Paul Hartzog has posted an interesting blog today about change, and about, perhaps, the absence of political activism/Civic Engagement from the development of P2P thinking. I am going to repost Paul’s entire blog posting below, for the purposes of discussing political activism/Civic Engagement in the context of the thinking that Paul is talking about:

“Mass ideological factors always lag behind mass economic phenomena, and that therefore, at certain moments, the automatic thrust due to the economic factor is slowed down, obstructed or even momentarily broken by traditional ideological elements — hence that there must be a conscious, planned struggle to ensure that the exigencies of the economic position of the masses, which may conflict with the traditional leadership’s policies, are understood. An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies….�

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, “The Modern Prince�

In other words, when political phase transitions (structural transformations) become possible, there is no guarantee they will occur without human political activism.

In a nutshell, Gramsci wrote that systems are maintained by a hegemony, or ideology, that tells us what kinds of ideas and practices are good/bad and right/wrong. So as long as the hegemonic forces can keep you thinking that copyright and patents and corporate theft and income inequality and software licensing are “the right way� to do things, then they are able to fight off their impending demise.

Gramsci wrote this in prison in 1932, but it is identical to what people like Larry Lessig and the EFF are saying about the need for political action today. Yes, it may be that copyleft and openness and peer-to-peer and sharing and commons should win over copyright and corporatism and hierarchy and hoarding and privatization in the long run, but without political activism we may find that society never reaches the tipping point.

Paul makes a fantastic point above, that new P2P paradigms appear to lack tangible political action. They evolve and develop mostly outside of out current political systems on all scales (local, state, federal). There have been some “run ins”, like people appearing in court for downloading copyrighted music, or servers being shut down for posting prohibited content (eg indymedia sites).

Yet, there is not a real political movement to make the P2P and Commons-based paradigms visible as a viable alternative to current systems.

I was watching the acclaimed PBS series “Eyes On The Prize” last night, coincidentally. This series documents how a national network of people DID create a grassroots and organized political movement, around the human concept of Civil Rights. As Paul describes above, these people did not believe what they were told by hegemonic forces, that racial segregation was the “right way” to do things. And this rejection of racial segregation fueled their will for political action, against tremendous and violent resistance by established powers, and people who wanted to maintain the status quo.

The Civil Rights movement achieved it’s successes by systematically forcing a “testing” of the legal systems as they applied to human civil rights in focused ways. People performed actions and entered areas where they were “prohibited” from performing those actions to force the system to apply the law correctly to their circumstances. The Civil Rights movement was also arguably successful because they applied an early form of OpenValueNetworking. Many small movements local tied themselves together in effective ways, and shared knowledge and best practices and resources within the networks.

So, a modern-day “commons and P2P values movement” can learn valuable lessons from the civil rights movement about how to systematically network related smaller movements together. And, it can learn how to systematically and publicly test existing hegemonic political/social structures, and force change where interests diverge from common law precedent, and from basic human rights and constitutionally guaranteed liberties.