A debate such as the one we have with Dmitry Kleiner, highlights the specificity of the approach of the P2P Foundation, which is based on plurarity, not just recognizing the plurality of the world, but the plurarity of possibilities and desires to change it. So within the general framework of being in favor of peer to peer practices, how do we go about promoting it?
In my own formulations, I usually say that I’m in favour of a pluralist economy, based on a core of commons-based peer production, surrounding by layers of a strengthened gift economy, within a reformed market and a reformed state.
So, I’m particularly interested on Dale Carrico’s take on the latter topic, which he recently eloquently explained, so I’m reproducing it in full:
Why I Want to Democratize the State Rather than Smash It
I. Violence Is Ineradicable in Plurality
(a) There will always be an uneven historical development and unequal material distribution of resources, capacities, information, and luck.
(b) The relative beneficiaries of these unequal distributions will have strong reason to maintain and consolidate their hold on these benefits.
(c) It is always possible and usually easy for human actors to retrospectively rationalize misconduct that serves what they take to be their interests.
From all the above, there will be an irresistible tendency in any given social order to make recourse to violence and deception to maintain and consolidate its contingent terms, especially on the part of its imagined beneficiaries.
State apparatuses arise out of the violence inhering in plurality, sometimes expressing and facilitating it, sometimes resisting and ameliorating it.
II. The Necessity (and Impossibility) of Legitimate Violence
In his immensely influential essay “Politics as a Vocation,� Max Weber proposed a definition of the state that has assumed foundational force in especially North Atlantic political thought. For Weber, the state is the constellation of institutions and organizations definitively empowered by a monopoly on the legitimate recourse to coercion to maintain a given social order within a particular territory under specified conditions.
Needless to say, in almost every historical instance hitherto states have deployed their putatively “legitimate� coercion in the service of established interests and privileged elites.
In proper democracies, to the contrary,
(a) states deploy coercion legitimately always only to frustrate its illegitimate deployment in the commission of violent crimes, the infliction of duress, the commission of fraud, or in the violent adjudication of disputes
(aa) or maintain the adequate appearance of doing so;
(b) states deploy coercion in ways that comport always with the consent of majorities of the governed
(ba) or maintain the adequate appearance of doing so; and
(c) states maintain social order in ways which conspicuously facilitate the achievement of general health, welfare, and security through the administration of public interests, the regulation of commerce, and the fairest distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific development to all its stakeholders
(ca) or maintain the adequate appearance of doing so.
III. End-Point or Starting Point?
Anyone of an anti-authoritarian bent will note the conspicuous vulnerability to devastating abuse inherent in this institutional legitimization of coercion.
(a) This recognition is pretty much the starting point for mature democratic political thinking.
(b) Typically, this recognition is the end-point for conservative and facile libertarian political thinking, or, more to the point,
(ba) the insistent re-assertion of this recognition provides the characteristic and in fact indispensable gesture for the ongoing project of anti-democratic rationalization that passes for conservative and libertarian political thinking.”
Comment sent by email by Ted Lumley:
The aboriginals did not require ‘central institutions’. In terms of sustaining dynamical balance, though there was periodic conflict, they perhaps fared better than modern ‘states’. We can say, of course, that the population was much sparser and distributed, certainly moreso than in europe.
what is often missed in discussions of ‘state’ is the difference between aboriginal and european thinking. in aboriginal thinking, there was no such things as ‘property’ therefore there was no such thing as an INDEPENDENT state. the notion of an independent state constituted by sovereign owned property is a european abstraction or ‘absolutism’ that was totally foreign to the mind of an aboriginal living on turtle island in 1491.
‘states’, in the common western definition of the term, are abstractions which the aboriginals mock because they don’t really exist.