Erik Douglas continues his discussion, with further commentary in these “Notes on a P2P Approach to the State”:
Michel Bauwens (14/10/2006) makes several remarks about a P2P approach to the state and comment accordingly below:
a. “The state has existed since the dawn of civilization and the class society, and is inevitable in a condition of inequality and plurality.” This corroborates position 1
b. “The democratic state is not only an expression of the interest of the ruling strata, but reflects the balance of forces that have imposed democracy and social welfare (and the amount of integration of the interests of the popular majorities reflect the ebb and flow of the interests of the latter; neoliberalism has deeply changed that balance to the detriment of the larger population, and neoconservatism would do it even more.)”
This begs the definition of a “democratic state” – an issue I am attempting to address directly in this article. It would be fairer, to my mind, rather to refer to such as “liberal democracy” in this regard.
c. “If the state exists and is inevitable for a long time to come, it might as well be used to support the majority of the population rather than be an instrument of corporate welfare; however such usage must be subsidiary to the possibilities of autonomous and distributed functioning of civil society, to which the state can play the role of enabler; rather than be an agent of corporate welfare and privilege; the state must be at least a neutral arbiter between the market and civil society related commons; and preferable must be the supporter of the latter.”
d. Thus, we endorse the state for pragmatic reasons if not on normative grounds. However, the state qua centralized authority should not have primacy over more decentralized, autonomous organizations. In its active capacity, the state should act only as an enabler, promoter and facilitator for these other organizations. In general, the state should play a passive role of peace keeper and judicious arbiter of conflict between these respective parts of the society.
In this last, Bauwens advocates for a leftist interpretation of the states passive role in that it should tend to side with the civil society and related commons, but he remains open to a centrist “neutral” kind of law.
“The centralized modes of operation that have been historically been associated with the state, and especially with the alternative Soviet model, are most of the time no longer appropriate for the running of public affairs; decentralization and distribution of state functions must be attempted, and these are not to be confounded with market-based privatization. Alternative commons-based models, such as the trust-based management of public resources, must be attempted.”
Strongly endorses non-capitalist forms of decentralized state functions.
e. “The sphere of autonomous production, participation and self-government must be extended, in line with the possibilities inherent in the peer production and peer governance model. Such autonomous governance can exist everywhere where more egalitarian distributed network models, based on a priori consensus of common goals, have proven to be viable.”
Thus, the polis should be constructed so that it supports more distributed P2P economic models of production and consumption.
f. “As society is not a distributed network based on such a priori consensus, but a decentralized play of competing groups with varying interests and convictions, it is unlikely that the representative model can be completely superseded; but the current format of representative democracy is in a deep crisis, and has become beholden to corporate interests; so it must be profoundly reformed and augmented by multiple forms of peer-informed, partnership-based multi-stakeholder governance; and exist within a sphere that is dominated by peer governance of an increasingly autonomous civil society.”
So, representative democracy is problematic but perhaps not yet redundant, thus suggesting various mixed participatory models of the polis.