Michel Bauwens on the Conflicts Between Commoners, Capitalists and Intersectionalists

Discussion

Michel Bauwens:

EDITORIAL: The struggle of our times: The Common-ers, The Capital-ists, and the Section-alists. Written during February 2022.

Our planetary health is in danger, and our societal health is in danger. How do we get out of this mess and construct of form of society and civilization that is able to have human communities live within planetary boundaries and where social conflict and violence is kept within civilized bounds ? For the moment, there are three options. We will first describe the options that we believe are to be rejected, but that doesn’t mean of course that there is nothing to be preserved from these particular paths.

The first is the path of capital. This is the path that believes that value, and social recognition and wealth, proceeds from the extraction of value from scarce resources, including land, the scarce resources it produces, as well as labour.

To be sure various attempts can be made to embed the rule of capital accumulation in broader frameworks; one such framework is the nation, including the Chinese model, where the ruling class is reproduced collectively, rather than individually; or renewed social democratic frameworks, or the many attempts towards a conscious, ethical, green forms of capitalism. We wrote in previous editorials that we see a hegemonic struggle between nation-centric models, the emerging national-populisms, broadly conceived as all the attempts to restore the power and sovereignty of the nation-state, and the restoration of some form of ‘popular sovereignty’. The other attempt is one to reform neoliberalism through the Great Reset, which I see as an attempt to a global order based on public-private partnerships and the generalization of rent-based income through global and local platforms that has users and not owners. A model that merges with ‘data feudalism’.

The second great alternative is that proposed by the (Inter)Sectionalists, which has to a significant degree merged with that of the Great Reset, but also has its own logic. For the sectionalists, the basic entity of society should not be class (i.e. labor or capital), but socially constructed groups, although in fact based on biological and immutable characteristics. In this model, groups, races and genders are marked by their ‘essences’ (blackness, whiteness,self-declared gender), which override the logic of equal personhood that was the hallmark of the capital-centric regime (and of its social-ist alternatives). The sovereignty lies within the intersectional groups, to which an individual must be beholden, and disciplined as to its freedom of expression. The societal order is based on group allocation, with a moral order based on victimhood and fragility rather than merit or excellence, with privileges and legal ‘restitutions’ in place. Merit and excellence based institutions and practices should be abolished, and ideological uniformity is imposed through media and academia, severely restricting the free flow of knowledge in society and the capacity to critique and develop alternatives to imposed mainstream solutions. It would amount to a Great Regress.

The wished for regime is one based on privileges and segregation, and it is not difficult to see that is based on a wish to return to premodern modes of social regulation, mixed with the worst of postmodern nihilism. This second group has achieved significant hegemony within the anglo-saxon world, and is influential within all ‘WEIRD’ countries, and has led to a regime of unprecedented censorship and social control, carried out by ‘netarchical’ capital, i.e. Big Tech. In class terms, it is an attempt to diversify the ruling strata, through an alliance of the 1% with an ideological cartel within the PMC, professional and middle classes, i.e. the 20%.

However, what appears to be its strength because of this elite alliance, is also its glaring weakness. As a war machine based on social racism against the working classes, and the poor of all races, and because its culture is felt as outrageous by the social and cultural majorities that are still rooted in place and community, it is also generating a huge amount of resistance. It seems also clear that despite the attempts to spread it through the practices of multinational corporations and international institutions, its potential basis in the Global South is just too small. It’s war on meritocracy, it’s targeting of the more successful social groups such as the Asians in the West, makes it a very shaky proposition. Even the productive sectors of the minority-based middle classes are turning against it. In the end, what the sectionalists propose seems not even really compatible with social reproduction itself. My prediction is that its historically unprecedented fast rise to hegemony, may be accompanied by a very rapid loss at some point in the future (even if that point is 2 decades away), as it has become the main factor in insuring longer term national-populist domination. Emergency legislation and ‘states of exception’ will only keep popular revolt at bay for so long. The 'Secessions' of the Plebs will continue and augment in number.

Enter the third option, which is the option of the commons and the commoners. This emerging alternative is relatively small compared to the previous two options, but it offers substantial solutions. The change is one from the dominance of extractive institutions, to that of a resource-preserving institution, the commons; and a shift in value regime from commodity to contribution (and impact, which is the negative side of contribution). This option rejects the rule of un-embedded global capital, but fully respects entrepreneurship and markets, while embedding these entrepreneurial freedoms in a broader setting of magisteria of the commons that preserve the integrity of ecological, and social, ecosystems. It favors more distributed forms of property, including new mixes between individual and collective forms of property. Both the state and markets are linked to the new institutions of the commons, which set protective limits to the practices of extraction. A commons-centric society transcends and includes capital, post-capitalism actually preserves the best of capitalism, while embedding it in a larger logic. Commons-based production is based on the equipotential rights of contribution of all commoners, and one role of the public institutions is to guarantee the maximum capacity to contribute for all its citizens, but it has no place for the racialism and segregationism as proposed by the sectionalists, although people are free to organize along any form of chosen identity.

However, public and private institutions retain all the legislation against discrimination. The commons are based on the free association of persons, that may have various enriching identities, but are not beholden to it, as they make their own choices at all times. The underlying logic of the commons is what we have called cosmo-localism, with production located closer to the place of need, but global technical, cultural and scientific cooperation insures that regenerative approaches can spread everywhere. The commons movement retains the inclusive, egalitarian and universalist values of the civil rights movements, but extends those rights to the world of production; it stands radically against the 'active discrimination and segregation' wished for by the Sectionalists. No person shall be discriminated upon based on their immutable characteristics, no hierarchy or supremacy of social groups shall be established by law or regulation.