Such neotraditional approaches, if they are based on a mutual dialogue, are a very important part of a transition to a social knowledge economy. In the following section, we make the case why this is so important.

The Main Argument: the common immateriality of traditional and post-industrial eras

It is not difficult to argue that modern industrial societies are dominated by a materialist paradigm. What exists for modern consciousness is material physical reality, what matters in the economy is the production of material products, and the pursuit of happiness is in very strong ways related to the accumulation of goods for consumption. For the elite, its powers derive essentially from the accumulation of capital assets, whether these are industrial or financial. Infinite material growth is really the core mantra of capitalism, and it is made necessary and facilitated by the very design of the contemporary monetary system, where money is mostly created to interest-driven bank debt.

But this was not the case in traditional, agriculture-based societies. In such societies, people of course do have to eat and to produce, and the possession of land and military force is crucial to obtain tribute from the agricultural workers, but it cannot be said that the aim is accumulation of assets. Feudal-type societies were based on personal relations consisting of mutual obligations. These are of course very unequal in character, but are nevertheless very removed from the impersonal and obligation-less property forms that came with capitalism, where there is little impediment for goods and capital to move freely to whomever it is sold to.

In these post-tribal but still pre-modern societies, both the elite and the mass body of producers are united by a common immaterial quest for salvation or a similar core spiritual pursuit like enlightenment, etc … , and it is the institution that is in charge of organizing that quest, like the Church in the western Middle Ages or the Sangha in South-East Asia, that is the determining organization for the social reproduction of the system. Tribute flows up from the farming population to the owning class, but the owning class is engaged in a two-fold pursuit: showing its status through festivities, where parts of the surplus is burned up; and gifting to the religious institutions. It is only this way that salvation/enlightenment, i.e. spiritual value or merit in all its forms, can be obtained. The more you give, the higher your spiritual status. Social status without spiritual status is frowned upon by those type of societies. This is why the religious institutions like the Church of the Sangha end up so much land and property themselves, as the gifting competition was relentless. At the same time, these institutions serve as the welfare and social security mechanisms of their day, by ensuring that a part of that flow goes back to the poor and can be used in times of social or natural emergencies.

In the current era, marked by a steady deterioration of eco-systems, is again undergoing a fundamental and necessary shift to immateriality.

Here are just a few of the facts and arguments to illustrate my point for a shift towards once again a immaterial focus in our societies.

The cosmopolitan elite of capital has already transformed itself for a long time towards financial capital. In this form of activity, financial assets are moved constantly where returns are the highest, and this makes industrial activity a secondary activity. If we then look at the financial value of corporations, only a fraction of it is determined by the material assets of such corporation. The rest of the value, usually called “good will”, is in fact determined by the various immaterial assets of such corporation, it’s expertise and collective intelligence, it’s brand capital, the trust in the present and the future expected returns that it can generate.

The most prized material goods, such as say Nike shoes, show a similar quality, only 5% of its sales value is said to be determined by physical production costs, all the rest is the value imparted to it by the brand (both the cost to create it, and the surplus value created by the consumers themselves).

The shift towards a immaterial focus can also be shown sociologically, for example through the work of Paul Ray on cultural creatives, and of Ronald Inglehart on the profound shift to postmaterial values and aspirations.

For populations who have lived for more than one generation in broad material security, the value system shifts again to the pursuit of knowledge, cultural, intellectual and spiritual experience. Not all of them, not all the time, but more and more, and especially so for the cultural elite of ‘cultural creatives’ or what Richard Florida has called the Creative Class, which is also responsible for key value creation in cognitive capitalism.

One more economic argument could be mentioned in the context of cognitive capitalism. In this model of our economy, the current dominant model as far as value creation is concerned, the key surplus value is realized through the protection of intellectual properties. Dominant Western companies can sell goods at over 100 to 1,000 times their production value, through state and WTO enforced intellectual rents. It is clearly the immaterial value of such assets that generate the economic streams, even though it requires creating fictitious scarcities through the legal apparatus.

We have argued before that this model is undermined through the emergence of distributed infrastructures for the production, distribution and consumption of immaterial and cultural goods, which makes such fictitious scarcity untenable in the long run. The immaterial value creation is indeed already leaking out of the market system. While we need such a transition towards a focus on immaterial value, it also creates very strong contradictions in the present political economy, one of the main reasons why a shift towards a integrated social knowledge economy, is a vital necessity.

The Second Argument: the nature of post-deconstructive trans-modernism

Industrial society, its particular mental and cultural models, are clearly antagonistic to tradition. The old structures must go: religion is seen as superstition, community is seen as repressive of individuality, and tradition is seen as hampering the free progress of dynamic individuals. This makes modernism both a very constructive force, for all the new it is capable of instituting in society, but also a very destructive force, at war with thousands of years of traditional values, lifestyles and social organization. It attempts to strip individuals of wholistic community, replacing it with disciplinary institutions, and commodity-based relations.

The subsequent postmodernist phase, is a cultural (but also structural as it is itself an expression of capitalist re-organization) reaction against modernity and modernism. Postmodernism is above all a deconstructive movement. Against all ‘reification’ and ‘essentialisation’, it relatives everything. No thing, no individual stands alone, we are all constituted of fragments that themselves are part of infinite fields. Through infinite play, the fragmented ‘dividual’ has at its disposal infinite constitutive elements that can be recombined in infinite ways. The positive side of it, is, that along with freeing us with fictitious fixed frameworks of belief and meaning, it also re-openes the gates of the past and of tradition. Everything that is usable, is re-usable, and the war against tradition ends, to make place for pragmatic re-appropriation. But as the very name indicates, postmodernism can only be a first phase of critique and reaction against modernity and modernism, still very much beholden to it, if only in its reactivity to all things modern. It is deconstructive, a social regression of the collective ego that can only receive ultimate therapeutic meaning if it is followed by a reconstructive phase. For postmodernism to have any ultimate positive meaning, it must be followed by a trans-formative, reconstructive phase. A trans-modernism if you like, which goes ‘beyond’ modernity and modernism. In that new phase, tradition can not just be appropriated any longer as an object, but requires a dialogue of equals with traditional communities. They are vital, because they already have the required skills to survive and thrive in a post-material age.

The Third Argument: the problematic nature of un-changed tradition

Using or returning to a premodern spiritual tradition for transmodern inspiration is not a path that is without its problems or dangers: it can very easily become a reactionary pursuit, a fruitless attempt to go back to a golden age that has only existed in the imagination.

The core problem is that many spiritual traditions all occurred within the context of exploitative economic and political systems. Though the exploitation was different, most traditional spirituality and its institutions developed in systems that were based on tribute, slavery , or serfdom. These systems usually combined a disenfranchised peasant population, a warrior or other ruling class, in which the traditional Church or Sangha played a crucial role for its social reproduction. For example, Buddhism only became acceptable to to the ‘mainstream’society of its time when it accepted to exclude slaves. Despite its radical-democratic potential, it became infused with the feudal authority structure that mirrored the society of which it was a part. These spiritualities are therefore rife with patriarchy, sexism and other profoundly unequal views and treatments of human beings.

Though the logic was profoundly different from capitalism, these forms of exploitation, and their justification by particular religious or spiritual systems and institutions, should prove to be unacceptable to contemporary (post/trans-modern) consciousness. Perhaps a symmetrical but equally problematic approach would be the pure eclecticism that can be the result of postmodern consciousness, in which isolated parts of any tradtion are simply stolen and recombined without any serious understanding of the different frameworks. Another problem we see is the following: contemporary communication technologies, and globalized trade and travel, and the unification of the world under capitalism, have created the promise for a great mixing of civilizations. Though contact and interchange was always a reality, it was slow, and it different civilisational spheres really did exist, which created profoundly different cultural realities and individual psychologies. To be a Christian or a Buddhist meant to have profoundly different orientations towards life and society (despite structural similarities in religious or spiritual organization). But a growing part of the human population, if not the whole part, is now profoundly exposed to the underlying values of the other civilisational spheres. For example, Eastern Asian notions have similarly already profoundly impacted western consciousness. In this context, rootedness in one’s culture and spiritual traditions can no longer be separated with a global cosmopolitan approach and a continous dialogue with viewpoints and frameworks that originate elsewhere. Increasinly global affinity networks are becoming as important as local associations in influencing individuals and their identity-building.

Fourth Argument: the road to differential post-industrial development

I believe it would be fair to say that contemporary capitalism is a machine to create homogeinity worldwide, and that this is not an optimal outcome, as it destroys cultural biodiversithy. In its current format, which got a severe shock with the current financial meltdown, which combines globalization, neoliberalism and financialization, it is also an enormous apparatus of coercion. It undermines the survivability of local agriculture and creates an enormous flight to the cities; it destroys long-standing social forms such as the extended family, and severely undermines traditional culture. Of course, I do not want to imply that all change or transformation is negative, but rather stress that it takes away the freedom of many who would make different choices, such as those who would want to stay in a local village.

It is here that neotraditional approaches offer real hope and potential. Instead of the wholesale import of global habits and technologies, for which society has not been prepared and which is experienced as an alien graft, it offers an alternative road of choosing what to accept and what to reject, and to craft a locally adapted road to post-industrial development.

It reminds us of Gandhi’s concept of Swadeshi and appropriate technology. He rejected both western high tech, which was not adapted to many local situations, but also unchanged local agragrian tradition and technology, which was hardly evolving. Instead, he advocated appropriate technology, a intermediary level of technology which started from the local situation, but took from modern science and technology the necessary knowledge to create new tools that were adapted to the local situation, yet offered increases in productivity.

Neotraditional economics could take a similar approach, but not limited to an attitude to technology selection, but to the totality of political and social choices. In this way, in harmony with local values, those aspects can be chosen, which increase the quality of livelihoods, but do not radically subvert chosen lifestyles and social forms. It represents a new approach which combines the high tech of globalized technical knowledge, with the high touch elements of local culture. For example, it becomes imaginable to conceive of local villages, adapting localized and small-scale manufacturing techniques based on the latest advances in miniaturization and flexibilisation of production technologies, and which are globally connected with global knowledge networks.

Fifth Argument: Adapting to Steady-State Economies in the Age of the Endangered Biosphere

The essence of capitalism is infinite growth, making money with money and increasing capital. An infinite growth system cannot infinitely perdure with limited resources in a limited physical environment. Today’s global system combines a vision of pseudo-abundance, the mistaken vision that nature can provide endless inputs and is an infinite dump, with pseudo-scarcity, the artificial creation of scarcities in the fields of intellectual, cultural and scientific exchange, through exaggerated and ever increasing intellectual property rights, which hamper innovation and free cooperation.

To be sustainable, our emerging global human civilization and political economy needs to reverse those two principles. This means that we first of all need a steady-state economy, which can only grow to the degree it can recycle its input back to nature, so as not to further deplete the natural stock. And it requires a liberalization of the sharing and exchange of technical and scientific knowledge to global open innovation communities, so that the collective intelligence of the whole of humankind can be directed to the solving of complex problems.

The first transformation is closely linked to our contemporary monetary system and alternative answers can be found in the traditional conceptions of wealth of pre-industrial societies.

For example, traditional religions associated with agriculture-based societies and production systems, outlawed interest. There is a good reason for that: when someone extends a loan with interest, that interest does not exist, and the borrower has to find the money somewhere else. In other words, to pay back the interest, he has to impoverish somebody else. This of course, would be extremely socially destructive in a static society, and therefore, it could not be allowed to happen, which explains the religious injunction against interest.

However, in modern capitalist societies, a solution has been found: growth. As long as the pie is growing, the interest can be taken from the growing pie. The problem however, is that such a monetary system requires growth, infinite growth. Static businesses are an impossibility, since that would mean they cannot pay back the interest.

Now that we have reached the limits of the biosphere, now that we need again a steady-state economy, we need interest-free monetary systems, and paradoxically, the religious injunctions again make sense.

This is just one of the connections between the transmodern challenges, and the value of traditional, and religious systems rooted in the premodern era, such as Buddhist Economics, and of course, the traditions of ‘Buen Vivir’.

We could take many other examples: for example, modern chemical agriculture destroys the quality of the land, and depletes it, so that here also, premodern traditional practices become interesting again. However, as we stated in the third argument, and refined in the fourth argument: since tradition is also problematic, it cannot be simply copied, it can only be used in a critical manner.

An example of such a critical approach is the appropriate technology movement. In this approach, it is recognized that traditional technology as such is insufficient, that hypermodern technology is often inappropriate in more traditional settings, and that therefore, an intermediate practice is needed, that is both rooted in ‘tradition’, i.e. the reality of the local situation, but also in modernity, the creative use of technological solutions and reasoning, so as the create a new type of ‘appropriate’ technological development.

Conclusion: Can the ethos of the social knowledge economy be mixed with neotraditional approaches?

With the emergence of the social knowledge economy and commons-based peer production, and practices like open and distributed manufacturing, a new alliance becomes possible: that between the most technologically advanced open design communities, with the majority of the people who are still strongly linked to traditional practices. Through such an alliance, which combines the traditional injunction for a steady-state economy in harmony with natural possibilities, a differentiated post-industrial future can be created, which can bypass the destructive practices of industrial-era modernism, and can create an ‘appropriate technology’ future, whereby more traditional communities can more freely decide what to adapt and what to reject. While on the other hand, transmodern open design communities can learn from the wisdom of traditional approaches. Such an alliance needs an ideological vehicle, and Buen Vivir is its expression.

Extract from “A Commons Transition Plan“.

Photo by kabl1992

Photo by University of the Fraser Valley

The post The Importance of Neotraditional Approaches in the Reconstructive Transmodern Era appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Originally published in FLOK Society’s website

The Buen Conocer / FLOk Society research project, presents the results of its work in the book Buen Conocer / FLOK Society: public policy and sustainable models for a social economy of common and open knowledge in Ecuador. The book analyzes and proposes lines of political action and productive projects in 14 subjects of the Ecuadorian economy considered strategic to change the productive matrix, such as education, science, culture, agri-food and bio-diversity, design and manufacturing, software, hardware, connectivity, ancestral knowledge and the popular and solidarity economy.

The launch of the book Buen Conocer / FLOK Society: public policy and sustainable models for a social economy of common and open knowledge in Ecuador will take place on June 16, 2015 in Quito, Ecuador.

The book contains the results of the research on public policies for the construction of a social economy of common and open knowledge in Ecuador; the edition of the book includes along its 800 pages, 14 documents, 27 authors, 14 reviewers, 911 comments of 122 people on the digital platform Co-ment, 196 participants (co-creators) in the Buen Conocer Summit in Quito and a total of more than 1,500 participants.

During the presentation of the book, the content of the Declaration of Buen Conocer, issued at the end of the Summit, held in Quito from 27 to 30 may 2014, will be re-edited. This declaration synthesizes the proposals of this transition to a common and open knowledge economy.

The Buen Conocer / FLOK Society book will be available for download since Tuesday, June 16 2015, at the site http://book.floksociety.org/, licensed by Creative Commons BY-SA (attribution share equal) Ecuadorian (v.3.0) and international (v.4.0) and GFDL (GNU free documentation license. The book was published in its digital version for the Buen Conocer /FLOK Society community, with the collaboration of aLabs association. It also has a co-edition in print by IAEN/CIESPAL.

The Buen Conocer/ FLOK Society project could be done under agreement between the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, Ministerio Coordinador de Conocimiento y Talento Humano and Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación.

Book Index

Introduction

The Buen Conocer /FLOK Society process

PART 1. Enhance the collective intelligence

1. Education: Open educational resources

2. Science: Collaborative, participative and open research

3. Culture: Access and sustainability on an open culture era

PART 2. Productive material capacities aimed to commons

2.1 Agri-food: Open and sustainable agri-food system in Ecuador

2.2 Bio-diversity: Citizen science, ancestral knowledge and bio-diversity applied to social knowledge economy

2.3 Manufacturing: Open design and distributed manufacturing

2.4 Energy: Free/libre knowledge, distributed energy and social empowerment for energetic matrix change.

PART 3. Institutions, society and communities

3.1. Institutions: Knowledge society, social economy and partner State

3.2 Communities: Original, traditional and popular knowledge

PART 4. Open and free/libre technical infrastructure

4.1 Hardware: Innovation and production ecosystems based on open hardware

4.2. Software: Free/libre and open code programs in public administration

4.3. Connectivity: Accessibility, sovereignty and self- management of communications infrastructures.

Lead image by abstractartangel77

The post Buen Conocer/FLOK Society: public policy and sustainable models for a social knowledge economy in Ecuador appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Our News and Articles section features interviews and articles involving Commoners in Transition, or, individuals and teams working together towards increasing the viability of the commons. Here, we present an interview with Janice Figueiredo, who was part of the FLOKSociety project launched in Ecuador. Janice spoke to us about her own experience collaborating with and learning from the indigenous people of the region.

What is your background, and how did you get involved in the project in Ecuador?

I am a Brazilian citizen who has lived abroad for about 20 years, both in the United States and in Europe (Paris, France). I worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) as IT project manager until 2009, when I decided to radically change my life and started placing my actions, work and studies in areas that, in my understanding, have the potential to genuinely transform the world into a more inclusive and fairer place. I directed my interests to researching the fields of collective intelligence, collaborative movements, P2P dynamics, the commons, the open and sharing society, social business, complementary currencies, sustainable development and poverty reduction, having a particular interest in exploring alternative models to the conventional economic paradigms based in centralization and scarcity.

I spent most of 2012 in Brazil, and got actively involved with several P2P-related projects in Rio de Janeiro, where I currently live. I joined academic research groups on the Collaborative Economy and Peer Production in Brazil, carried out collaborative projects in Rio’s favelas, took part in civil society and social movement initiatives that proposed commons-oriented alternatives for the planet (such as the People’s Summit), and got involved with different projects related to the sharing economy in Brazil.

I have a B. Sc. in Computer Science, a M. Sc. in Strategy and Marketing, and have completed post-graduate courses in the area of Sustainable Development.

In September 2013, Michel Bauwens – who I first met in Brazil in July 2012, on the occasion of the Rio+20 UN meeting – invited me to be part of the research team that would be producing public policy recommendations for a transition to a Social Knowledge Economy in Ecuador. I immediately accepted the invitation!

You visited a lot of urban commons communities in Quito. What is your summary of their experiences and concerns ?

My research area, “Open infra-structures for collective life”, explored how citizens and communities could benefit from as well as take an active part in the building of a Social Knowledge Economy. On the one hand, we investigated how communities could, in an autonomous way, create and maintain mutualized infrastructures needed for their lives, such as housing and food systems. On the other hand, we explored how knowledge systems could be created and governed by communities.

The principles of solidarity and cooperation are deeply rooted in the Ecuadorian culture. Several community needs are achieved through autonomous practices whose origins come from the traditions of the Indigenous quechuas. The most well-known of these initiatives are mingas. These are community works towards common goals that have been extensively used in both urban and rural areas to supply the needs of the communities, such as improvement of roads or communal areas, and energy provision, and also as a means to cooperate among families, such as in the case of the building of a house. La minga de la quiteñidad, a yearly community-led event held in some Quito neighbourhoods, chose to promote recycling in one area (December 2014).

Through mingas the main values of the Andean indigenous culture are expressed: union and solidarity among communities. Mingas are seen as a huge celebrations where work, food, collaboration and accomplishments are shared. Ranti-ranti is another solidarity practice intrinsic to the Ecuadorian culture. It represents the concept of reciprocity and abundance: “I give to you because Nature has given to me”. Trueque is a practice of exchange used at open food markets, where sellers exchange what hasn’t been sold among themselves. Randimpa are open spaces self-organized by communities, where discussions and decisions about the community take place.

We visited several initiatives that follow the principles of self-governance that develop and nurture cooperation within their communities. I will mention two of them: the first, “Comuna Tola Chica” represents a group of 400 people that live and work in a communal manner. The community tries to preserve its cultural roots through the development of local projects, such as the School of Traditional Knowledge, and to stimulate ecological and sustainable local projects like the building of a local communal house made with super-adobe construction. All decisions concerning the Comuna are taken in a collective, participatory way, through assemblies open to all residents. Land ownership is communal and all comuneros have the same rights over the lands.

A second project that illustrates cooperation is “Alianza Solidaria”. This project was launched to tackle the lack of access to quality and affordable housing, and was expanded to the building of an autonomous, cooperative community capable of solving their own problems in a cooperative way.

One of the main concerns I’ve noticed among communities is that these principles of solidarity and cooperation are being lost; there are far fewer mingas now than in the 1970’s.

Several individuals suggested that people have become more individualistic and competitive as a result of being influenced by the values promoted by capitalism; people engage less and less with traditional solidarity practices. Another concern observed is that newer indigenous generations no longer want to learn quechua, dress using their traditional customs or preserve their culture, as the media propagates the idea that what comes from the Western world (Europe and the United States) is better and represents the values of a more developed people.

You also worked with indigenous communities and coordinated a policy paper that was written by indigenous activist scholars themselves. What were the results, and how was the paper received ?

At FLOK meetings conducted during the process, the subject of “Ancestral Knowledge” was the one that raised the greatest interest and the most questions from the communities and academia.

Among the 17 policy papers, the “Ancestral, Traditional and Popular Knowledge” paper was the only one written by a group composed exclusively of local, Ecuadorian people. That paper discusses and proposes policies on how to preserve, manage and implement traditional and ancestral knowledge and practices, respecting the diversity of cultures and nationalities of Ecuador.

Ecuador has a total of 14 nationalities and 18 pueblos, and it was quite a challengeto embrace such a diversity of visions and traditions in a single paper. Initially, we engaged 5 indigenous scholars and activists from different ethnicities, each one deeply involved with the subject within their communities, to collectively write a first version of the paper. Later on, we realized the paper should also contemplate non-indigenous visions, such as those of the Afro-Ecuadorian community.

The current version of the paper is the product of a collective work developed by indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian, mestizo and white Ecuadorian scholars and activists. This composition of multiple visions, all from local actors, gives a unique strength to the paper and its policy recommendations.

The policy paper presents proposals for the management of ancestral, traditional and popular knowledge in five main domains: 1) ancestral, traditional and popular knowledge must be declared heritage of the communities and peoples; 2) intercultural, bilingual education must be promoted and strengthened; 3) promotion of proper management of knowledge about biodiversity and traditional and ancestral agricultural practices; 4) strengthening of the relationship between the territories and knowledge and 5) strengthening of traditional and ancestral practices of governance.

What is your overall view of the FLOK process and what are your expectations for the future?

FLOK is a pioneer project, as this is the first time in history that a series of policy documents was produced in a collaborative way to propose, at a national level, a transition to a new economic and societal model based on open and shared knowledge, on the commons, on traditional and ancestral practices and on peer-to-peer production. Producing these documents in such a short time (8 months) was a big challenge. The work represents an integrated view, framed within the Ecuadorian legal system, and resulted from an intense collaborative process that involved meetings with Ecuadorian experts from civil society, academia, government and constant exchange with international experts in each area.

I see this first FLOK experience both as a seed that has been planted, as well as a threshold that has been crossed: a first attempt to provide an alternative model to the capitalist system has been proposed, and this work – not only the document, but the entire process that allowed the production of the documents – can be a source of inspiration to any person, city, civil society collective, region, and can be replicated, modified and adapted according to different contexts and needs. A threshold has been crossed in the sense that an integral proposition has been done for an entire society.

Needless to say, it was a very rewarding experience to be part of the project.

For the future, I expect the commons-transition movement to grow and to strengthen. And that different initiatives, with different flavors, will start to sprout. In the past year, many people showed a lot of interest in the FLOK process – not only during the time we were in Ecuador, but afterwards as well. The world needs profound changes; this is no longer an option, but a necessity. The human being is intrinsically generous and solidary – every culture has solidarity practices that became more and more lost with the individualistic and competitive behavior modeled by capitalism. A commons-transition movement is a real possibility to rescue human cooperation and solidarity and a path to reach harmony with Nature.

Images by Kevin Flanagan

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Today the P2P Foundation proudly presents The Commons Transition Platform.

Commons Transition is a database of practical experiences and policy proposals aimed toward achieving a more humane and environmentally grounded mode of societal organization. Basing a civil society on the Commons (including the collaborative stewardship of our shared resources) would enable a more egalitarian, just, and environmentally stable society. The proposals presented in our web platform go beyond rhetoric and are inspired by successful, self-organized working communities that maintain themselves and their environments through Commons Based Peer Production, Property and Governance.

The Commons, together with Peer to Peer dynamics, represent a third mode of societal organization evolving away from the competitive Market State and obsolete, centrally-planned systems. It is a system based on the practices and needs of civil society and the environment it inhabits at the local, regional, national and global levels.

The main three policy documents you’ll find in the platform, authored by Michel Bauwens, John Restakis and George Dafermos, were originally created for Ecuador’s groundbreaking FLOK Society Project. Commons Transition, however, features newly revised and updated, non-region specific versions of these documents. We share them in order to provide an overview of the many precedents and possibilities pointing toward a fairer societal order, and to inspire civil society collectives at the local, regional, national and global levels to adapt them to their particular contexts.

As a matter of fact, the proposals originally developed for FLOK are currently being discussed and adapted by the Catalan Integral Cooperative. There is a stark difference between these projects, the former being a state-sponsored study and the latter a completely pre-figurative, stateless initiative. The Commons Transition website features material related to both and will reflect the ongoing development of these projects.

In parallel with these pilot projects, we also highlight the valuable work of other transnational, commons-oriented collectives, such as Share the World’s Resources, the Post Growth Institute, and the Sustainable Economies Law Center. These, among others, are presented in the Related Projects section of the website. Other highlights include an FAQ on Commons Transition, a News and Articles section with exclusive interviews (in which we will feature regular updates on Commons Transition activities) and a Wiki entirely dedicated to Commons-oriented policy proposals and transition-oriented projects.

To give you a taste of the material contained in this web platform, here is Michel Bauwens’ and John Restakis’ overview of the Commons Transition project. This text has been adapted from their introduction to our Commons Transition Book, which features the newly updated policy in an easy to read, downloadable format.

P2P Foundation members and friends at the 2014 Open Everything Convergence, Cloughjordan Ecovillage, Ireland.

What is Commons Transition?

A special introduction by Michel Bauwens and John Restakis

When the administration of Rafael Correa was swept into power in 2006, it appeared as though a new political page had been turned in Ecuador. A Citizen’s Revolution that had mobilized broad swathes of the Ecuadorian public, in particular the country’s indigenous peoples, had galvanized the country around a radical set of political, social, economic, and environmental values that set the stage for an overhaul of the nation’s inherited political past.

In short order, the Ecuadorian government re-wrote the national constitution, rejected the odious national debt contracted by previous corrupt regimes, joined the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, and developed a comprehensive vision of national economic and social life based on the concept of Buen Vivir (Good Living) that linked economic and social life to the values of personal well being and protection of the environment.

This vision formed the basis of the country’s National Plan and the move to fundamentally alter the nation’s productive matrix from one of dependency on foreign capital and oil extraction to the construction of an economic model based on the values of commons, co-operation, and free and open access to knowledge.

At the end of 2013, the FLOK Project (Free/Libre Open Knowledge) was launched to articulate what such an economy would look like and what policy recommendations would be required to realize it. Under the joint sponsorship of The Ministry for National Planning (SENPLADES), The Ministry for Innovation and Human Resources (SENESYCT), and the National Institute for Advanced Studies (IAEN) the governmental asked an international team of researchers to draw up a participatory process to craft a transition strategy for a society based on the idea of a “social knowledge economy” – an economy based on free an open access to knowledge conceived as a commons. And while the project was rooted in the particular context and concerns of Ecuador, the issues, sectors, and policy proposals that were addressed also transcended this local situation.

The local context was that Ecuador is still essentially in a dependent situation vis-a-vis the western-dominated global economy, which means that it needs to export raw material at low added value, and import consumer goods at high added value. It’s a scenario for permanent dependency that the progressive government wanted to change. The FLOK Project was a key strategy to aid in this effort. Following the lead of Minister Rene Ramirez of SENESCYT, FLOK aimed to envisage an economy that would no longer be dependent on limited material resources, but on infinite immaterial resources – such as knowledge.

The proposals of the research team consisted of a generic Commons Transition Plan, and 18+ legislative proposals including a dozen pilot projects, which were further developed and validated in the Buen Conocer Summit at the end of May 2014. The synthetic proposals were then presented by the research team at the end of June 2014, while still being finished for scientific publication. The proposals are now being processed in the Ecuadorian administration, and being submitted to political review and assessment.

Several aspects of the Ecuadorian process where highly progressive, such as the intense participatory process and the openness to both local and foreign input, which is both innovative and unusual. So too was the willingness to link technological and economic questions with the social and cultural conditions in which they must be realized.

The FLOK Project, the Commons Transition Plan, and the Policy Papers, significantly transcend the local context and have a global significance.

The first characteristic of the FLOK process is of course its very existence. This is the first time that a transition plan to a commons-based society and economy has been crafted. There are ‘new economy’, green, social economy, and other transition plans, but none of them have focused on re-organizing society and the economy around the central concept of the Commons as the core value creation and distribution system.

The Commons Transition Plan is based on an analysis and observation of the already existing commons processes and economies, and the value crisis that they provoke within the current political economy. The rise of the digital commons is a case in point.

There is a growing contradiction between new relations of production emerging around the digital commons and the economies they are creating, and how this emerging prototype of a new mode of production is embedded within capitalism. In short, while more and more use value is created in and through the commons, only a fraction of this is being monetized. When this commons-produced use value (such as free and open software (FOSS)) is monetized into exchange value, it is done so through proprietary platforms that very seldom share any of this exchange value with the creators.

Hence we see an evolution from a type of capitalism that was based on the extraction of rent through the privatization of knowledge and the control of intellectual property and supply networks (cognitive capitalism), to a new form of ‘netarchical capitalism’ in which proprietary platforms both enable human co-operation but also exploit it for the benefit of private capital. In other words, netarchical capitalism directly extracts value from human co-operation itself. Moreover, in our current information age, the whole of society is being transformed into a “social factory” producing commons-generated goods and services. The cases of uncompensated user-generated value for Facebook and Google are obvious examples.

The failure of netarchical capitalism to return fair value to its creators has transposed the traditional exploitation of labour in the production of material goods to that of immaterial goods such as knowledge, branding, and ideas that are now the driving force of capital accumulation. This has greatly increased the precariousness of both workers and commoners the world over. Hence, any transition must also solve and restore the feedback loop between value creation and distribution, and create an ethical and civic economy around the commons, moving from extractive forms of exploitative capital, to generative forms of co-operative capital. In other words, capital that returns value to those that contribute to the commons.

This process requires the re-conception and re-alignment both of traditional commons and co-operative thinking, and practice, into new institutional forms that prefigure a new political economy of co-operative commonwealth. This in turn, is based on a simultaneous transition of civil society, the market, and the organization and role of the state and forms a foundation principle of the Commons Transition Plan.

For most of the history of industrial and post-industrial capitalism, the primary political conflict has been one between state and market – whether to use the state power for redistribution of wealth and regulation of the excesses of the market, or to allow market players to privatize the value of public and social goods and services for the benefit of capital. This is the classic conflict between social versus private benefit and has been called by some the lib (for liberal) vs. lab (for labour and its derivative social movements) pendulum. In our current political economy, except for a few researchers who operated outside of the mainstream, such as Elinor Ostrom and her research on the commons, the focus on social value and the common good has been discarded as a historical legacy without future. Indeed, the remaining physical commons that exist globally, mostly in the South, are everywhere under threat while under austerity, what remains of public goods in Europe and North America are also being privatized at breakneck speeds.

But the emergence of digital knowledge, software and design, as new forms of commons not only recreate commons-oriented modes of production and market activities, they also show that value is now increasingly created through contributions, not traditional labor, to create commons, not commodities. Through its contributions and the ubiquity of digital technology, it can be said that civil society has now become productive in its own right, and we can make a leap from contributor communities of software developers to a vision of civil society that consists of civil commons contributed to by citizens.

The entrepreneurial activities that are created around the commons induce the vision of an ethical economy, a non-capitalist marketplace that re-introduces reciprocity and co-operation in the market’s functioning, while co-creating commons and creating livelihoods for the commoners. This type of economy and market in which co-operation, mutuality, and the common good define the characteristics of a new kind of political economy, point the way to a new state form, which we have called the Partner State.

Thus, the commons not only introduces a third term next to the state and the market, i.e. the generative, commons-producing civil society, but also a new market and a new state. A foundation principle of a Commons Transition Plan is that the changes must happen concurrently in all three aspects of our social and economic life.

Through the Partner State concept, the report proposes the radical democratization of the state, the mobilization and expansion of the social/solidarity economy, the creation and use of public-commons partnerships, the co-operitization of public services, and other innovative concepts and practices that could fundamentally renew our political economy. These ideas are developed in the second document.

A third contribution by George Dafermos, shows a policy report on Open Design Commons and Distributed Manufacturing developing on the work around the FLOK transition in Ecuador, to give the reader a taste of what these changes could mean in a concrete sector.

But what now? What comes after the FLOK experience in Ecuador?

The Commons Transition website is part of an ongoing effort to create an open public forum for further commons-driven and commons-oriented policy-making that is distinct from its first iteration in Ecuador (floksociety.org), and is open to all contributions from commoners globally.

The project will be carried by a consortium of commons and co-operative movements, that are discussing their relative support at this time, and the P2P Foundation will of course be one of the partners. With the Commons Transition Plan as a comparative document, we intend to organize workshops and dialogues to see how other commons locales, countries, language-communities but also cities and regions, can translate their experiences, needs and demands into policy proposals. The Plan is not an imposition nor is it a prescription, but something that is intended as a stimulus for discussion and independent crafting of more specific commons-oriented policy proposals that respond to the realities and exigencies of different contexts and locales.

As part of this process, we have already concluded a workshop with the Reseau Francophone des Communs in Paris in September, and workshops with Syriza officials in Greece. The idea is not to support or choose any political or social movement, but to enable all progressive and emancipatory forces to look for commonalities around their approaches, and to renew their political visions with the commons in mind.

This project therefore, is itself a commons, open to all contributions, and intended for the benefit of all who need it. Please visit us at www.commonstransition.org and join the conversation.

Image by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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The post Introducing the Commons Transition Web Platform appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Continuing our coverage of FLOK Society’s recent “Buen Conocer” summit, we’re glad to present this special long-form conversation between Open Access chronicler Richard Poynder and Michel Bauwens, held just before the summit took place. The interview is specially noteworthy for being a very honest across-the-board examination of FLOK as a process, including both its virtues and the unavoidable pitfalls it has faced. Read on for more.

Today a summit starts in Quito, Ecuador that will discuss ways in which the country can transform itself into an open commons-based knowledge society. The team that put together the proposals is led by Michel Bauwens from theFoundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives. What is the background to this plan, and how likely is it that it will bear fruit?  With the hope of finding out I spoke recently to Bauwens.

Richard Poynder

While these movements often set themselves fairly limited objectives (e.g. “freeing the refereed literature”) some network theorists maintain that the larger phenomenon they represent has the potential not just to replace traditional closed and proprietary practices with more open and transparent approaches, and not just to subordinate narrow commercial interests to the greater needs of communities and larger society but, since the network enables ordinary citizens to collaborate together on large meaningful projects in a distributed way (and absent traditional hierarchical organisations), it could have a significant impact on the way in which societies and economies organise themselves.One interesting phenomenon to emerge from the Internet has been the growth of free and open movements, including free and open source software, open politics, open government, open data, citizen journalism, creative commons, open science, open educational resources (OER), open access etc.

In his influential book The Wealth of Networks, for instance, Yochai Benkleridentifies and describes a new form of production that he sees emerging on the Internet — what he calls “commons-based peer production”. This, he says, is creating a new Networked Information Economy.

Former librarian and Belgian network theorist Michel Bauwens goes so far as to say that by enabling peer-to-peer (P2P) collaboration, the Internet has created a new model for the future development of human society. In addition to peer production, he explained to me in 2006, the network also encourages the creation of peer property (i.e. commonly owned property), and peer governance (governance based on civil society rather than representative democracy).

Moreover, what is striking about peer production is that it emerges and operates outside traditional power structures and market systems. And when those operating in this domain seek funding they increasingly turn not to the established banking system, but to new P2P practices like crowdfunding and social lending.

When in 2006 I asked Bauwens what the new world he envisages would look like in practice he replied, “I see a P2P civilisation that would have to be post-capitalist, in the sense that human survival cannot co-exist with a system that destroys the biosphere; but it will nevertheless have a thriving marketplace. At the core of such a society — where immaterial production is the primary form — would be the production of value through non-reciprocal peer production, most likely supported through a basic income.”

Unrealistic and utopian?

So convinced was he of the potential of P2P that in 2005 Bauwens created theFoundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives. The goal: to “research, document and promote peer-to-peer principles”

Critics dismiss Bauwens’ ideas as unrealistic and utopian, and indeed in the eight years since I first spoke with him much has happened that might seem to support the sceptics. Rather than being discredited by the 2008 financial crisis, for instance, traditional markets and neoliberalism have tightened their grip on societies, in all parts of the world.

At the same time, the democratic potential and openness Bauwens sees as characteristic of the network is being eroded in a number of ways. While social networking platforms like Facebook enable the kind of sharing and collaboration Bauwens sees lying at the heart of a P2P society, for instance, there is a growing sense that these services are in fact exploitative, not least because the significant value created by the users of these services is being monetised not for the benefit of the users themselves, but for the exclusive benefit of the large corporations that own them.

We have also seen a huge growth in proprietary mobile devices, along with the flood of apps needed to run on them — a development that caused Wired’s former editor-in-chief Chris Anderson to conclude that we are witnessing a dramatic move “from the wide-open Web to semi closed platforms”. And this new paradigm, he added, simply “reflects the inevitable course of capitalism”.

In other words, rather than challenging or side-lining the traditional market and neoliberalism, the network seems destined to be appropriated by it — a likelihood that for many was underlined by the recent striking down of the US net neutrality regulations.

It would also appear that some of the open movements are gradually being appropriated and/or subverted by commercial interests (e.g. the open access andopen educational resources movements).

While conceding that a capitalist version of P2P has begun to emerge, Bauwens argues that this simply makes it all the more important to support and promote social forms of P2P. And here, he suggests, the signs are positive, with the number of free and open movements continuing to grow and the P2P model bleeding out of the world of “immaterial production” to encompass material production too — e.g. with the open design and open hardware movements, a development encouraged by the growing use of 3D printers.

Bauwens also points to a growth in mutualisation, and the emergence of new practices based around the sharing of physical resources and equipment.

Interestingly, these latter developments are often less visible than one might expect because much of what is happening in this area appears to be taking place outside the view of mainstream media in the global north.

Finally, says Bauwens, the P2P movement, or commoning (as some prefer to call it), is becoming increasingly politicised. Amongst other things, this has seen the rise of new political parties like the various Pirate Parties.

Above all, Bauwens believes that the long-term success of P2P is assured because its philosophy and practices are far more sustainable than the current market-based system. “Today, we consider nature infinite and we believe that infinite resources should be made scarce in order to protect monopolistic players,” he says below. “Tomorrow, we need to consider nature as a finite resource, and we should respect the abundance of nature and the human spirit.”

Periphery to mainstream

Michel Bauwens

And as the need for sustainability becomes ever more apparent, more people will doubtless want to listen to what Bauwens has to say. Indeed, what better sign that P2P could be about to move from the periphery to the mainstream than an invitation Bauwens received last year from three Ecuadorian governmental institutions, who asked him to lead a team tasked with coming up with proposals for transitioning the country to a society based on free and open knowledge.

The organisation overseeing the project is the FLOK Society (free, libre, open knowledge). As “commoner” David Bollier explained when the project was announced, Bauwens’ team was asked to look at many interrelated themes, “including open education; open innovation and science; ‘arts and meaning-making activities’; open design commons; distributed manufacturing; and sustainable agriculture; and open machining.”

Bollier added, “The research will also explore enabling legal and institutional frameworks to support open productive capacities; new sorts of open technical infrastructures and systems for privacy, security, data ownership and digital rights; and ways to mutualise the physical infrastructures of collective life and promote collaborative consumption.”

In other words, said Bollier, Ecuador “does not simply assume — as the ‘developed world’ does — that more iPhones and microwave ovens will bring about prosperity, modernity and happiness.”

Rather it is looking for sustainable solutions that foster “social and territorial equality, cohesion, and integration with diversity.”

The upshot: In April Bauwens’ team published a series of proposals intended to transition Ecuador to what he calls a sustainable civic P2P economy. And these proposals will be discussed at a summit to be held this week in the capital of Ecuador (Quito).

“As you can see from our proposals, we aim for a simultaneous transformation of civil society, the market and public authorities,” says Bauwens. “And we do this without inventing or imposing utopias, but by extending the working prototypes from the commoners and peer producers themselves.”

But Bauwens knows that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and he realises that he has taken on a huge task, one fraught with difficulties. Even the process of putting the proposals together has presented him and his team with considerable challenges. Shortly after they arrived in Ecuador, for instance, they were told that the project had been defunded (funding that was fortunately later reinstated). And for the moment it remains unclear whether many (or any) of the FLOK proposals will ever see the light of day.

Bauwens is nevertheless upbeat. Whatever the outcome in Ecuador, he says, an important first stab has been made at creating a template for transitioning a nation state from today’s broken model to a post-capitalist social knowledge society.

“What we have now that we didn’t have before, regardless of implementation in Ecuador, is the first global commons-oriented transition plan, and several concrete legislative proposals,” he says. “They are far from perfect, but they will be a reference that other locales, cities, (bio)regions and states will be able to make their own adapted versions of it.”

In the Q&A below Bauwens discusses the project in more detail, including the background to it, and the challenges that he and the FLOK Society have faced.

The interview begins

RP:  We last spoke in 2006 when you discussed your ideas on a P2P (peer-to-peer) society (which I think David Bollier refers to as “commoning”). Briefly, what has been learned since then about the opportunities and challenges of trying to create a P2P society, and how have your thoughts on P2P changed/developed as a result?

MB: At the time, P2P dynamics were mostly visible in the process of “immaterial production”, i.e. productive communities that created commons of knowledge and code. The trend has since embraced material production itself, through open design that is linked to the production of open hardware machinery.

Another trend is the mutualisation of physical resources. We’ve seen on the one hand an explosion in the mutualisation of open workspaces (hackerspaces, fab labs, co-working) and the explosion of the so-called sharing economy and collaborative consumption.

This is of course linked to the emergence of distributed practices and technologies for finance (crowd funding, social lending); and for machinery itself (3D printingand other forms of distributed manufacturing). Hence the emergence and growth of P2P dynamics is now clearly linked to the “distribution of everything”.

There is today no place we go where social P2P initiatives are not developing and not exponentially growing. P2P is now a social fact.

Since the crisis of 2008, we are also seeing much more clearly the political and economic dimension of P2P. There is now both a clearly capitalist P2P sector (renting and working for free is now called sharing, which is putting downward pressure on income levels) and a clearly social one.  First of all, the generalised crisis of our economic system has pushed more people to search for such practical alternatives. Second, most P2P dynamics are clearly controlled by economic forces, i.e. the new “netarchical” (hierarchy of the network) platforms.

Finally, we see the increasing politicisation of P2P, with the emergence of Pirate Parties, network parties (Partido X in Spain) etc.

We have now to decide more clearly than before whether we want more autonomous peer production, i.e. making sure that the domination of the free social logic of permissionless aggregation is directly linked to the capacity to generate self-managed livelihoods, or, if we are happy with a system in which this value creation is controlled and exploited by platform owners and other intermediaries.

The result of all of this is that my own thoughts are now more directly political. We have developed concrete proposals and strategies to create P2P-based counter-economies that are de-linked from the accumulation of capital, but focused on cooperative accumulation and the autonomy of commons production.

RP: Indeed and last year you were asked to lead a team to come up with proposals to “remake the roots of Ecuador’s economy, setting off a transition into a society of free and open knowledge”. As I understand it, this would be based on the principles of open networks, peer production and commoning. Can you say something about the project and what you hope it will lead to? Has the Ecuadoran government itself commissioned you, or a government or non-government agency in Ecuador?

MB: The project, called FLOKSociety.org, was commissioned by three Ecuadorian governmental institutions, i.e. the Coordinating Ministry of Knowledge and Human Talent, the SENESCYT (Secretaría Nacional de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación) and the IAEN (Instituto de Altos Estudios del Estado).

The legitimacy and logic of the project comes from the National Plan of Ecuador, which is centred around the concept of Good Living (Buen Vivir), which is a non-reductionist, non-exclusive material way to look at the economy and social life, inspired by the traditional values of the indigenous people of the Andes. The aim of FLOK is to add “Good Knowledge” as an enabler and facilitator of the good life.

The important point to make is that it is impossible for countries and people that are still in neo-colonial dependencies to evolve to more fair societies without access to shareable knowledge. And this knowledge, expressed in diverse commons that correspond to the different domains of social life (education, science, agriculture, industry), cannot itself thrive without also looking at both the material and immaterial conditions that will enable their creation and expansion.

FLOK summit

RP: To this end you have put together a transition plan. This includes a series of proposals (available here), and a main report (here). I assume your plan might or might not be taken up by Ecuador. What is the procedure for taking it forward, and how optimistic are you that Ecuador will embark on the transition you envisage?

MB: The transition plan provides a framework for moving from an economy founded on what we call “cognitive” and “netarchical” capitalism (based respectively on the exploitation through IP rents or social media platforms) to a “mature P2P-based civic economy”.

The logic here is that the dominant economic forms today are characterised by a value crisis, one in which value is extracted but it doesn’t flow back to the creators of the value. The idea is to transition to an economy in which this value feedback loop is restored.

So about fifteen of our policy proposals apply this general idea to specific domains, and suggest how open knowledge commons can be created and expanded in these particular areas.

We published these proposals on April 1^st in co-ment, an open source software that allows people to comment on specific concepts, phrases or paragraphs.

This week (May 27^th to 30^th) the crucial FLOK summit is taking place to discuss the proposals. This will bring together government institutions, social movement advocates, and experts, from both Ecuador and abroad.

The idea is to devote three days to reaching a consensus amongst these different groups, and then try and get agreement with the governmental institutions able to carry out the proposals.

So there will be two filters: the summit itself, and then the subsequent follow-up, which will clearly face opposition from different interests.

This is not an easy project, since it is not possible to achieve all this by decree.

RP: Earlier this year you made a series of videos discussing the issues arising from what you are trying to do —  which is essentially to create “a post-capitalist social knowledge society”, or “open commons-based knowledge society”. In one video you discuss three different value regimes, and I note you referred to these in your last answer — i.e. cognitive capitalism, netarchical capitalism and a civic P2P economy. Can you say a little more about how these three different regimes differ and why in your view P2P is a better approach than the other two?

MB: I define cognitive capitalism as a regime in which value is generated through a combination of rent extraction from the control of intellectual property and the control of global production networks, and expressed in terms of monetisation.

What we have learned is that the democratisation of networks, which also provides a new means of production and value distribution, means that this type of value extraction is harder and harder to achieve, and it can only be maintained either by increased legal suppression (which erodes legitimacy) and outright technological sabotage (DRM). Both of these strategies are not sustainable in the long term.

What we have also learned is that the network has caused a new model to emerge, one adapted to the P2P age, and which I call netarchical capitalism, i.e. “the hierarchy of the network”. In this model, we see the direct exploitation of human cooperation by means of proprietary platforms that both enable and exploit human cooperation. Crucially, while their value is derived from our communication, sharing and cooperation (an empty platform has no value), and on the use value that we are exponentially creating (Google, Facebook don’t produce the content, we do), the exchange value is exclusively extracted by the platform owners. This is unsustainable because it is easy to see that a regime in which the creators of the value get no income at all from their creation is not workable in the long; and so it poses problems for capitalism. After all, who is going to buy goods if they have no income?

So the key issue is: how do we recreate the value loop between creation, distribution, and income? The answer for me is the creation of a mature P2P civic economy that combines open contributory communities, ethical entrepreneurial coalitions able to create livelihoods for the commoners, and for-benefit institutions that can “enable and empower the infrastructure of cooperation”.

Think of the core model of our economy as the Linux economy writ large, but one in which the enterprises are actually in the hands of the value creators themselves. Imagine this micro-economic model on the macro scale of a whole society. Civil society becomes a series of commonses with citizens as contributors; the shareholding market becomes an ethical stakeholder marketplace; and the state becomes a partner state, which “enables and empowers social production” through the commonication of public services and public-commons partnerships.

Challenges and distrust

RP: As you indicated earlier, it is not an easy project that you have embarked on in Ecuador, particularly as it is an attempt to intervene at the level of a nation state. Gordon Cook has said of the project: “it barely got off the ground before it began to crash into some of the anticipated obstacles.” Can you say something about these obstacles and how you have been overcoming them?

MB: It is true that the project started with quite negative auspices. It became the victim of internal factional struggles within the government, for instance, and was even defunded for a time after we arrived; the institutions failed to pay our wages for nearly three months, which was a serious issue for the kind of precarious scholar-activists that make up the research team.

However, in March (when one of the sides in the dispute lost, i.e. the initial sponsor Carlos Prieto, rector of the IAEN), we got renewed commitment from the other two institutions. Since then political support has increased, and the summit is about to get underway.

As for Gordon, he became a victim of what we will politely call a series of misinterpreted engagements for the funding of his participation, and it is entirely understandable that he has become critical of the process.

The truth is that the project was hugely contradictory in many different ways, but this is the reality of the political world everywhere, not just in Ecuador.

Indeed, the Ecuadorian government is itself engaged in sometimes contradictory policies and is perceived by civil society to have abandoned many of the early ideas of the civic movement that brought it to power. So, in our attempts at broader participation we have been stifled by the distrust many civic activists have for the government, and the sincerity of our project has been doubted.

Additionally, social P2P dynamics, which of course exist as in many other countries, are not particularly developed in their modern, digitally empowered forms in Ecuador. It has also not helped that the management of the project has been such that the research team has not been able to directly connect with the political leaders in order to test their real engagement. This has been hugely frustrating.

On the positive side, we have been entirely free to conduct our research and formulate our proposals, and it is hard not to believe that the level of funding the project has received reflects a certain degree of commitment.

So the summit is back on track, and we have received renewed commitments. Clearly, however, the proof of the pudding will be in the summit and its aftermath.

Whatever the eventual outcome, it has always been my conviction that the formulation of the first ever integrated Commons Transition Plan (which your readers will find here) legitimised by a nation-state, takes the P2P and commons movement to a higher geopolitical plane. As such, it can be seen as part of the global maturation of the P2P/commons approach, even if it turns out not to work entirely in Ecuador itself.

RP: I believe that one of the issues that has arisen in putting together the FLOK proposals is that Ecuadorians who live in rural areas are concerned that a system based on sharing could see their traditional knowledge appropriated by private interests. Can you say something about this fear and how you believe your plan can address such concerns?

MB: As you are aware, traditional communities have suffered from systematicbiopiracy over the last few decades, with western scientists studying their botanical knowledge, extracting patentable scientific results from it, and then commercialising it in the West.

So fully shareable licenses like the GPL would keep the knowledge in a commons, but would still allow full commercialisation without material benefits flowing back to Ecuador. So what we are proposing is a discussion about a new type of licensing, which we call Commons-Based Reciprocity Licensing. This idea was first pioneered with the Peer Production License as conceived by Dmytri Kleiner.

Such licences would be designed for a particular usage, say biodiversity research in a series of traditional communities. It allows for free sharing non-commercially, commercial use by not-for-profit entities, and even caters for for-profit entities who contribute back. Importantly, it creates a frontier for for-profits who do not contribute back, and asks them to pay.

What is key here is not just the potential financial flow, but to introduce the principle of reciprocity in the marketplace, thereby creating an ethical economy. The idea is that traditional communities can create their own ethical vehicles, and create an economy from which they can also benefit, and under their control.

This concept is beginning to get attention from open machining communities. However, the debate in Ecuador is only starting. Paradoxically, traditional communities are today either looking for traditional IP protection, which doesn’t really work for them, or for no-sharing options.

So we really need to develop intermediary ethical solutions for them that can benefit them while also putting them in the driving seat.

Fundamental reversal of our civilisation

RP: In today’s global economy, where practically everyone and everything seems to be interconnected and subject to the rules of neoliberalism and the market, is it really possible for a country like Ecuador to go off in such a different direction on its own?

MB: A full transition is indeed probably a global affair, but the micro-transitions need to happen at the grassroots, and a progressive government would be able to create exemplary policies and projects that show the way.

Ecuador is in a precarious neo-colonial predicament and subject to the pressures of the global market and the internal social groups that are aligned with it. There are clear signs that since 2010 the Ecuadorian government has moved away from the original radical ideas expressed in the Constitution and the National Plan, as we hear from nearly every single civic movement that we’ve spoken with.

The move for a social knowledge economy is of strategic importance to de-colonialise Ecuador but this doesn’t mean it will actually happen. However, the progressive forces have not disappeared entirely from the government institutions.

As such, it is really difficult to predict how successful this project will be. But as I say, given the investment the government has made in the process we believe there will be some progress. My personal view is that the combination of our political and theoretical achievements, and the existence of the policy papers, means that even with moderate progress in the laws and on the ground, we can be happy that we will have made a difference.

So most likely the local situation will turn out to be a hybrid mix of acceptance and refusal of our proposals, and most certainly the situation is not mature enough to accept the underlying logic of our Commons Transition Plan in toto.

In other words, the publication and the dialogue about the plan itself, and some concrete actions, legislative frameworks, and pilot projects, are the best we can hope for. What this will do is give real legitimacy to our approach and move the commons transition to the geo-political stage. Can we hope for more?

Personally, I believe that even if only 20% of our proposals are retained for action, I think we can consider it a relative success. This is the very first time such an even partial transition will have happened at the scale of the nation and, as I see it, it gives legitimacy to a whole new set of ideas about societal transition. So I believe it is worthy of our engagement.

We have to accept that the realities of power politics are incompatible with the expectations of a clean process for such a fundamental policy change. But we hope that some essential proposals of the project will make a difference, both for the people of Ecuador and all those that are watching the project.

For the future though, I have to say I seriously question the idea of trying to “hack a society” which was the initial philosophy of the project and of the people who hired us. You can’t hack a society, since a society is not an executable program. Political change needs a social and political basis, and it was very weak from the start in this case.

This is why I believe that future projects should first focus on the lower levels of political organisation, such as cities and regions, where politics is closer to the needs of the population. History though, is always full of surprises, and bold gambles can yield results. So FLOK may yet surprise the sceptics.

RP: If Ecuador did adopt your plan (or a significant part of it), what in your view would be the implications, for Ecuador, for other countries, and for the various free and open movements? What would be the implications if none of it were adopted?

MB: As I say, at this stage I see only the possibility of a few legal advances and some pilot projects as the best case scenario. These, however, would be important seeds for Ecuador, and would give extra credibility to our effort.

I realise it may surprise you to hear me say it, but I don’t see this as crucial. I say this because, we already have thousands of projects in the world that are engaged in peer production and commons transitions, and this deep trend is not going to change. The efforts to change the social and economic logic will go on with or without Ecuador.

As I noted, what we have now that we didn’t have before, regardless of implementation in Ecuador, is the first global commons-oriented transition plan, and several concrete legislative proposals. They are far from perfect, but they will be a reference that other locales, cities, (bio)regions and states will be able to make their own adapted versions of it.

In the meantime, we have to continue the grassroots transformation and rebuild commons-oriented coalitions at every level, local, regional, national, global. This will take time, but since infinite growth is not possible in a finite economy, some type of transition is inevitable. Let’s just hope it will be for the benefit of the commoners and the majority of the world population.

Essentially, we need to build the seed forms of the new counter-economy, and the social movement that can defend, facilitate and expand it. Every political and policy expression of this is a bonus.

As for the endgame, you guessed correctly. What distinguishes the effort of the P2P Foundation, and many of the FLOK researchers, is that we’re not just in the business of adding some commons and P2P dynamics to the existing capitalist framework, but aiming at a profound “phase transition”.

To work for a sustainable society and economy is absolutely crucial for the future of humanity, and while we respect the freedoms of people to engage in market dynamics for the allocation of rival goods, we cannot afford a system of infinite growth and scarcity engineering, which is what capitalism is.

In other words, today, we consider nature infinite and we believe that infinite resources should be made scarce in order to protect monopolistic players; tomorrow, we need to consider nature as a finite resource, and we should respect the abundance of nature and the human spirit.

So our endgame is to achieve that fundamental reversal of our civilisation, nothing less. As you can see from our proposals, we aim for a simultaneous transformation of civil society, the market and public authorities. And we do this without inventing or imposing utopias, but by extending the working prototypes from the commoners and peer producers themselves.

RP: Thanks for speaking with me. Good luck with the summit.

The post Working for a phase transition to an open commons-based knowledge society: the Poynder-Bauwens Interview appeared first on P2P Foundation.

 

Extracted from Langdon Winner’s blog, here are his first impressions of FLOK’s “Buen Conocer” summit, just two weeks ago. l

I’ve just returned from the best conference I’ve ever attended. It was the “summit’ of the Free Libre Open Knowledge FLOKSociety held in Quito, Ecuador. In recent times I’ve followed the free software, open source, open knowledge, open culture, new commons movement and its leading advocates. What happened in Quito was phenomenal: a gathering of activists, academics, pubic policy types, writers, hacktivists, indigenous people, visionaries, etc. — all mapping plans to take the “open knowledge” and the “new commons” approach into education, agriculture, new industrial production, public affairs, and other spheres of contemporary life.  Under the general label of “Buen Conocer,” the event and the year of extensive research projects that preceded it were supported by the government of Ecuador. The next step is an attempt to realize at least parts of the vision mapped at the summit within that nation’s public policies, perhaps becoming a model for other countries as well as they seek alternatives to the toxic forms of capitalism and old fashioned socialism that earlier centuries have left behind. 

There was a enormous amount of good energy and lively debate.   Unlike the dreary scholarly gatherings I sometimes attend, there was very little show boating and trade show self-promotion that academic conferences usually feature.  People seemed committed to making good ideas come to life in down-to-earth practical ways. 

This site on the Resilience web page provides a good introduction and links for anybody interested. 

Here in Spanish, is the summit’s site.  I was primarily involved in the “Open Data and Open Government” table (“mesa,” shown below), skillfully moderated by Enrique Rojas, one of fourteen “mesas” where the issues were hammered out.  

I’ll have more to say about this later as I ponder what I heard, saw and felt about it all, and as the results of the gathering emerge.  Evidently, this June will be a month in which the central organizers and researchers edit and publish the summits findings and recommendations.  The only newspaper reporter from the U.S. or Europe covering the scene was a fellow from The Guardian.  I spoke with him at length.  We’ll see what he has to say about the deliberations.  

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