Twitter Thread on the Role of the State in a Commons-Centric Society
Discussion
Michel Bauwens:
- a thread on the role of the state in a commons-centric society
Part One
1) Markets and states are co-dependent ‘extractive’ institutions, based on competition between firms and states, and have historically, without exception, led to the exhaustion of their heartlands; a situation which global capitalism has created at world scale
2) But markets and states are also essential in a competitive environment, as protectors of ‘their’ people; people without strong market and states, are dominated and exploited by those that have
3) Societies with weak and disintegrating states descend in civil war, not in utopian brotherly countries, because states are the necessary meta-regulation for conflictual and differentiated societies (which may be, actually <is>, a perennial condition)
4) However, historically, there has been a ‘pulsation of the commons’, where periodically, the productive classes have healed their lands through a generative counter-institution, the commons. Smart, pre-modern societies have always included them in their structure, only capitalism has systematically destroyed them
5) See the Japanese Togukawa period, where the last Shogun become Emperor, nationalized the commons of Pure Land buddhism, but kept protecting them. For two centuries, Japan lived within its regional material boundaries, with a stable population.
6) Today, we have 3 contending hegemonies fighting for domination in the global system:
a. a) the western, ‘maritime’, anglo-saxon / European empire, led by its financial class and driven by the anti-systemic short-termism of profit-maximization, in cultural free-fall;
b. b) the Russia-China axis, run by ‘state-centric’ ruling classes, i.e. the ‘warrior’ class, which is nevertheless able to think long term about the systemic logic of society; they are ascending and are keeping ‘woke’ disintegration at bay.
c. c) the Islamic forces, centered around the more moderate Muslin Brotherhood and the more radical Daesh/Al Qaeda, following the spiritual dream of restoration of a traditional society
7) Within the Western ‘empire’, politics has devolved to a choice between
a. a) multicultural (and now identitarian) neoliberalism, with the Davos model of global public-private partnership as governance proposal, supported by imperial NGOs and censorious Big Tech
b. b) the national-populist movements, which want to restore national sovereignty, with national solidarities, and naturally aligned with the Russia-China axis because of shared sovereignism
c. c) the left is divided around the same axis; the identitarian left has become the authoritarian appendage of the 1%, with the populist left fatally weakened by the sirens of identitarianism
d. d) as a result, the left has become the movement of the urban cognitive elite, the Nowhere’s, and the working class, i.e. the Somewhere’s who cannot escape neoliberal de-industrialization, has moved to national-populism
8) Both models have fatal weaknesses, although a return to the nation-state is the more inclusive choice for the majority of the population who refuse both neo-racism and neo-segregationism, and have nothing to gain from it. Most likely, and despite the authoritarian lockdowns of public debate, we should expect a long-term dominance of national-populism is substantial parts of the imperial heartland.
9) In terms of sustainability of both the environment and society, the first neoliberal model leads to further ecological destruction and unsustainable inequality, while the state-model could lead to generalized warfare for scarce resources, and a closure of global cultural exchange
10) Our contention is that a cosmo-local commons-centric order is a more integrative solution for the next stage of human civilization. Explaining that logic is for tomorrow
Part Two
Part 2
1. In our last thread, we established two models currently vying for hegemony: the continuation of the neoliberal model under its Great Reset adaptation, and the national-sovereignty model.
2. We believe we need a third model, which we call cosmo-localism.
a. Cosmolocalism is based on the ‘subsidiarity of material production’ to the local level, smart localization if you want. This is needed because we are spending 3 times as much on transport than on making.
b. Cosmolocalism is based on the generalization of ‘distributed manufacturing’, moving from ‘economies of scale’ (producing more to keep the unit price down), to ‘economies of scope’ (doing more with the same thing by making global knowledge commons available to every distributed producer).
c. Imagine a massive circular economy, maximally using biodegradable materials, maximally using renewables, and thermo-dynamically informed of its planetary boundaries.
d. Cosmo-localism must also be associated with a substantial mutualization of local provisioning systems. For example, it is possible to keep the same level of transport of goods, using electric vans and zero-carbon cargo bikes.
e. At the heart of this revolution is the post-cartesian anthropological revolution taking place in maker spaces, where ‘brahmin workers’ think and design, implement and produce, and reflect. Mind and body, body and technique, individual and community, reorganized at a higher level of complexity.
3. Makerspaces will play a vital role:
a. In bringing together local production with global open design communities, which we also call protocol cooperatives, as ‘keepers of the protocols of cooperation)
b. In creating the culture of cooperation that must embed within itself the culture of excellence and competition (a reversal of cooperation within competitive entities, to differentiation within cooperating entities)
c. In linking the younger digitally-literate generations with the practical minded craft producers
d. In creating ecosystems that unite physical, service, knowledge and technical workers
4. So what is the role of the state ?
a. Currently state-forms keep order in differentiated societies, act as the collective representation of the managerial elites, and act as mediator between the contending and conflictual sociological groups
b. Under neoliberalism, the weakened states prioritized the attractiveness of the local to global capital, in a competition towards guaranteeing profit maximization.
5. Under a commons-centric, trans-local and trans-national social order, geography will not disappear; Cities, regions, bioregions and nation-states will remain in existence, although they will be substantially transformed.
6. The transformed state becomes the enabler of cosmo-localism, by increasing the contributory qualities of its population, and attracting the global knowledge streams.
a. It guarantees contributory equality by augmenting the capacities of its inhabitants
b. It creates multi-stakeholder coalitions that support domain-specific mutualization and localization efforts (there is a fractal equivalent to the local support coalitions that support the local distributed production, and the trans-local support coalitions that support the domain-specific knowledge commons)
7. The challenge of the successor system is the optimal imbrication of the local geographic, the traditional role of local and national governance, and the new layer of virtual nations, neoguilds, and crowdfunded civic capital funds.
8. At the global layer we currently have:
a. The inter-national system of states and its global cooperative infrastructure (UN, World Bank, IMF)
b. The transnational organization of capital flows, and the new imperial forms of Big Tech, which have become functionally equivalent to global state forms
c. But what we are missing, we can call this the commons gap, are trans-local and trans-national commons institutions that can protect the commons and their associated human and non-human communities. Let’s call them the ‘magisteria of the commons. They are the alternative to the public-private partnerships proposed by the Great Reset, because they are centered around the cooperation of trans-local civic forces. The global open design communities and FLOSS Foundations are their possible prefigurations, as are the multiple blockchain-based neoguilds that are now active amongst the digital nomads.
9. The economy will be contributory, recognizing non-commodified contributions, and negative impacts. Impacts are negative contributions. The flows of contributions and impact will be visible through a new global cyber-physical infrastructure of post-capitalist accounting: a combination of contributory accounting, ecosystemic flow accounting showing every transaction in its ecosystemic context, and thermodynamically informed by a direct view of the matter-energy flows
a. This contributory economy will be visible through the new current-sees: a) local currencies protecting the flow of value within particular communities
b. intelligent cryptocurrencies, thermodynamically informed like Fishcoin, used in the particular domains of the trans-national cosmo-local economy (based on mutual credit for human contributions and asset-backed for physical production)
c. reformed nation-state currencies d
d. a global currency marking the thermo-dynamic limits of human production.
10. Distributed, post-blockchain, public ledgers will be the vital tool for this new infrastructure, marked by strong anti-oligarchic protocols and democratic decision-making.
11. Imagine a new integration of the hitherto contending forms of economic and social coordination;
a. At the base level, open ecosystemic which allow for real-time coordination , i.e. stigmergy, the contribution of the open source commons of the last decades
b. Regenerative market forms, that are used for the exchange of scarce material resources and human labor
c. A planning level, which informs all the agents of their thermo-dynamic context so that they can make productive decisions that stay within planetary boundaries
12. In this system, private property is fully honoured but may be complemented by new cooperative forms; common property, for example in the form of trusts, manage the capital of the commons; and for-benefit associations, maintain the infrastructures of cooperation on behalf of the cooperating ecosystems.
13. Who will be the agent of this transformation: the commoners, i.e. all the contributors engaged in value creation.
a. The Somewhere’s will be engaged in the relocalization of the economy at the local level
b. The Everywhere’s are those “Nowhere’s’ which are engaged in bridging their knowledge capacities rooted in their translocal cooperations in global open design communities, at the service of the local production units, much as the guilds operated in medieval times. Whereas the Nowhere’s are currently fusing with the 1% and choosing authoritarian forms, I expect that Everywhere’s will be differentiating from them, by choosing solidarity with the productive classes.
c. The Everywhere’s will benefit from new forms of ‘commonfare’, solidarity mechanisms, which link digital nomadism to the local solidarity structures, for example the social security systems operated by the nation-states, but augmented by additional layers adapted to their translocal conditions.
14. Is this utopian ? It depends, all the seedforms of what I describe exist. Historically, the ongoing ‘pulsation of the commons’ is a good predictor for such return of the commons in conditions of thermodynamic crisis. To be realistic, we have to expect minoritarian groups, in exodus from the declining meta-system, to be the first agents of change.
As the actors of the declining ecosystem engage in costly competition and likely warfare, the alternative will become more and more realistic as a choice to avoid increasing societal catastrophes.