  It assumes we are
on the path of doom rather than looking to organize and affirm that
argument.  I don't disagree with that position, but again, it is a position
that is convenient to a sort of utopianism.



> 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.
>
As I have already argued, artificial scarcity is a term that makes
little sense to me as a term or as an idea.  It seems to be anti-realist in
the extreme...almost child-like.  In simplist terms, that which people wish
to be scarce as a society is and can be scarce.  To argue otherwise
is anti-systematic in a way that obviates any hope of dialogical solutions.
So, for as long as people choose "scarcity" of whatever forms, it is not
artificial, but very real and completely natural.  The human/nature
dichotomy is part and parcel of what got us into these messes.



> 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.
>
Technical point:  I see no need for these to be "open."  That is a
consistent but not necessary body of thought.




> 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.
>
I understand that you argue with the European left because they entertain
such arguments.  But they are totally irrelevant.  P2P is a technology.  It
is a way of achieving desired outcomes.  In that sense it is political.  It
is, so far as I can tell, not ideological.  P2P does not exist because
someone believes certain principles.  It exists because certain modes of
organizing lead to desired outcomes.  Or so say I.



> 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.
>
For a modern Marxist, I would think this would be true.  Open is choice
based...it is inherently anti-ideological.



> 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.
>
I was with you up to the end of here.  I don't have an end goal, so the
following is...old school.




> 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.
>
In fact it doesn't require anything.  It is a logical outcome from where we
find ourselves.  It is not inevitable; it is a possible solution that is
logical.  It isn't historically certain, it is a way we can work together to
solve certain issues we have (e.g. problems in the production and especially
the distribution of intellectual goods and services--possibly even some
commodities, though I doubt it.



> 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.
>
Agreed.  But this again is technology, not politics.  It is a how, not a
why.  It must be the communities themselves that grasp why.



> 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.
>
Disagree.  I think this is fun, but it is a distraction.  Neo-liberalism is
not an enemy.  It is a mode of technology.  Disliking it is like working to
build word processors because you "dislike" typewriters and the injustices
inherent with them.  It makes no sense.



> 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).
>
Actually, this will be the P2P movement's most likely downfall.  What is
needed is enabling of technology...not enabling of passions.  If the
passions are not inherent, the effort will fail.  We don't need "comrades."
We need engineers who build commons because they make social sense given
where humans find themselves...not because it is some sort of counter
culture.




> 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.
>
> The phrase I like best is that "We need to construct the alternatives."
That is genius and indeed correct.  I am no one's enemy.  I disagree with
many (if not all) political approaches in one form or another.  What I
personally believe in is the capacity to evolve, change and stigmergize.  I
don't see any historical, political or social drivers necessary beyond
having the basic economic ideas of why co-ops and commons can and do work.

Best,

Ryan
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