George Pór: My decades old quest for higher meaning reached a new phase with the question, “what is the pattern that connects awakening to our highest potential in individual, organizational,and social life?” I felt if I could discover that pattern, I’d be able to unlock the synergy between the directions of my calling to walk on the paths of personal, organizational, and social evolution.That discovery started in the early years of this century, when I got acquainted with and dove into Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics, frameworks that I could apply to the three domains of evolution that were of most interest to me. The exploration continued when Otto Scharmer introduced me to the U Process in 2005. This is a process that takes a group through cycles, where they can access different perspectives and solutions regarding organizational and cross-organizational (or even personal) issues.

In the years following my first Theory U work-shop, I immersed myself in the life of various“we-spaces,” nourishing environments for accelerated personal and collective development. That made me expand the domain of my pattern-seeking and insert the “community” level between“individual” and “organizational” in the chain that stops at the “social” scale of awakening. 

The understanding of the patterns that connect the edges of our evolution (in those four dimensions), and what drives them, became both my passion and an ever-deepening and endless work-in-progress. What follows is a report reflecting the current state of my quest, at least as much of it that I was able to pull into this writing, as of May 2017.

The four sections of this essay that serve as contexts for outlining the meaning, conditions and practices of “collective awakening” are: What Brings Me to We; Collective Buddha; Wisdom-Driven Enter-prise; and Awakening to a Wiser Society. Exploring and unleashing the synergy of transformative work across all four domains call for an action research.

Read the full essay below:

On the Verge of Collective Awakening by George Pór on Scribd

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Tarnas emphasizes that “although the Cartesian-Kantian epistemological position has been the dominant paradigm of the modern mind, it has not been the only one” and argues that with the work of Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Emerson, as well as Rudolf Steiner, a diversely expressed but consistent alternative epistemology began to emerge based on the “fundamental conviction that the relationship of the human mind to the natural world was ultimately not dualistic but participatory” (Tarnas, 1996, p.433).

This alternative way of knowing does not contradict the Kantian epistemology, but includes and transcends it. It acknowledge Kant’s assertion that all human knowledge of nature or the world is ultimately determined by subjective principles; “but instead of considering these principles as belonging ultimately to the separate human subject, and therefore not grounded in the natural world independent of human cognition, this participatory conception held that these subjective principles are in fact an expression of the world’s own being, and that the human mind is ultimately the organ of the world’s own process of self-revelation” (Tarnas, 1996, p.434). Tarnas explains:

“In this view, the essential reality of nature is not separate, self-contained, and complete in itself, so that the human mind can examine it “objectively” and register it from without. Rather, nature’s unfolding truth emerges only with the active participation of the human mind. Nature’s reality is not merely phenomenal, nor is it independent and objective; rather, it is something that comes into being through the very act of human cognition. Nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind. In this perspective, nature pervades everything, and the human mind in all its fullness is itself an expression of nature’s essential being.” — Richard Tarnas, 1996, p.434

Deep Galaxy Field from the Hubble Space Telescope showing hundreds of galaxies with thousands of star systems in each of them.

Tarnas emphasizes that this participatory epistemology which Goethe, Hegel, Steiner and others, all expressed in different but related ways is not a form of regression to naïve participation mystique. Rather, it is a way of knowing that can be regarded as a dialectical synthesis of the long evolution from the primordial undifferentiated consciousness and the enchanted world of early humans when everything was sacred and alive, on to the dualistic alienation between self and world, mind and body, humanity and nature, to then arrive at a participatory worldview that embraces the paradox of being at one and the same time (seemingly) separate from and fundamentally interconnected with nature.

In being we are an individual self and integral to the whole’s emergence at one and the same time. This participatory epistemology “incorporates the postmodern understanding of knowledge and yet goes beyond it” since “the interpretative and constructive character of human cognition is fully acknowledged, but the intimate, interpenetrating and all-permeating relationship of nature to the human being and human mind allows the Kantian consequence of epistemological alienation to be entirely overcome” (Tarnas, 1996, p.435).

We can acknowledge difference and celebrate diversity without staying trapped in the alienation of separation. The qualities that define the uniqueness of ‘other’ come into being when the self takes a perspective from which to ‘observe’ the world. The perceived separation emerges through a way of seeing, but the world does not cease to be whole. Everything is an expression of the one unifying, living, evolving, and conscious process we can choose to call Nature, Universe, God, the Ultimate, the Whole, or the One. As there is nothing outside it — neither in space nor time since they only come into being through a participatory experience of this process.

For the One to know itself, it has to divide itself in order to get a perspective on itself. This first distinction makes experience and participation possible. We create the illusion of our separation as experiencing subjects in the very act of relating to the unifying process by distinguishing the objects of our experience. Precisely because we can experience Nature we are a part of it and not separate from it.

The perception of separation and experience of self and world — subject and object — are valid and important emergent properties of our participation in and as the One. By embracing the seeming paradox that in our very experience of separation lies the proof of our belonging, we can learn to celebrate diversity and difference as expressions of our underlying unity.

We can find peace and rest in the certainty that with all our striving, going somewhere, and creative passion to co-create a regenerative culture, we are — in every moment — arriving exactly where we need to be, the eternally transforming now of the present moment. Our level of consciousness affects how we perceive this moment. Our collective narrative about who we are and what future we want affects what future emerges.

The French writer Marcel Proust reminded us “the true journey of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.” The journey towards a regenerative culture is about embracing all of Nature as the ground of our being — seeing ourselves and thereby everything with new eyes. Once we do that we will express our experience of this new intimate relationship of belonging to Universe and to Nature in beautifully diverse and creative ways.

“For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its own being. The driving impulse of the West’s masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life, and thus to rediscover its connection to the whole” – Richard Tarnas, 1996, p.443

A bright intellect advancing science and technology, striving for a ‘better world’ and a caring heart feeling deeply connected with all of life, celebrating the perfection of all-that-is, are not mutually exclusive. I have met many women and men who have integrated the gifts of heart and mind on their own path as cultural creatives of a humanity that cares for nature as nature — in humility, creative brilliance, and full recognition of our kinship with all of life.

Our path into the future is one of synthesis. Just as our experience of a separate self is what Einstein called “a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness”, our experience of time is also an illusion. It has us experience the transition towards a regenerative culture as a journey through time rather than as an arriving where we already are: bringing forth a world, by living the questions together.

[This piece is based on a chapter that my editor suggested I cut out of my book Designing Regenerative Cultures published by Triarchy Press in May 2016].

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From this, on an invitation by Rich Carlson to contribute to a book called Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures (a Springer publication), edited by Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape, we produced a book chapter called “P2P and Planetary Futures”, modified for public use as “Toward a Synthetic Theory for P2P Alter-globalization.” The chapter presents peer to peer theory and practice in the context of alter-globalization and planetary perspectives on change. It begins through a short elicitation on peer to peer theory. It then synthesizes a dialogic engagement between peer to peer theory and nine perspectives on planetary change:

• reform liberalism,
• post-development,
• relocalization,
• cosmopolitanism,
• neo-marxism,
• engaged ecumenism,
• meta-industrial,
• autonomism / horizontalism,
• and co-evolutionary perspectives.

The chapter then presents a synopsis of a ground breaking effort in the application of peer to peer theory, the FLOK (Free Libre Open Knowledge) project in Ecuador, which provides a concrete example of P2P as an alter-globalisation practice, providing a experience base which captures the synthetic nature of p2p interventions.

Learnings:

Overall the engagement between peer to peer and alter-globalisation theory is both complex and fruitful. On one hand it does provide a sifting mechanism to situate peer to peer thinking in a broader spectrum of theory and discourse, and sharpens our understanding of where peer to peer thinking sits in the landscape of planetary change. On the other hand it also broadens out the dimensions of peer to peer thinking and theory, and is a vehicle for what can be understood as a an emerging synthetic theory-practice. The following bullet points provide a synopsis of the engagement between discourse and theory, with the warning that to really understand the intersection of alter-globalization and peer to peer theory and practice, one must look at the deeper engagements in the book chapter, modified paper and on the P2P Foundation Wiki. However, in general we can provide these general insights that a P2P perspective:

• Disagrees with the Reform Liberalist approach of a reformed capitalism, e.g. promoting ‘green’ capitalism and accepting ‘netachical’ capitalism, which we feel will ultimately lead to a deeper crisis.
• Sees a synergy with the Post Development discourse through building shared innovation communities and commons, selective de-globalization and the combination of neotraditional and P2P/transmodern approaches.
• Agrees with much of the Relocalization discourse on the need to re-localize much of our production and consumption, but sees a danger in over-romanticizing the local, or in ignoring the role of global solidarity systems and knowledge commons. Smart localization means ‘Cosmolocalization’.
• Agrees with the Cosmopolitan discourse’s emphasis on the need to create post-national structures to solve global problems, but would add the phenomenon of ‘Phyles’ and would de-emphasize CSOs and NGO and re-emphasize the critical role of global collaboration communities.
• Would reframe the neo-Marxist discourse’s commitments to global class formation, into the need for a global coalition of the commons, the forces of social justice (workers and labour movements), the forces for the defense of the biosphere (green and eco-movements) and the forces for a liberation of culture and social innovation (free culture movement), as the constituent blocks of a new hegemony.
• Agrees with the Engaged Ecumenist view on the need for spiritual awakening, but would argue that secular forms of spirituality which emphasize the unity of humankind, nature and cosmos, are as important as the non-secular. A peer to peer spiritual practice is based on a common exploration of the spiritual inheritance of humankind, independent of, but not opposed to, denominational religious affiliations.
• Agrees with the Meta-Industrial and Gender perspective that it is vital to take into account all peoples that have historically been excluded, with the female gender as paradigmatic example. A danger exists, however, for a reformed neoliberalism to embrace gender and sexual minorities and replace them with other inequalities and displacements. Therefore a ‘conscious’ P2P approach is needed, aware of both structural externalities and the internal subjective and cultural characteristics which continue to drive inequality.
• Accepts from Autonomism and Horizontalism the logic of the network form, but argues a global movement requires coherence and needs to draw on the principle of ‘diagonality’. A purely horizontalist orientation, which disowns leadership, embodied responsibility, as well as sequential 4 and programmatic social development, cannot wage an effective struggle in the face of hostile and ruthless state and market forces.
• Sees itself as eminently compatible with Co-evolutionary viewpoint: in particular because the advent of the P2P projects and communities are inherently global in their cooperative dynamics, and coincides with other scale shifts toward a planetary mode of thinking and action.

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Most of the organizations we have inherited today are born out of certain fairly static templates which are, in turn, derived from fairly stolid concepts of human life. Humans have certain stable patterns of organization and desires, and the types of ways in which they bind together are also have certain reappearing patterns, of which corporations are one of the best known.

Somewhat notable around this is the extent to which the corporation, originally born as a’joint-stock company’ has gradually superseded many other forms of human organization. First, it was given its own legal identity as a “person.” Second, it has gradually grown to take over many of the roles of the nation-state, which at least in most incarnations, was a group identity based around a particular ethnicity or notion of nationhood.

It was not always so. The corporation has at its heart a certain economically derived idea of human interaction, which by and large privileges the idea of each autonomous individual pursuing their own self-interest, which then is reified in the code of law in the form of compensation and equity. Most everything you see around you is to some extent derived from these norms. Even folks like Apple, which had a certain internal quasi-religious temperament, have chosen this as their primary form.

There are other historically successful forms. The Daibutsu, for example, was what succeeded the Samurai culture of Japan, which highly leveraged a martial culture with a highly engrained ability of self-sacrifice. In some respects, this might be seen as an even larger degree of ‘corporatism’ in the sense that the communal identity is so strong that the needs of the individual are subsumed, even to the point of death. Admittedly, many of the strongest implementations of such instances happened in cultures where death was not the end, it was merely seen as a gateway to another reality that might be even more scintillating than the one from which one had come.

“Holonics” in looking back at biological systems starts with a very different vantage point that most modern systems. For example, all modern utilitarian systems start with human life and human preferences and, by and large, ignore other species or wider senses of ecology. Holonics, conversely, looks at how these systems organize and converge, and considers humans, and human organizations, as simply a subset of these overall dynamics. The more general principle, which is one that is easily understood by those with a background in computer systems design, is the idea of “nesting.” Fractals and other structures are often infinitely sub-divisible and allow similar structures or patterns to reoccur in the part that occur at the higher system level. These seem to often create systems of incredible complexity and robustness. This is partially to suggest that human cognition and functioning may actually be strongly handicapped by a strong sense of ego, including many of the democratically enforced ideas that place a strong emphasis on the rights of the individual and their sometimes desire to be as loud as possible.

Conversely, other systems, like monarchy, may at times seen to be highly evolved structures in the sense that they can allow very easy nesting and decision-making that, at least ostensibly, represents the parts. Some of the West’s great thinkers have explicitly addressed this idea in the context of Kingship. For example, Aquinas suggested that the king had a secondary “body’ that represented the polis as a whole. In the 20th century this was taken up by Ernst Kantorwitz in the elegant work “King’s Two Bodies.” This is not to say that holonic thinking is explicitly monarchic, or would have embraced any of the formulations that, it merely accepts this as one possible topology. In fact, unlike many modern political formulations (e.g. communism, democracy),which implicitly assume that their political formulation is the ideal and ultimate form, holonics is ultimately more of a descriptive system. Rather than looking for an ideal to promote, it looks for markers of health and energy to optimize for.

Holonic philosophy was originally circulated by Arthur Kostler under the idea concept of “gestalt form,” which is tricky to formulate as it has an idea of form that is something beyond the mere sum of its parts. It almost implies a concept similar to an artist motif, consciousness, or some other binding non-physical mechanism that enables the whole to cohere. A modern clue to this “glue” is found in the work on quantum mechanics, for example Schrodinger’s insights as elegantly described by Stuart Kauffman. It is, for example, only in quantum mechanics that we found how systems that would seemingly decay into entropy can maintain a coherent state.

Ken Wilber, the American metaphysical philosopher, has taken this up in several works. In this modern reformulation, seemingly explicitly derived by expositions of consciousness, it is ‘”love” that serves as the bond and allows these various states to interact with each other. In some cases, this may even allow the non-physical and non-corporal to interact with the material and corporal, allowing for new types of inspiration. Today several works also attempt to apply this to human organizational design, of which the best known is called “Holacracy.” Somewhere between a dungeons and dragons manual and a guidelines for implementing holonic organizations, this has has some traction among small companies that find traditional corporate structures too heavy or flawed in other ways.

Other sets of technologists have explicitly been inspired by blockchain, most particularly the gas of the Ethereum network which promises to fuel new forms of organizations. These people, and the author is one major proponent, believe the relatively low barriers to entry and lack of friction in these networks will allow organizations that mirror self-organizing systems, or swarms. It was the early thought leaders of these communities, themselves throughly versed in political philosophy, that thought of setting up autonomous living units, also known as “holons.” The holon was thought to potentially serve as a focal point, not only for technologists, but also for artists and deep thinkers in other areas.

The Ethereum Foundation ultimately decided to focus more on technology than larger artistic and cultural engagement, but private individuals continued to move forward with this vision. The Palo Alto holon, also known as a Nest, adopted a philosophy that was similar to the Burning Man cultural movement. Monetary incentives were explicitly not emphasized and organization on the basis of other principles was explicitly encouraged. It might be said that holonic philosophy as formulated above is explicitly non-normative and anti-ideological, and builds its concepts of ideas from things like health and strength, including the idea that these principles apply throughout all of the systems. For example, it might make sense to speak of a sick organization in the sense it makes sense to speak of a sick individual. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine a healthy organization that is full of sick people.

There are currently numerous people working to apply some of these principles to help optimize both individuals and organizations for peak performance. ExO Works, a consulting company spun out of Singularity University, applies the broader theories of exponential organizations and sets up small disruptive cells within a larger organization that can identify high leverage areas for disruptive growth. Agentic Group, an organization that has done pioneering work on social organisms, looks explicitly at holonic modes and how they can create a larger immune systems within large organizations. We are probably at the beginning of an arc in which organizations are re-thought within the context of old philosophies and new tools. One mode that may accelerate this is
artificial intelligence. While human institutions may be unlikely to adopt change, especially at the fairly radical level of complete re-organization, there is no reason why artificial intelligence can’t evolve at a much more rapid rate.

Holonics is not a single tool, it is more of a way of looking at life, one that takes a deliberate scientific approach to areas that have often been the subject of ideology. It also deliberately starts the focal point at the smallest unit and deliberately moves up the tree to aggregate measurements. It is revolutionary, in the sense that it potentially has the tools to create replacements to things that we have previously taken for granted. It is solutionary, in the sense that it is highly focused on measurable improvements.

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Part One – Analyzing the global situation

One of the best books I have read in the last ten years is undoubtedly, The Structure of World History, by Kojin Karatani.

Karatani focuses on world history as an evolution of ‘modes of exchange’, i.e. how humans produce, but most of all, ‘exchange’ value. Like Alan Page Fiske, in ‘Structures of Social Life’, Karatani recognizes four basic ways of doing this, and these modes exist at all times and in all places. For example, while the dominance of capitalism is new, markets have existed since very early times; or, if the dominance of the state was new after the replacement of tribal systems, distribution depending on rank pre-existed its dominance. This insight is very important because it allows us to recognize that any political and economic system is not just one modality, but an integration of modalities. As Dmytri Kleiner says, ‘we live in a multi-modal world’, and ‘if the capitalists won, its because there were capitalists already’.

It is quite different to see capitalism as a mere mode of production, and then to declare the state and the nation as mere epiphenomena of capital (as marxists used to do), or to insist (as Karatani does) that capitalism is really a triarchy combining Capital-State-Nation. Though ‘capital’ dominates, the two other modalities are just as essential for the survival and organization of the system as a whole.

The reason that the present system is so strong, therefore, is that these three act in concert, and whenever one is endangered, the two other sub-systems mobilize to its rescue. What I want to do now is to interpret Karatani’s insight by adding another layer of analysis, that of Karl Polanyi, expressed in his landmark book, The Great Transformation.

Polanyi’s book is a history of the emergence and perpetuation of capitalism from the late 18th century to the 1940s, in which he sees a double movement at play. In some periods, the market forces are dominant (the ‘Smithian’ capitalism of the 19th century) but by being dominant, they actively subvert the order of society and dislocate it, putting many people in danger; thus, eventually, society reacts through mobilisations and forces the market back into a more ‘social’ order. For example, the post-war so-called ‘Fordist’ system – think of how in that Fordist period, the labor movement forced a re-alignment of society around the welfare state, and how the counter-revolution of the 80s again deregulated these social protections in favour of the 1%. Since the 1980s we have again seen a impoverishing of the workers and the middle classes in favour of the oligarchic elites. Now let’s recount this dynamic in Karatani’s scheme.

When capital becomes too dominant in the Capital-State-Nation system, the nation, the locus of what remains of community and reciprocity dynamics, revolts and mobilizes, and, if successful, it forces the state to discipline Capital.

Many observers were puzzled that, despite the systemic crisis of 2008, there seems to be a lack of such an expected counter-movement, but that was just social inertia at play. Now, in 2016, we are in the midst of a Polanyian backlash nearly everywhere. Both Trump and Sanders in the current US electoral cycle represent the Polanyian double movement, and are reacting against the effects of neoliberalism and its destruction of the U.S. middle class. Trump represents the ‘national’ business interests, trying to mobilize behind their interests the declining white middle class and workers, while Sanders represent the new generations of workers who are suffering from precarity. The signs of this Polanyian counter-movement are visible nearly everywhere. The U.S. right now is an exciting place to be, where all kinds of social movements are being revitalized, such as the struggle against structural racial bias (Black Lives Matter), the $15 dollar minimum wage movement and its successes, and vibrant anti-gentrification and rent control revival movements. Nevertheless, there is a bug in the (Polanyian) double movement!

And the bug is that ‘Capital’ has developed a trans-national logic and capacity. Globalized and financial neoliberalism has fundamentally weakened the capacity of the nation-state to discipline its activities.

Faced with a all-powerful transnational capitalism, the various nation-state systems have proven pretty powerless to effect any change. Dare to challenge the status quo and paralyzing capital flight is going to destroy your country! This is one of the explanations of the deep distrust that people are feeling towards the current political system, which simply fails to deliver towards any majoritarian social demand.

Look at how the moderately radical Syriza movement in Greece was put under a European protectorate and had to abandon Greek sovereignty; or look at how the more antagonistically-oriented Venezuelan government is crumbling, along with other progressive governments in Latin America. So, while the electorate may vote for parties that promise to change the status quo and eventually bring to power movements like Podemos, a Labour Party under the leadership of Corbyn, or a Democratic Party strongly influenced by the Sanders movement, their capacities for change will be severely restricted.

Our own ‘political’ recommendations in the P2P Foundation, following our work on the Commons Transition, is that progressive coalitions at the city and nation-state level should first of all develop policies that increase the capacity for the autonomy of citizens and the new economic forces aligned around the commons. Simply initiating left-Keynesian state policies will not be sufficient and will, in all likelihood, be met with stiff trans-national opposition from the financial oligarchy. These pro-commons policies should be focused not just on local autonomy but on the creation of trans-national and trans-local capacities, interlinking the efforts of their citizens and ethical and generative entrepreneurs to the global civic and ethical entrepreneurial networks that are currently in development (*). What we are suggesting is that progressive coalitions should focus on post-capitalist construction first and foremost.

To be realistic, except in very rare locales (perhaps in Barcelona under the En Comú coalition or in Bologna), the current progressive movements are still very much wedded to the old industrial Keyneisan models, but as they discover the limits of this strategy, openings towards commons-supportive policies should emerge.

Part Two: Our Necessary Response, from inter-national to trans-local

What necessarily follows from the above analysis, is that the current p2p and commons forces must also focus on the creation of trans-local and trans-national capacities.

What can we do?

Currently, there is an exponential increase in the number of civic and cooperative initiatives outside of the state and corporate world, as documented for example by Tine De Moor in Homo Cooperans for the Netherlands. Most of these initiatives are locally oriented, and that is absolutely necessary and legitimate. It is vital that citizens transition here and now to new models of food and energy provisioning (and any other domain that needs to be changed); from an extractive model that is destroying the environment and undermining society, to generative models that create added value to the shared resource base that citizens are co-constructing everywhere. Ezio Manzini has already taught us that in the networked age, there is no such thing as pure locality, and that these are all SLOC initiatives, i.e. they are Small and Local, but also Open and Connected. We also know that today there are movements that operate beyond the local and use global networks to organize themselves. A good example may be the Transition Town movement, and how it uses networks to empower local groups.

But this is not enough, at least in our opinion. What we are thinking and proposing is the active creation of trans-local and trans-national structures that actively aim to have global effects and change the power balance on the planet.

The only way to achieve systemic change at the planetary level is to build counter-power, i.e. alternative global governance. The transnational capitalist class must feel that its power is curtailed, not just by nation-states which may organize themselves inter-nation-ally, but by transnational forces representing the global commoners and their livelihood organizations.

How can we do this?

Las Indias, a trans-national hispanic community, has introduced the notion of ‘phyles’, inspired by cyberpunk literature and specifically from the book The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.

Phyles are trans-national business eco-systems that sustain a community and its commons. They are already successful for certain ethnic and religious communities that operate on the global level, such as the soufi ‘mourabite’ communities from Senegal, and the indigenous communities of Otovallo in Ecuador, where the trans-migrant income-generating systems are said to represent one third of GDP. These globally operating networks are described in the book by Alain Tarrius entitled, Etrangers de passage. Poor to poor, peer to peer (Editions de l’Aube, 2015).

My argument is that we need to construct phyles for peer production communities. Remember the structure of commons-based peer production most commonly consists of three institutions. One, the contributory community co-creating the shared resources (the open source communities); two, the entrepreneurial coalitions creating livelihoods around those shared resources (the third institution is the ‘for-benefit association’ which manages the infrastructure of cooperation on behalf of the contributors and entrepreneurial coalition; see below). At the P2P Foundation, we favour ‘generative’, ‘ethical entrepreneurial coalitions’, which strengthen commons and their contributory communities and create an economy for them. These generative, trans-local, and trans-nationally operating coalitions already exist. Amongst the best known are Enspiral (originally based in New Zealand); Sensorica (originally based in Montreal, Canada); Las Indias (mostly based in Spain but with many hispanic members from Latin America); and the Ethos Foundation (based in the UK). We believe this new type of trans-local organization is the seed form of future global coalitions of generative entrepreneurs, sustaining global open design communities. Our work in this trend is the eventual creation of a United Phyles Organization, which is represented at the local level by the territorial Chambers of Commons.

We also believe that global civic organizations from the commons sphere should do the same. Our working name for these are the United Transnational Republics.

We are fully aware that these are at present science-fictional notions but if we don’t build them, it will be the extractive multi-national organizations of capital that will rule our world, destroy our planet, and reduce the world population to generalized precarity.

This construction is by no means impossible, and we can see already the construction of many globally nomadic structures as well as global civic mobilizations such as those against climate change. But we can’t just protest and ask the ‘state’ and ‘states’ to do our bidding; we cannot just rely on the weak inter-national structures such as those of the United Nations. We must build ‘counter-hegemonic’ power at the global level. This means building global open design communities, and the global phyles that go with it. At the production level, this means replacing neoliberal globalization, which is destroying the biosphere, with cosmo-local production coalitions. These follow the rule, ‘what is heavy is local, what is light is global’. They combine global open design communities, global open cooperatives and phyles, i.e. organizing coordination systems at the trans-local and trans-national scale, with relocalized distributed manufacturing.

At the political level, this means building territorial assemblies for citizens, the Assemblies of the Commons, and assemblies for generative entrepreneurial entities, the Chambers of the Commons, and to scale them at the national, regional and global levels. This continuous meshworking at all levels is what will create the basis to create systemic change, i.e. power to change, at the level where the destructive force of global capital and its predation of the planet and its people can be countered.

Let me stress that this does not mean a destructive, all-out conflict. Dmytri Kleiner has proposed a strategy of trans-vestment, i.e. the transfer of value from one modality to another. Enspiral has created a vehicle, based on ‘capped returns’, which is able to accept external investments, which are then ‘subsumed’ to the values of the generative coalition. At the P2P Foundation, we have proposed reciprocity-based licenses, which allow the commercialization of open source knowledge on the basis of reciprocity, creating a protective membrane around the ethical phyles. The Assembly of the Commons in Lille is discussing a trans-vestment vehicle for the state, called a General Political License, which allows the assembly to work with the world of politics and government while maintaining the autonomy of the commoners.

This has been done before. ‘If capitalists became dominant, it is because there were capitalists’. The reason our current market society came about is that Europe, being at the margins of Empire, was never able to consolidate centralized power, allowing independent cities where the merchants could exist and expand their power, and this social force became dominant after the fall of the absolute monarchs.

Commoners exist; there’s three billion of us in digital commons, and likely just as many relying on physical commons. They have to follow the same multi-modal strategy, i.e. prefiguratively building their power and influence at all levels, trans-vesting state and market forces to strengthen the commons. Of course, just as laborers did, for this we have to develop a consciousness that we are commoners. Anyone participating and co-constructing shared resources without exploiting them is in fact a commoner. And as the current global system becomes increasingly dysfunctional, more and more of us have to rely on the commons, and not on the market and the state, for our very survival.

If the world of the merchants became the world of Capital-State-Nation, an integration of various modalities under the dominance of the market forces, then the world of the commoners will be a new integration: Commons – Ethical Economy – Partner State. Because we live in a multi-modal world, it does not make sense, and is impossible, to create a ‘totalitarian’ commons world, but we can aim for a commons-centric world in which market forces and state functions (rule and protect, plunder and distribute) are ‘disciplined’ at the service of the commons and the commoners. Like capital did before us, we must build our strength within a multi-modal world. Paradoxically, I believe it is because the ‘extractive’ model is incompatible with our survival that the time for a ‘generative’ transition will come and is in fact not just indispensable, but likely.

The commons is civil society, where citizens contribute to the commons and choose where they invest their care for the common good of their communities, the planet and humanity; the ethical economy consists of the livelihood organizations of the commoners, where generative market practices add value for the commoners and the commons; and the ‘state’ of the commons, presently prefigured by the for-benefit associations which manage the infrastructures of cooperation of the open source communities, is the ‘partner state’ which enables and empowers the capacities of individuals and communities to participate and contribute to the commons of their choice.

This fundamental transformation of our social, political and economic systems requires more than a local approach, it requires trans-local practices and forms of organization.

Let’s get to work!

Notes

• (An interesting parallel would be the ‘Silent Revolution’ in the High Middle Ages, as described by Tine De Moor, which saw an explosion of civic autonomy in the form of city-based guilds and rural land commons agreements, in coalition with the autonomous city authorities and protected by social charters that forced feudal lords to abide by them.)

Photo by Rob de Vries,

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Karatani, in The Structures of World History, makes a key argument that the key underlying structure is less the mode of production, than the ‘mode of exchange’. The mode of exchange point of view, allows him to talk about the Capital-Nation-State nexus, instead of believing that state and nation are epiphenomena (superstructures). For example, this shift in the understanding of structures and their evolution, helps to explain the contradictory nature of capitalism, by stressing the innovation in the field of exchange, based on the invention of neutral exchange and mutual interest, above the naked exploitation of the labor condition, and its continued hierarchical subordination.

Karatani distinguishes four ‘modes of exchange’:

* mode A, which consists of the reciprocity of the gift ;

* mode B, which consists of ruling and protection;

* mode C, which consists of commodity exchange; and

* mode D, which transcends the other three.

The transcend and include aspect of Mode D helps to see how it is:

* Related to the nomadic condition which is entirely about communal shareholding

* Related to the gift economy aspect of the clan societies

* Related to the distributed aspect of the medieval structures

* Honours the advantages of the market and even capitalism Helps us disentangle mode of production and mode of exchange aspects of commons-based peer production

Kojin Karatani in his book, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. Duke University Press, 2014, makes an important theoretical innovation that echoes what we have done in P2P Theory in 2005-6.

In P2P Theory, we use the relational grammar of Alan Page Fiske, which are modes of allocation, i.e. modes of exchange, and what we claimed is that though all four modes exist in most societies at nearly all times, their relative dominance change over time.

Does we have Equality Matching, the gift economy, in tribal societies, but we mentioned that Communal Shareholding was the likely primary mode in small groups; Then we have Authority Ranking in pre-capitalist class societies, Market Pricing under capitalism, and as we argued, Communal Shareholding is slated to become dominant again due to all the changes we see around peer to peer technologies, relational dynamics and peer production. It is the very basic central claim of the work of the P2P Foundation, and what distinguishes us from many others which recognize p2p without recognizing its emerging centrality.

Karatani makes a similar move, by arguing that modes of production do not adequately explain changes in society, but modes of exchange do.

He recognizes

* Mode A, pre-capitalist, pre-class tribal societies,
* Mode B, rule and protection,
* Mode C, capitalism,
* and Mode D, a return to the reciprocity logic of Mode A, but which also transcends and includes features of all previous modes.

This is very close to your own use of integral theory.

Nevertheless, Karatani’s approach solves and illuminates a number of issues.

First of all, he stresses the mistake by Marx of not seeing the difference between the nomadic structures, with the freedom to move and without accumulation of property but with pooling of resources, and the clan-based tribal societies, which use organized direct reciprocity, which binds people to their societies. Thus nomadic societies are in the ‘pure gift’ of pooling (i.e. the Communal Shareholding of Fiske) while the larger and sedentary tribal societies use Equality Matching. In this context, Fiske allows more clarity in distinguish both, than lumping them together in one simple Mode A.

There are a huge number of advantages in more clearly distinguishing the mode of production from the mode of exchange.

For example, in the evolutionary account of cooperation, derived from Edward Haskell, we stress the evolution from adversarial modes (pure class domination through coerced labor), to neutral modes (the markets), to synergistic modes (peer to peer). Obviously as a mode of production, capitalism is still a mode of pure class domination, based on the blackmail of selling one’s labor to a owner of capital, and being in a dependent and subordinated position. But when we look at the mode of exchange, it is impossible not to recognize this innovation and how this profoundly changes the subjectivity of participants, including workers, who must sell their own labor as commodity. It is much more easy to explain to some sceptical left audiences, who don’t want to hear anything remotely positive about markets and capitalism, when one can so usefully distinguish modes of exchange and modes of production, and how how it is actually the motivation from the former, which influences the behaviour in the latter. I think this is a great theoretical advance from Karatani, which we can use. It will also helps us to do the same for peer production itself, what are its ‘mode of production’ aspects, and what are its mode of exchange aspects ? Though I use Fiske’s allocation theory, I mostly talk about peer production as a mode of production, and I believe we can rethink this presentation by differentiating its various aspects.

Another great point from Karatani is that Mode D does not simply go back to Mode A, but actively transcends elements of all three preceding modes; this is crucial, and we have to systematize this insight.

For example,

Related to the nomadic condition which is entirely about communal shareholding Related to the gift economy aspect of the clan societies Related to the distributed aspect of the medieval structures

It is hard to miss that one of the essential features of peer to peer technologies is the ‘liberation from the limitations of time and space’, in other words, it enables and facilitates a universal nomadic existence. This does not mean that everyone will travel everywhere all the time, of course not, but that a ever larger number of people is not bound to their territory, which includes territory in the virtual sense, i.e. “organisation”, and this is now true both for immaterial and material production. As Karatani very precisely links the pooling of resources to the nomadic condition, this re-inforces our original argument about the return of Communal Shareholding as the core mechanism for allocation.

Communal Shareholding in the language of Karatani, is ‘pure gift’, i.e. without the direct reciprocity requirements of the gift economy. Yet, along with CS, we also see a strong revival of gift economy practices. In a pluralistic understanding of Mode D, this makes a lot more sense than in the expectation of a simple return to Communal Shareholding.

Similarly, when Douglas Rushkoff makes the point that the Renaissance which came out of the Middle Ages, looked to the centralization of the Roman Empire as its ideal, and undertook to recreate centralized structures for the next 400 years; but that the Digital Renaissance, looks at, and re-introduces, a lot of the practices and forms of ‘distributed’ and ‘local-oriented’ medieval times, this makes a lot more sense if we see Mode D in this integrative mode.

More importantly, it gives additional justification to our triarchical model of productive commons-organized civil society, cooperative marketspace, and enabling ‘partner’ state models (which we did not invent, but deduce from the actual institution-building of p2p communities all over the world). If Mode D is integrative, it makes a stronger argument that market dynamics AND advantages cannot just be denied and abolished, but can be used in a new context. Pooling based market forms, like Community-Supported Agriculture models, described and defended by Silke Helfrich for example, also make a lot more sense. But also the continued existence of the state.

Karatani says the capital-nation-state trinity is so strong, because each will always come to support when the other ones are threatened. He sees the return of Mode D as the realization of Kant’s dream of a world republic, the only model that avoid new world wars by regional blocs fighting for scarce resources.

P2P shows the key role that trans-local, trans-national productive communities, including the global ethical entrepreneurial coalitions that are emerging, can play in a trans-national scenario, as I don’t believe personally that a merely inter-national republic can work. Faced with the strength of that trinity, the focus on both the local-urban level, and the transnational level, makes a lot of sense as a transitional strategy, since the attempts to change the capitalist nation-state, seem so impossible today. Karatani makes the strong and in my view realistic point, that the community integrating functions of the nation are not likely to disappear, nor the redistribution functions of the state.”

Photo by perceptions (off)

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In the preface to his major book, “The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange.”, published by Duke University Press in 2014, he makes the exact same argument I made in P2P and Human Evolution in 2005-6. He similarly distinguishes, using a different terminology, the gift economy reciprocity (called Equality Matching by Alan Page Fiske), characteristic of clan societies, from the pure gift of pooling (called Communal Shareholding by Fiske), which is characteristic of nomadic society. And it is all grounded in a large body of evidence of anthropological research and findings. Karatani similarly hypothizes an emerging “Mode D” of exchange, which is again based on pooling, AND, this is a illumination for me, on renewed nomadism. Think about it, the major and principal effect of internet technology is to massively enable and allow nomadism! In those conditions, the author shows, contributory pooling as an exchange mechanism ‘naturally’ emerges as a necessity.

I am majorly excited to read this important book and if you have any interest in the theoretical and historical grounding of the P2P transition, then it is strongly recommended for you as well!

Karatani Kojin, from the Preface:

“This book is an attempt to rethink the history of social formations from the perspective of modes of exchange. Until now, in Marxism this has been taken up from the perspective of modes of production— from, that is, the perspective of who owns the means of production. Modes of production have been regarded as the “economic base,” while the political, religious, and cultural have been considered the ideological superstructure. In the way it splits the economic from the political, this view is grounded in capitalist society.

Accordingly, the view runs into difficulties in trying to explain pre-capitalist societies: in Asiatic or feudal societies, to say nothing of the clan societies that preceded these, there is no split between political control and economic control. Moreover, even in the case of contemporary capitalist societies, viewing the state and nation as simply ideological superstructures has led to difficulties, because the state and nation function as active agents on their own. Marxists believed that ideological superstructures such as the state or nation would naturally wither away when the capitalist economy was abolished, but reality betrayed their expectation, and they were tripped up in their attempts to deal with the state and nation.

As a result, Marxists began to stress the relative autonomy of the ideological superstructure. In concrete terms, this meant supplementing the theory of economic determinism with knowledge derived from such fields as psychoanalysis, sociology, and political science. This, however, resulted in a tendency to underestimate the importance of the economic base. Many social scientists and historians rejected economic determinism and asserted the autonomy of other dimensions. Even as it led to increased disciplinary specialization, this stance became increasingly widespread and accepted as legitimate. But it resulted in the loss of any totalizing, systematic perspective for comprehending the structures in which politics, religion, philosophy, and other dimensions are interrelated, as well as the abandonment of any attempt to find a way to supersede existing conditions.

In this book, I turn anew to the dimension of the economic. But I define the economic not in terms of modes of production but rather in terms of modes of exchange.

There are four types of mode of exchange:

* mode A, which consists of the reciprocity of the gift ;

* mode B, which consists of ruling and protection;

* mode C, which consists of commodity exchange; and

* mode D, which transcends the other three.

These four types coexist in all social formations. Th ey differ only on which of the modes is dominant. For example, in capitalist society mode of exchange C is dominant. In Capital, Marx considered the capitalist economy not only in terms of modes of production but also in terms of commodity exchange — he theorized how the ideological superstructure could be produced from mode of exchange C. Particularly in volume 3 of Capital, he took on the task of explicating how a capitalist economy is above all a system of credit and therefore always harbors the possibility of crisis.

But Marx paid only scant attention to the problems of precapitalist societies.

It would be foolish to criticize him on this though. Our time and energy would be better spent in explaining how ideological superstructures are produced through modes of exchange A and B, in the same way that Marx did for mode of exchange C. That is what I have attempted in this book. One other question I take up is how a society in which mode of exchange A is dominant emerged in the first place.

Since Marcel Mauss, it has been generally accepted that mode of exchange A (the reciprocity of the gift ) is the dominant principle governing archaic societies. But this principle did not exist in the band societies of nomadic hunter-gatherers that had existed since the earliest times. In these societies, it was not possible to stockpile goods, and so they were pooled, distributed equally. This was a pure gift , one that did not require a reciprocal countergift. In addition, the power of the group to regulate individual members was weak, and marriage ties were not permanent. In sum, it was a society characterized by an equality that derived from the free mobility of its individual members. Clan society, grounded in the principle of reciprocity, arose only after nomadic bands took up fixed settlement. Fixed settlement made possible an increased population; it also gave rise to conflict with outsiders.

Moreover, because it made the accumulation of wealth possible, it inevitably led to disparities in wealth and power. Clan society contained this danger by imposing the obligations of gift – countergift . Of course, this was not something that clan society intentionally planned. Mode of exchange A appeared in the form of a compulsion, as Freud’s “return of the repressed.”

This, however, led to a shortcoming for clan society: its members were equal but they were no longer free (that is, freely mobile). In other words, the constraints binding individuals to the collective were strengthened.

Accordingly, the distinction between the stage of nomadic peoples and that of fixed settlement is crucial. As is well-known, Marx hypothesized a “primitive communism” existing in ancient times and saw the emergence of a future communist society as that primitive communism’s restoration after the advancement of capitalism. Today this stance is widely rejected as a quasi-religious historical viewpoint. Moreover, if we rely on anthropological studies of currently existing primitive societies, we are forced to reject this idea of primitive communism. We cannot, however, dismiss the idea simply because it cannot be found empirically — nor should we. But Marxists have largely ducked this question.

The problem here is, first of all, that Marx and Engels located their model of primitive communism in Lewis H. Morgan’s version of clan society. In my view, they should have looked not to clan society but to the nomadic societies that preceded it. Why did Marx and Engels overlook the difference between nomadic and clan societies? This was closely related to their viewing the history of social formations in terms of mode of production. In other words, when seen from the perspective of their shared ownership of the means of production, there is no difference between nomadic and clan societies.

When we view them in terms of modes of exchange, however, we see a decisive dif erence — the difference, for example, between the pure gift and the gift based on reciprocity.

Second, when seen from the perspective of modes of exchange, we are able to understand why communism is not simply a matter of economic development nor of utopianism, but why it should be considered instead the return of primitive communism. Of course, what returns is not the communism of clan society but that of nomadic society. I call this mode of exchange D. It marks the return of repressed mode of exchange A at the stages where modes of exchange B and C are dominant. It is important to note, though, that clan society and its governing principle mode of exchange A themselves already constitute the return of the repressed: in fixed settlement society, they represented attempts to preserve the equality that existed under nomadism. Naturally, this did not arrive as the result of people’s desire or intention: it came as a compulsory duty that offered no choice.

Mode of exchange D is not simply the restoration of mode A — it is not, that is, the restoration of community. Mode of exchange D, as the restoration of A in a higher dimension, is in fact only possible with the negation of A.

D is, in sum, the restoration of nomadic society. Yet this too does not appear as the result of human desire or intention, but rather emerges as a duty issued by God or heaven or as a regulative idea. In concrete terms, D arrives in the form of universal religion, which negates religions grounded in magic or reciprocity.

But there is no need for mode of exchange D to take religious form. T ere are cases where mode of exchange D appeared without religious trappings — in, for example, Ionia from the seventh to the sixth centuries BCE, or Iceland from the tenth through the twelfth centuries CE, or the eastern part of North America in the eighteenth century. What these share in common is that all were poleis formed by colonialists: covenant communities established by persons who had become independent from their original states or communities. In them, if land became scarce, rather than perform wage labor on another person’s land, people would move to another town. For this reason, disparities in landed property did not arise. Because people were nomadic (free), they were equal. In Ionia, this was called isonomia.

This meant not simply formal political equality but actual economic equality.

Of course, these communities were all short-lived: they ended when they reached the limits of the space available for colonization. These examples show that communism depends less on shared ownership of the means of production than on the return of nomadism.

But in actuality, all around the world socialist movements that aimed to bring about mode of exchange D were generally carried out under the guise of universal religions. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, socialism became “scientific” and lost its religious hue. But the key question here is not whether socialism is religious; it is whether socialism intends mode of exchange D. Socialism in the twentieth century was only able to realize societies dominated by modes of exchange B and C, and as a result it lost its appeal. But so long as modes of exchange B and C remain dominant, the drive to transcend them will never disappear. In some form or another, mode of exchange D will emerge. Whether or not this takes religious form is unimportant. This drive is fundamentally rooted in that which has been repressed from nomadic society. It has persisted throughout world history, and will not disappear in the future— even if we are unable to predict the form in which it will appear.”

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“As we evolve we begin to identify with larger and larger systems, recognizing the nested nature of subsystems and the uncountable interconnections between them. Using the terminology from Reed, we can see this process of transforming identity (role & relationship) as a function of expanded human consciousness and pattern harmonization. The more aware we become of how nature works, the more clearly we recognize that we are an integral part of the planetary system (Gaia). The separation between man and nature perpetuated by those lingering narratives is wilting away — though there is a lot of important work to be done to send it on its way once and for all.

The above graphic highlights what Bill Reed calls “Ecological Strategies” in the movement from a degenerating to a regenerating function of human activity.

Let’s take a quick look at what these terms represent:

Biophilia means “an urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” The biophilia hypothesis states that “there is an instinctive bond between human beings and other living systems.” In other words, by nature we long to be surrounded by life — plants, animals, and other human beings. Here we may still see ourselves as separate from nature, but we recognize our contact with it as an important part of our overall health.

Biomimetics looks to nature as inspiration for human design and development — imitating nature to produce the built environment and to create man-made systems. Nature is a guide and a model from which we gain important insights about what serves us best. These insights are derived from an understanding of how nature works. Again, still perhaps seeing “nature” as a separate concept from that of humanity and civilization.

In the restorative paradigm a role for humanity in nature emerges. We see nature as a system with an inherent self-organizing capability — and our job is to return it to its natural state. Once we have succeeded in doing so, and in what Reed calls a “finite agreement,” the human’s job is done. Time to move on and let nature do its thing.

With regenerative development and design the role of the human being merges with nature. Nature is no longer seen as an “other” — it loses its usefulness as a distinctive concept. Here the purpose of humanity aligns with the purpose of the planetary system itself, having an evolutionary function that looks to continuously improve through feedback loops, learning, and adaptation toward ever-increasing levels of diversity, resilience, beauty, abundance, etc.

In other words, we are not here by accident. We have an important role to play and it’s time for us to step into it, to transform the narratives that have cast us as separate from an environment designed to serve us.

Those operating from the regenerative paradigm have a deep-seated belief in the potential of the human race — that we are capable of much more than merely “minimizing our impact” or “leaving no trace.” In fact, and contrary to popular belief, many indigenous peoples understood this well and actively managed the land to create greater states of health than would have been if left alone.”

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“Hanauer and Liu (write) on the existing economic story and what they call the “machinebrain” rationalistic approach.

It’s fairly standard fare:

– Call it the “Machinebrain” picture of the world: markets are perfectly efficient, humans perfectly rational, incentives perfectly clear and outcomes perfectly appropriate. From this a series of other truths necessarily follows: regulation and taxes are inherently regrettable because they impede the machine’s optimal workings. Government fiscal stimulus is wasteful. The rich by definition deserve to be so and the poor as well.

The roots of a circular economy, in contrast, lie with those thinkers and designers who recognise that:

– Economies, as social scientists now understand, aren’t simple, linear and predictable, but complex, nonlinear and ecosystemic.

The source for this quote is still Hanauer and Liu. It’s a matter of science, that is what economies are and they follow the ‘rules’ of feedback rich systems. That’s still a very dry, hardly understandable description. What is needed is a suitable metaphor group – a more consistent metaphor, which is more explicit than for example; “taking insights from living systems” which is common in many overviews of the circular economy.

Here is Hanauer and Liu’s suggestion:

– An economy isn’t a machine; it’s a garden. It can be fruitful if well tended, but will be overrun by noxious weeds if not.

In this new framework, which we call Gardenbrain, markets are not perfectly efficient but can be effective if well managed. Where Machinebrain posits that it’s every man for himself, Gardenbrain recognizes that we’re all better off when we’re all better off. Where Machinebrain treats radical inequality as purely the predictable result of unequally distributed talent and work ethic, Gardenbrain reveals it as equally the self-reinforcing and compounding result of unequally distributed opportunity.

Gardenbrain challenges many of today’s most conventional policy ideas.

One almost visceral reaction to the notion of a garden as a metaphor, let alone ‘Gardenbrain’ as a descriptor is that it reduces or diminishes the human from being in charge to a kind of stewardship. It means a kind of humility, working with the system, being in partnership – it’s somehow ‘fuzzy.’ A garden is also, well, just an old man’s [sic] pastime, an irrelevance surely in the big picture of a technological, fast moving increasingly urban world run by technocrats managing, controlling complicated systems. It’s potentially a big turn off.

Perhaps that’s a bit harsh, but one reality for the ‘machinebrain’ orientated for sure…let’s go on a little. Looking into Hanauer and Liu’s ‘Gardenbrain’ reveals these consequential reframings
Under the prevailing assumption, regulation is an unfortunate interruption of a frictionless process of wealth creation in a self-correcting market. But Gardenbrain allows us to see that an economy cannot self-correct any more than a garden can self-tend. And regulation — the creation of standards to raise the quality of economic life — is the work of seeding useful activity and weeding harmful activity.

Is it possible to garden clumsily and ineffectively? Of course. Wise regulation, however, is how human societies turn a useless jungle into a prosperous garden. This explains why wherever on earth one finds successful private companies, one also finds a well-regulated economy, and where regulation is absent we find widespread poverty.

OK, this sounds much like the circular economy, advocating “optimising system conditions” rather than interfering in the detail or seeking to micro manage anything. Taxes are reframed too, of course. Compare the existing ‘story’. Taxes take…“money out of the economy. It is not just separate from economic activity, but hostile to it. This is why most Americans believe that lower taxes will automatically lead to more prosperity.”

But for Gardenbrain types this question illuminates the key role of circulation:

– …taxes as basic nutrients that sustain the garden. A well-designed tax system — in which everyone contributes and benefits — ensures that nutrients are circulated widely to fertilize and foster growth. … Jobs are the consequence of an organic feedback loop between consumers and businesses, and it’s the demand from a thriving middle class that truly creates jobs. The problem with today’s severe concentration of wealth, then, isn’t that it’s unfair, though it might be; it’s that it kills middle-class demand. Lasting growth doesn’t trickle down; it emerges from the middle out.

It’s perfectly obvious; perfectly consistent, as all effective deployment of metaphor should be. Feedback rules; feedback reinvigorates. It is restorative and regenerative as with “circular economy” aspirations around materials, but explicitly applied to how jobs are created and the process of tax and invest. Note here that it’s not “tax and spend” since ‘spend’ has connotations of spendthrift, to lose, to diminish the organism [“I’m spent”], of waste. Hanauer and Liu write ‘The word spending means literally “to use up or extinguish value,”’

Making sure there is enough demand for products and services is therefore an obligation of governance and is part of creating effective economic flows.

This flows metaphor is, furthermore, deployed in a very interesting way:

Government no more spends our money than a garden spends water or a body spends blood. To spend tax dollars on education and health is to circulate nutrients through the garden.”

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By contrast, ‘left integralist’, such as Joe Corbett and my own ‘p2p theoretical’ approach, claim the next phase is marked by the importance of collaborative commons.

Joe Corbett makes the argument very cogently:

“One often hears within integral circles of the developmental oscillation between individual and collectivist orientations, so that, for instance, whereas modernity is characterized by an individual achievement ethos, postmodernity is characterized by a collectivist ethos, and therefore post-postmoden integral being and consciousness will be characterized once again by a more integrated individualist ethos, presumably one in which each individual becomes an innovative entrepreneur leading the way in a brave new world of John Galtian self-sufficiency and superhuman individualism.

My contention is that this vision is patently false and is based on a misunderstanding of postmodernism (green) that will require a complete reorientation of the direction and goals of the integral leadership and its community.

As Jurgen Habermas and Zygmunt Bauman say, postmodernity is not so much a transcendence of modernity as it is a hyper-modernity in which the goals and values of modernity are extended to people and society where once they were limited and circumspect. Women and minorities are granted rights once denied to them, and the truths of authority (from the white male heterosexual and imperialism to science itself) are put under the spotlight and hollowed-out of their sacred essence.

In a word, under postmodernity the myth of the given is dethroned, and with it the enlightenment myth of progress through the application of science and reason to social problems is exposed as a gender, class, and racial fraud that the white European male has imposed as a narrative on the world for his own advancement and self-aggrandizement. What began as a critique of religious superstition and authority under modernity ends in a critique of scientific materialism and political-economic authority under hyper-modernity (postmodernity).

Thus, what characterizes postmodernity above all is a kind of relativism that lacks moral and epistemological authority beyond the individual in what Norman O. Brown has called the loss of the Father, where there is no center, and self-identity is the only anchor left for individual stability and existential grounding. The vacuum is filled with narcissistic consumerism and the pursuit of money as an infantile anal-fecal fixation, patriotic flag-waving and its variant in vicarious identification with sports teams, and the endless other quasi-individual tribal identifications (gender, race, new age religion, etc.) offered as postmodern forms of self-identity in a factionalized anarchy of cultural centerlessness.

These are the cultural conditions that then make possible the seamless economic and political transformation into neoliberalism, where the institutional and material conditions of a war of all against all can be implemented without resistance for the benefit of the few. This is the current post-enlightenment period of plutocracy we now find ourselves in, where the democratic and scientific foundations of modernity have all but melted into thin air.

Notice that the era of postmodernity is not characterized by a collectivist ethos, but rather by individual narcissism and quasi-individual tribalism. Postmodernity is the logical conclusion of a modern individual achievement orientation, not its transcendence. Therefore, what comes after postmodern-green isn’t the hyper-individualized ethos of innovative entrepreneurialism, which is precisely the neoliberal conditions for a war of all against all, but a collectivist ethos—not of mass obedience to a central authority, but networks of p2p individuals working on common projects for the collective good, otherwise known as (integral) socialism.

If there is one thing holding back the development of the integral vision into a reality, it’s not a mean green-meme bent on social division and deconstruction, but the continued belief and practice of integral leaders and the integral community that the next integral stage of development is characterized by superhuman individualism in the oscillation of the spiral away from “collectivist” green. On the contrary, once integral leaders and the integral community come out of the delusion of superhuman individualism, they will realize that the only solution to first tier problems isn’t self-interested narcissism and tribalism but a collectivist vision of networked individuals working toward common purpose and universal human interests.”

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