Achieving sustainability without participation is an impossibility!!

One of my key arguments regarding an eventual transition to a new form of society that is based on peer to peer as its core logic, which I consider a ‘conditional inevitability’, is a hypothetical but hopefully likely attempt, to a new global reform towards a green/natural capitalism. My general argument is that such an attempt at sustainability, is precisely what will create room for more participation, and therefore, for a maturation of peer to peer processes and mentalities, until that time as they are ready to become the dominant logic themselves, with the market (but not infinite growth capitalism), as a subsystem.

I would like to point to two articles which I feel go in the same direction, re-inforcing my conviction.

The first is an editorial by William Easterly in the Financial Times, which discusses a recent report of the World Bank on development, and concludes that the era of development expertise is over. The gist is that in a morphogenetic society (where everything constantly changes), nobody can really be an expert, and what is needed is the involvement of the seven billion inhabitants of the planet. But what the author may imply by citing Hayek, is perhaps the total marketization of society? So at the bottom of this article, I’d like to restate the differences between market as a distributed mechanism, and true p2p/participatory processes originating in civil society.

The second item is the Spring 2008 issue of the journal Design Issues, dedicated to ‘design for sustainability’. I can’t quote from a pdf document, but please read the first page, from the introduction by the editors.

It clearly states that design for sustainability cannot be a top-down process, but must necessarily involve large scale participation of all the people who need to redesign their processes for living. It needs transdisciplinary design dialogues, in which designers can be instigators and facilitators, but cannot replace the development of visions by the affected communities.

So both articles make the same point. If we are to reform the world system to sustainability, and even though at this current stage such reform will likely take the form of some kind of greener capitalism, it is simply a requirement that participatory processes are part and parcel of such a reform.

So just as the 18th century created the conditions for parity between the declining nobility and the rising merchant class, the ‘natural capitalism’ era will necessarily create the conditions between the decline of totalitarian market ideology and practice (infinite growth is an impossibility in a limited physical environment, and the market does not function in the context of immaterial abundance where there is no tension between supply and demand) and the rising power of peer producing communities, for parity to eventually occur.

Whether the next step, the dominance of peer to peer as core logic, necessarily occurs then depends on our assessment of the feasibility of infinite growth in a physically-limited environment.

Here is the quote by Easterly, followed by my argumentation on how peer to peer distribution differs from market distribution.

William Easterly:

“Why should we care about the debacle of a World Bank report? Because this report represents the final collapse of the “development expert” paradigm that has governed the west’s approach to poor countries since the second world war. All this time, we have hoped a small group of elite thinkers can figure out how to raise the growth rate of a whole economy. If there was something for “development experts” to say about attaining high growth, this talented group would have said it.

What went wrong? Experts help as long as there are useful general principles, such as could be established by comparing low-growth and high-growth countries. The Growth Commission correctly pointed out that such an attempt to find secrets to growth has failed. The Growth Commission concluded that “answers” had to be country specific and even period specific. But if each moment in each country is unique, then experts cannot learn from any other experience – so on what basis do they become an “expert”?”

On the market vs. p2p dynamics (Bauwens):

Essentially, markets are a form of swarming, and lack any social awareness, but parties interact starting from their own self-interest, with no consciousness of the whole, no extended circle of care. Activities have no objects that transcends the interested parties. Market dynamics are like insect dynamics, with prices acting as stygmergic signs that guide behaviour, the individual has no intentionality beyond his own. Really existing ‘capitalist’ markets, dominated as they are by large multinational companies, have a decentralized, and not distributed dynamic. And of course, the very pricing mechanism works in an exclusionary fashion against those who do not have money.

True peer to peer dynamics take place in distributed systems, and are permission-less, not dependent on powerful obligatory hubs (hubs are chosen/created through cumulative individual action). Participants have the intentionality and awareness that they are either participating in a sharing mechanism, or in a commons mechanism, and therefore human intentionality is integrated in p2p dynamics, having social objects that transcend the individual. P2P systems are designed, to converge individual and collective interests, unlike markets that are based on the hope that individual interests will converge into a collective interest, but we know that this mechanism does not function without regulation and external control from the state or civil society. Historically unregulated markets have always resulted in a strengthening of the domination of the already powerful as it has done in the last 30 years of neoliberalism, to an unprecedented extent. In peer to peer, the two wins of the participants are augmented by the win of the group project, and the benefit of the group for the whole society through the distribution mechanism which guarantees universal availability through sharing or a commons. Motivation for peer to peer is intrinsic positive, i.e. deriving passion, rather than ‘extrinsic positive’ (self-interest or greed, motivated by the external money mechanism). Finally, in terms of the cooperation mechanism it is not neutral as capitalism is (I win, you win as rarely achieved best hypothesis), but synergistic in its very design.

For all these reasons, the market cannot be equated with a peer to peer mechanism, as it operates in peer production and governance processes.