Peer2Politics

Status: this book achieved its third printing in a very short time in the Flanders ; we're looking for an english and other language publishers. French translation is already secured.

“My read is that the idea that the idea of post-scarcity has been with us since the Enlightenment philosophers morphed spiritual millennialism into secular utopianism. Insofar as transhumanism is the thread of Enlightenment bioutopianism bound up with this larger narrative of progress both themes can be found wound around one another for the last two hundred and fifty years. But since the Enlightenment has both an Anglo-American classical liberal wing and an egalitarian and statist wing there has been an ongoing debate over whether post-scarcity will be produced by minarchy and free markets or through collective action, planning and social provision. Transhumanists, like Enlightenment radicals in general, are divided by those arguments.

In the 19th century, the counter-hegemonic forces of labour focused on the democratisation of the state as well as focusing on the redistribution of the surplus value created by labour. Both tasks are by no means obsolete given the evolution towards market state models which have hollowed out popular democracy, as well ans the increased role of debt in human exploitation1. However, what is now needed in addition, for and by 21st century social movements, is the democratisation of the means of monetization. In a contributive economy, use value becomes key, and undermines mechanisms based on labor value alone; value must therefore become pluralistic and diverse, and so must monetary means; while undoubtedly, demonetization will be a good thing in many sectors under a regime of civic domination, we will also need new forms of monetization, and restore the feedback loop between value creation and value capture. As we will argue, the current value regime, which we call ‘cognitive capitalism under the emergence of netarchical capitalism’ (see infra), is unable to redistribute value in a fair way, and is creating not just a crisis of social reproduction for working people, but also a crisis of accumulation of capital. In our article, value and money regimes are placed in the context of the evolution of the overall political economy toward an increasing importance of models based on peer production. We will look at what kind of social system and policy transition, that can solve this crisis of value.

From Occupy to Wikileaks, the anarchist spirit of leaderless resistance, decentralized decision-making and autonomous self-governance, is on the rise everywhere.

Michel Bauwens tells us the opportunities and challenges of the FLOK Society - Free, libre, open-knowledge society-, a project founded by three government institutions in Equador, which aim is to make a transition to an open-knowledge common society.

Peer-to-peer is an improvement over capitalism. The basis idea of the P2P Foundation is that the world is presently based on a combination of two totally wrong assumptions: that the natural material world is infinite (pseudo-abundance), and that we need to create artificial scarcity to insure intellectual-property based progress.

In my lectures, based on my reading of history books during 2003-2004, I use a genealogy of social change and phase transitions from one system to another, that starts with the crisis of a dominant system, creating an exodus or flight out of the system, which in turns leads to a mutual reconfiguration of both managerial and producing classes into a new arrangement which forms the seed of the next stage of society and civilization.

In this new work, Michel continues to propose powerful ideas that not only demonstrate his capacity for synthesis, but more importantly, his capacity to articulate ideas that facilitate points of convergence between broad sectors that are sympathetic to the ideas of production based on the commons.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing my colleagues Carlos Prieto del Campo, Xabier Barandiaran, and Daniel Vazquez from the FLOK Society, a project in Ecuador that aims to create a “free, libre, open knowledge” society. Read on to learn about our plan for influencing structural changes within the country’s economic model using the commons paradigm.

The FLOK Society Project (http://floksociety.org/) is looking for a number of Research Coordinators/Assistants that can help the project through research assistance to support the development of transition strategies, proposals and policies to help Ecuador to create a open commons-based knowledge society that enables ‘good living’ for the Ecuadorian people. The project is funded and coordinated by IAEN, the advanced studies institute of Ecuador, located in Quito, and two associated ministries.