[p2p-research] Is the p2p approach utopian?

[Michel Bauwens]

First to sam, here is a video of geert, where he discusses free culture at
appr. 25 mins .. and on ..

Ryan, any comments in line ...

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

I would say that there was once definitely a kind of argument whether humans
where essentially good (and made evil by society), or evil ( and made less
evil by strong society), at least in my youth there were these kinds of
essentialist arguments. It seems to me they have been largely abandoned, and
that certainly on the left, there is an awareness that humans are a pretty
mixed bunch. I think the remaining essentialist position is that of
neoliberalism seeing humans as rational actors constantly and systematically
seeking their own benefit ... but I gather a lot of liberal thinkers are
slowly abandoning that fiction (emotional market theory, behavioural
economics, recognition of cooperative behaviours etc.. ). Nevertheless, the
left/right polarities still exist ..


>
>
>> 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.)
>

how are these critiques self-involved?

>
>
>
>> 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.
>

I agree, and my interpretation of p2p theory states no end goal, but it does
hypothesizes a phase transition


>
> 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.
>

Coops interconnected and mutually coordinated and innovation sharing through
global open design are part of the story, but just a part



>
> 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.
>

have you recently taken a look at the research, say of the worldwatch
institute, I would rather say that given all the objective data about
biodiversity, resource depletion, it's rather those that ignore it that
would be utopian ..

>
>
>
>> 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.
>

Artificial scarcity is any scarcity not found in human or natural reality
without conscious legal/social intervention to make it so. That is just an
objective definition. Putting DRM in a software to prohibit free sharing is
creating an artificial scarcity. Turning seeds into terminators that can't
reproduce, is again an 'artificial' scarcity, as natural processes would
make the seeds reproduce themselves. You can look the other way, but it is
still there, just as you can choose to look away from environmental
degradation, loss of biodiversity, climate disturbance and resource
depletion. It's your choice, but it can't change the underlying reality.
It's not a matter of opnion, but of scientific dialogue. If you have other
figures, or can prove that seeds would not reproduce without Monsanto's
intervention, I'm all ears..



>
>
>
>
>> 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.
>


I think you've stated before that you are a technological determinist, while
I see technology in a feedback loop with human value systems, social
systems, and conflicting social desires. There are many examples of
technologies that existed, but were not taken up because of the social
structures (say machines in the roman empire, or robots at the islamic
courts, solely used for entertainment). The kind of machines that we develop
cannot be seen in isolation of the rest of the social field.



>
>
>
>> 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.
>

Exactly because it is choice based, it depends on value systems, and hence
is ideological as well (in the broad sense)


>
>
>
>> 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.
>

neoliberalism a mode of technology???? surely you do not mean that .. it's a
financial system, a political system, an ideology, a whole complex of things
that are inter-related into a coherent logic. is it a technollogy that is
gutting the welfare state and bailed out the banks ...




>
>
>
>> 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.
>


The technology by itself will not solve anything. Already there is enough
food in the world, and enough money for a basic income, yet people are poor
and hungry. Again, a subjective-objective integrative approach is needed,
which sees technology as part of the mix, not the sole determining factor of
human history.

>
>
>
>
>> 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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>
>


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