Partner State

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= the Partner State is the concept whereby public authorities play a sustaining role in the 'direct creation of value by civil society', i.e. sustains and promotes commons-based Peer Production


Introduction

By George Dafermos:

"The concept of the Partner State took on a central importance in the work of the theorists affiliated with the P2PF in the last decade. Initially, it was incorporated into their discourse as a strategic proposal for building commons-friendly institutions at statelevel. But as institutions of this type did not yet exist, the concept was methodologically constructed as an ideal type with no empirical validation. The opportunity to put flesh on its bones came in 2013, when Bauwens was invited to Ecuador to lead the FLOK Society Project (the acronym FLOK stands for Free, Libre, Open Knowledge), a government-funded research project aimed at the development of a set of public policy proposals for the transformation of the Ecuadorian economy through peer production and the digital commons.14 The project, as Bauwens immediately realized, had an enormous symbolic significance, as this was the first time that commons theorists had ever come so close to public policy makers. The fact that the socialist government of Rafael Correa’s Alianza PAIS had given them free rein to envision a commons transition process at the national level meant that the commons and peer production were becoming a force to be reckoned with in the world of politics (Schneider 2018b). This solidified Bauwens’ (2009: 132) view that peer production represents ‘the socialism of the twenty-first century’ and encouraged him and his FLOK collaborators to think strategically about what form the Partner State could assume in Ecuador. Here, the influence of one of the FLOK researchers, John Restakis, who emphasized the relevance of the region of Emilia-Romagna in Italy, was decisive.

For Restakis, the cooperative ecosystem of that region was a tangible example of what the Partner State looks like in practice. Multi-stakeholder cooperatives are responsible for the management and provision of public goods and services, such as care and support for the elderly, whereas the role of the State is basically confined to funding them and evaluating their performance. This conception formed the backdrop for all the policy proposals that Bauwens and his FLOK colleagues developed with the aim of empowering ‘the direct creation of value by civil society’ (P2P Foundation 2017). Thus, in the context of FLOK’s policy documents, the Partner State is synonymous with a state government that supports cooperative organizations by developing policies and regulations that allow them to play a central role in the economy (see e.g. Bauwens & Kostakis 2015, Restakis 2015).

Nevertheless, despite his initial enthusiasm, Bauwens soon became disillusioned with the project. Although FLOK was funded by the Ecuadorian government, nobody in its higher echelons of power seemed to really care about it. Apparently, there was no political will to implement any of its proposals. Based on this experience, Bauwens (2014) came to the conclusion that ‘we have to abandon the romantic idea that we can hack a country’ by appealing to the reason and the willingness of traditional political parties and their leaders. That, however, does not mean that he or his collaborators abandoned the idea of the Partner State. On the contrary, they re-conceptualized it at the city-level. Actually, this scaling-down of the concept had very little to do with the failure of FLOK to transform the Ecuadorian government into a partner state. Rather, as we shall see, the emphasis on the city as the epicentre of a commons transition reflected the growing political momentum of new municipalist movements in various European metropolises, such as the Barcelona en Comú citizen platform which has governed the city of Barcelona since 2015 to-date (2020)." (http://heteropolitics.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Digital-Commons.pdf)

Recuperating systemic institutions from below

George Dafermos:

"It would be an error to underestimate the importance of these attempts to redefine the notion of the Partner State. First of all, it is made patently manifest through the analysis of P2PF theorists that commoners antagonize systemic institutions of political governance by organizing themselves into citizen platforms, which act as a fermenting agent upon the expansion of peer production and the development of an alternative mode of governance at the city-level. As can be clearly seen in the case of Barcelona en Comú, such citizen platforms constitute a new political actor with the capacity to take over municipal governance institutions and transform them into enablers and accelerators of peer production. In recognition of the pivotal role that such supportive institutions could play in a commons transition, Bauwens et al. (2019) have come up with the strategic proposal of utilizing citizen platforms like Barcelona en Comú as a ‘Trojan horse,’ that is, as an instrument for invading systemic institutions and revolutionizing them from within. In that sense, we could say that the setting up of citizen platforms constitutes a political strategy by which commoners attempt to recuperate systemic institutions from below.

What is also remarkable about the partner state approach crystallized into the examples of the Barcelona en Comú citizen platform and the Bologna Regulation is the fact that it results in the expansion of peer production from cyberspace to the urban space of the city. By approaching urban resources as a commons in which local communities should have the right to be actively engaged, such institutions open up the possibility of tapping into urban resources and using them as a springboard for the development of peer production projects in the offline world. In a nutshell, this form of commoners’ struggle opens up the possibility of applying the principles and the methods of peer production and governance to anything that can be possibly conceived of as an urban commons, such as a public park or an abandoned factory building. In this partner state approach, then, resides the possibility for an extension of the field of application of peer production/governance to the metropolitan field and its cornucopia of resources (Bauwens et al. 2019)." (http://heteropolitics.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Digital-Commons.pdf)

Discussion

The partner state approach

Bauwens and Kostakis:

We introduce the concept of the Partner State Approach (PSA), in which the state becomes a 'partner state' and enables autonomous social production. The PSA could be considered a cluster of policies and ideas whose fundamental mission is to empower direct social-value creation, and to focus on the protection of the Commons sphere as well as on the promotion of sustainable models of entrepreneurship and participatory politics...While people continue to enrich and expand the Commons, building an alternative political economy within the capitalist one, by adopting a PSA the state becomes an arbiter, retreating from the binary state/privatization dilemma to the triarchical choice of an optimal mix amongst government regulation, private-market freedom and autonomous civil-society projects. Thus, the role of the state evolves from the post-World War II welfare-state model, which could arguably be considered a historical compromise between social movements for human emancipation and capitalist interests, to the partner state one, which embraces win-win sustainable models for both civil society and market.

The partner state includes the welfare state

Tommaso Fattori:

"Bauwens points out that, to avoid the risk that the concept of partner state be confused with plans to dismantle the welfare state, along the “big society” model: “the peer production of common value requires civic wealth and strong civic institutions. In other words, the partner state concept transcends and includes the best of the welfare state, such as the social solidarity mechanisms, strong educational systems and a vibrant and publicly supported cultural life. What the British Tories did was to use the Big Society rhetoric to attempt to further weaken the remnants of social solidarity, and throw people to fend for themselves. This was not enabling and empowering; it was its opposite.” Bauwens M., The Partner State & Ethical Economy, July 2012. See: http://www.shareable.net ."

Silke Helfrich on state support for the commons

"For me the role of the state is at least fourfold:

not only

- to stop enclosures, but to trigger the production/construction of new commons by

- (co-) management of complexe resource systems which are not limited to local boundaries or specific communities (as manager and partner)

- survey of rules (chartas) to care for the commons (mediator or judge)

- kicking of or providing incentives for commoners governing their commons - here the point is to design intelligent rules which automatically protect the commons, like the GPL does (facilitator)" (email, September 2009)

Dmytri Kleiner

From an interview conducted by KMO:

"Is there any point in trying to request that the state serve the ends of a peer-to-peer society, or is the state completely at odds with that by definition?

There are a number of threads in the overall strategy that I think are necessary. On one hand, we need venture communism, which means independent, federated entrepreneurship along communist principles. But on the other hand, the state does exist, and I believe that we can’t just imagine that we live in a future state-less society. We have to understand what the state provides now, and we have to struggle within the state as a theater of struggle as well, to get what we can out of it. So I would say yes, but that it really depends on where you are.

In principle, if you look at public funding for other kinds of media, like film, television, and movies, in many cases there’s been quite significant public involvement in the development of those media. So, do I think that there is the prospect for public involvement in funding of social media for a positive impact? Certainly, but, in an era where we’re still not out of the neoliberal phase of history, in an era where governments don’t even want to pay for schools and housing and education and roads, the idea that they will suddenly become interested in paying for social media seems unlikely. So, it doesn’t seem to be a prospect that I have a lot of confidence will actually come about, though it could come about, and if it did, it could be positive. Perhaps, especially in areas that are trying to assert their independence from global neoliberalism, like South and Central America for instance, perhaps they will understand the public need to finance social media in the same way that they finance their broadcast media and their film media." (http://snuproject.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/venture-communism-and-technological-miscommunication- a-conversation-with-dmytri-kleiner/)

RC Smith on anti-statism

From an interview with John Wisniewski

Someone asked me the other day about the intersections between critical theory and anarchist thought, which led to some interesting discussion and debate. Perhaps it will be fruitful to reflect on this a bit in light of the above question. I do think there are points of intersection that we can discern. For instance, in many Heathwood studies one will often read an emphasis toward non-hierarchical, non-dominant, anti-authoritarian alternatives – this is obviously also a popular theme in the anarchist tradition. In many past Frankfurt School studies, particularly in relation to a critique of ‘coercive society’ (i.e., hierarchical, dominant, authoritarian society), which of course aligns with a fundamental critique of the historical genesis of human society, we read very explicit and direct accounts against many things that the anarchist movement (broadly defined) seems to also rail against. This is not to say that the Frankfurt School is fundamentally anarchist, because there are also many fundamental differences. I mean, it would be difficult to sit here and discuss all of the variations of the anarchist movement within such little space and provide a very general caricature, but in general one conflict I feel today is the absolute anti-statist position commonly held in the anarchist tradition. While not necessarily inaccurate in terms of its critique of the State, which is dominant and coercive, I think it fails to recognise the practical need for some sort of state organisation, albeit fundamentally different from modern hierarchical, dominant and coercive state practice. I like to think of this along the lines of a critical concept of the state or, at least, along the lines of its radical reconceptualisation: i.e., the ‘non-state like state’ or the ‘non-state state’ particularly in relation to or coinciding with a radical alternative participatory politics and things like a theory of non-coercive power.

The one thing I will say is that the idea of non-dominant, non-hierarchical human relations is something I admire about the anarchist tradition, and is one thing that should be celebrated with regards to the history of anarchist thought. I also appreciate how certain anarchist movements believe in a sort of anti-dogmatic (open, inclusive, integrative) philosophy and are openly critical of themselves and traditional leftist politics. On the other hand, I do think certain other anarchist movements are susceptible to, have become, or are almost inherently dogmatic. A critique of anarcho-primitivism comes to mind, as well as this strange phenomenon called ‘anarcho-libertarian capitalism’ or something as such. In this respect, I think there are large sections of anarchism that have become bound up in contemporary structures of political thought, which is worth some reflection. (http://www.heathwoodpress.com/exploring-horizon-social-political-economic-change-interview-r-c-smith-john-wisniewski-part-1/)

Michel Bauwens on the new triarchy

At the P2P Foundation, our central concept is peer to peer, i.e. the ability to freely associate with others around the creation of common value. More specifically, we call this, according to the structural anthropology of Alan Page Fiske, communal shareholding, i.e. the non-reciprocal exchange of an individual with a totality. It is totality that we call the commons.

Commons can be subdivided in different ways, for example, local-regional-global, but also between the polarity of rivalry and non-rivalry. Commons consisting of rival goods can be renewable or not, but in each case, there have to be rules regulating the exchange between the commons and its users/contributors/members. In digital commons, though they are dependent on a rival physical infrastructure in order to exist, non- or anti-rivalry prevails, and non-reciprocal exchange is non-problematic.

It is customary to divide society into three sectors, and what we want to show is how the new peer to peer dynamic unleashed by networked infrastructures, changes the inter-relationship between these three sectors.

In the current ‘cognitive capitalist’ system, it is the private sector consisting of enterprises and businesses which is the primary factor, and it is engaged in competitive capital accumulation. The state is entrusted with the protection of this process. Though civil society, through the citizen, is in theory ‘sovereign’, and chooses the state; in practice, both civil society and the state are under the domination of the private sector.

Of course, this is not to say that the state is a mere tool of private business. In my view, it fulfills three contradictory functions. One is the protect the whole system, under the domination of private business, and this is determined by a balance of power not only between different private business sectors, but also by the social balance of power between business and civil society, capital and labour. It is only when this balance of power is severely disturbed, that the state either becomes a private tool of some dominant business clique, or, can become relatively independent, as in the case of the fascist state.

So, to the first function of being the protector of the total system under domination of capital, we should add two added functions. It is the protector of civil society, depending on the balance of power and achievements of social movements. And finally it is also the protector of its own independent interests.

We have historically seen three scenarios in the 20th century. Under fascism, the state achieves great independence from the private sector , which may become subservient to the state. Under the welfare state, the state becomes a protector of the social balance of power and manages the achievements of the social movement; and finally, under the neoliberal corporate welfare state, or ‘market state’, it serves most directly the interests of the financial sector.

Each sector also had its key institutions and forms of property.

The state managed a public sector, under its own property.

The private sector , under a regime of private ownership, is geared to profit, discounts social and natural externalities, both positive and negative, and uses its dominance in society to use and dominate the state. Civil society has a certain power through the mechanisms of civil society, but the great majority of its members are in a disadvantaged position because it lacks ownership of the means of production.

However, civil society has a relative power as well, through its capability of creating social movements and associations. Amongst those are religious institutions, civil associations, political parties, the labour movement, identity and sectoral movements, and since the 1960’s mostly, issue-oriented non-profits. In the context of industrial and cognitive capitalism, natural resource commons slowly disappeared, and the institution of the commons became a non-player, in the dual struggle between the private and the state sector, influenced by the relative strength or weakness of civil society and its movements.

Capitalism has historically been a pendulum between the private and the public sector, and the commons mostly irrelevant in the struggles for more or less state intervention.

However, this configuration is changing, in my opinion due to two factors. The first is the environmental crisis, i.e. the endangerment of the biosphere through the workings of ‘selfish’ market players; the second is the role of the new digital commons.

The first factor is of course the continuing damage done to the biosphere, through pollution, resource depletion, endangered biodiversity, climate change, and similar issues. It is becoming increasingly clear that capitalist enterprise, whose DNA makes it incapable to care about externalities, and the infinite growth engine of which it is a part, are endangering the planet. At the same time, the idea of state-owned economies and centralized planning has lots its luster as an alternative. This leads to a revival of the idea of natural resource commons, since studies have cited by Ostrom have shown that no working commons has ever degraded its environment.

The second factor is the emergence of the digital commons. It is the experience of creating knowledge, culture, software and design commons, by a combination of voluntary contributions, entrepreneurial coalitions and infrastructure-protecting for-benefit associations, that has most tangibly re-introduced the idea of commons, for all to use without discrimination, and where all can contribute. It has drastically reduced the production, distribution, transaction and coordination costs for the immaterial value that is at the core also of all what we produce physically, since that needs to be made, needs to be designed. It has re-introduced communing as a mainstream experience for at least one billion internet users, and has come with proven benefits and robustness that has outcompeted and outcooperated its private rivals. It also of course offers new ways to re-imagine, create and protect physical commons.

The combined failure of state fundamentalism in 1989 and so-called ‘free market’ ideology in 2008, coupled with the emergence of the peer to peer practices and the commons, has put this alternative back on the agenda.

Peer production gives us an advance picture of how a commons-oriented society would look like. At its core is a commons and a community contributing to it, either voluntarily, or as paid entrepreneurial employees. It does this through collaborative platforms using open standards. Around the commons emerges enterprises that create added value to operate on the marketplace, but also help the maintenance and the expansion of the commons they rely on. A third partner are the for-benefit associations that maintain the infrastructure of cooperation. Public authorities could play a role if they wanted to support existing commons or the creation of new commons, for the value they bring to society.

Non- or anti-rival commons do not need to worry about the depletion of their stocks, so no trusts are necessary, but they use peer property modalities such as special licenses, which insure the common stock cannot be privatized, and that those that use the commons and improve on it, also improve the commons at the same time. But commons of rival or depletable goods need a trust.

Generally speaking, if a commons is not created as in the case of the digital commons, it is something that is inherited from nature or former generations, given in trust and usufruct, so that it can be transmitted to our descendents. The proper institution for such commons is therefore the trust, which is a corporate form that cannot touch its principal capital, but has to maintain it.

So here we have it, the new triarchy:

  • The state, with its public property and representative mechanisms of governance (in the best scenario)
  • The private sector, with the corporation and private property
  • The commons, with the Trust (or the for-benefit association), and which is the ‘property’ of all its members (not the right word in the context of the commons, since it has a different philosophy of ownership)

The emergence of peer to peer dynamics and the commons does not of course mean that society will change radically from the outset. I believe some different phases can be contemplated. In a first phase, the commons simply emerges as an added alternative. But as it proves it worth and creates the accompanying social movements that create, defend and expand it, it starts becoming a subsector of society, and starts influencing the whole. Eventually, it reaches a phase where society needs to be reformed (let’s call this the parity level). However, it is not realistic that the state form that was created to protect a given class structure, can also serve for a new structure, and therefore at some point, phase transition and transformation will need to occur.

Let us now imagine how a commons-dominated, i.e. after the phase transition, society would look like.

  • At its core would be a collection of commons, represented by trusts and for-benefit associations, which protect their common assets for the benefit of present and future generations
  • The commons ‘rents out’ the use of its resources to entrepreneurs. In other words, business still exists, though infinite growth-based capitalism does not. However, it is unlikely that traditional corporations, wo do not take into account externalities, will still exist without modification. More likely is that the corporate forms will be influenced by the commons and that profit will be subsumed to other goals, that are congruent with the maintenance of the commons. Also likely, these entities will be owned by the producers, and not by abstract capital (we’re talking after the phase transition here)
  • The state will still exist, but will have a radically different nature. Much of its functions will have been taken over by commons institutions, but since these institutions care primarily about their commons, and not the general common good, we will still need public authorities that are the guarantor of the system as a whole, and can regulate the various commons, and protect the commoners against possible abuses. So in our scenario, the state does not disappear, but is transformed, though it may greatly diminish in scope, and with its remaining functions thoroughly democratized and based on citizen participation.

In our vision, it is civil-society based peer production, through the Commons, which is the guarantor of value creation by the private sector, and the role of the state, as Partner State, is to enable and empower the creation of common value. The new peer to peer state then, though some may see that as a contradictio in terminis, is a state which is subsumed under the Commons, just as it is now under the private sector. Such a peer to peer state, if we are correct, will have a much more modest role than the state under a classic state society, with many of its functions taken over by civil society associations, interlinked in processes of global governance.

The above then, this triarchy, is the institutional core which replaces the dual private-public binary system that is characteristic of the capitalist system that is presently the dominant format.


Examples

Barcelona en Comú and the Bologna Regulation

George Dafermos:

"The meteoric rise of new municipalist movements and citizen platforms in the mid2010s like Barcelona en Comú drew the attention of P2PF theorists, who did not take long to start theorizing them as examples of a ‘partner state approach’ (Bauwens et al. 2019: 59-64). What, in their view, sets these ‘citizen platforms’ apart from conventional political parties is the emphasis of their political vision on the commons, as well as the fact that their programs push for ‘openness and democratization of local government institutions and direct citizen participation in local governance’ (Bauwens et al. 2019: 60). To better understand why such citizen platforms constitute examples of strategic importance for a commons transition, let us look at two main examples from the recent literature.

The first example is the Barcelona en Comú citizen platform, which, according to Bauwens et al., is ‘a momentous case that signifies a new form of radical municipalism’ (Bauwens et al. 2019: 60).15 In contrast to previous municipal governments, Barcelona en Comú’s strategy was not to reform the city from the top down, but to transform it from the bottom up. Thus, it put emphasis on enabling citizen participation in its collective processes. Characteristically, by adopting the use of open assemblies and online platforms in the context of drafting its electoral program, it enabled over five thousand people to contribute to that process. And then, in the space of the four years that it governed the city of Barcelona during its first term, it developed a wide spectrum of policies that ‘embrace cooperatives and citizen activism’ along with the commons (Bauwens et al. 2019: 60-61).

But aside from its policies, what truly makes Barcelona en Comú unique is that it constituted in practice a new municipal institution of political authority ‘created by social movements along with political parties to reimagine citizen participation in governance’ (Bauwens et al. 2019: 60). In a sense, citizen platforms like Barcelona en Comú are a hybrid between social movements and political parties. Τhey constitute a new institution of municipal governance that makes it possible to build an alliance between those two forces." (http://heteropolitics.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Digital-Commons.pdf)


Emilia-Romagna

George Dafermos:

"The second example, which serves as ‘a paradigmatic case for developing new institutional processes for public-commons partnerships,’ comes from the region of Emilia-Romagna in Italy and, in specific, from the city of Bologna (Bauwens et al. 2019: 61-62).16 As we mentioned in section 5.4, in the context of the FLOK policy proposals, the partnership model between cooperatives and the local government of Emilia-Romagna was theorized as a real-world manifestation of the Partner State. More specifically, the example of Emilia-Romagna served to showcase the enabling role that the State can play in the development of a strong cooperative economy. Yet, aside from this synergy between the State and cooperatives, what confers particular importance on this part of the world is the so-called ‘Bologna Regulation on Civic Collaboration for the Urban Commons,’ which was adopted by the City of Bologna in 2014.

The Regulation basically allows the citizens of Bologna to ‘claim urban resources as commons and to declare an interest in their care and management’ (Bauwens et al. 2019: 62). Practically speaking, it means that citizens can propose to the City of Bologna to hand over to them the responsibility of managing urban resources such as, for example, unused public buildings which they consider to be badly managed or under-utilized. In that way, the Regulation constitutes a process by which the stewardship of urban resources can be entrusted to the citizenry. At the same time, it exemplifies a partnership model between the institutions of local administration and the commoners in the context of the commonification of city resources. By ‘giving citizens the direct power to produce policy proposals and transform the city and its infrastructure’ (Bauwens et al. 2019: 63) in the direction of the commons, the Regulation, in a sense, represents the basis of a ‘new form of municipal government’ in Bologna. What is more, its popularity has encouraged other Italian cities to follow: ‘for instance, Torino is already planning to adopt the Regulation, while Milan, Rome, and Florence have expressed specific interest’ (Bauwens et al. 2019: 63). According to P2PF theorists, if that happens, it will result in a great shift of power from Capital to the Commons. In a word, it will be a historic step towards a commons transition." (http://heteropolitics.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Digital-Commons.pdf)


More Information

M. Bauwens & V. Kostakis' 2014 book (last chapter of the part three discusses the partner state approach) as well as 2014 article:

  1. Towards a new reconfiguration among the state, civil society and the market
  2. http://p2pfoundation.net/Network_Society_and_Future_Scenarios_for_a_Collaborative_Economy

David Ronfeld on the Partner State concept by Michel Bauwens:

  1. http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/david-ronfeldt-in-dialogue-with-the-partner-state-concept/2011/07/25
  2. http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/david-ronfeldt-engages-with-the-partner-state-2/2011/07/27
  3. http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/p2p-partner-state-theory-vs-timn-network-theory/2011/12/01

Vasilis Kostakis dealing with Partner State Approach:

  1. At the Turning Point of the Current Techno-Economic Paradigm: Commons-Based Peer Production, Desktop Manufacturing and the Role of Civil Society in the Perezian Framework. tripleC 11(1): 173-190, 2013. URL = http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/463/447
  2. The Political Economy of Information Production in the Social Web: Towards a “Partner State Approach”. TUT Press, 2011. URL = http://digi.lib.ttu.ee/i/?610


Key Book

"Civilizing the State displays three segments: how we got this systematic crisis from political and economic powers; what alternatives we can learn from divergent communities; and, finally, the inception of the Partner State".