Ruby Irene Pratka: Call it “An Inconvenient Truth” for the market economy. In “The Third Industrial Revolution,” American economic and social theorist, business school professor, and policy adviser Jeremy Rifkin lays out a bleak vision of a near-future world devastated by climate change, mass extinctions, slow economic growth, and rising levels of extremism and inequality. “This is no longer imminent; it’s at the door and in the house,” Rifkin says, giving a lecture to an audience of several dozen people at an undisclosed location in Brooklyn, New York, before launching into a Q&A session. “If it were fully explained, our human family would be terrified.”

Over the course of the filmed lecture, Rifkin charts a course out of the quagmire. For Rifkin, creating a more sustainable world within the next two generations is necessary for humankind’s continued survival. This sustainable world, he says, will depend on increasing interconnectedness between people, places, and objects. Youth engagement, the Internet of things, renewable energy, and the sharing economy will play pivotal roles. Together, they will create a network of data hubs in buildings and vehicles, powered by renewable energy, generating data that can be mined by app developers to create useful, shared tools. The end result, Rifkin says, will be a “distributed nervous system that will allow everyone on the planet at low cost to engage directly with each other.”

This model “works best when it’s collaborative and open, and more and more people join the network and contribute our talent,” he says, referring to already-existing examples of open-source knowledge-sharing networks, such as Wikipedia and Massive Open Online Courses. Widening the network would open the door for a “vast, vast expansion of social entrepreneurialism,” he says. “You already spend part of your day in the market economy, and part of it in the sharing economy with car sharing and Wikipedia.” The sharing economy, he says, “as murky as it is now, is the first real new economic system since capitalism and socialism… I don’t think capitalism will disappear, but it will find value by developing a relationship with the sharing economy.”

He posits that the shift in perspective created by the sharing economy — from a focus on owning property to a focus on accessing goods, services, and experiences — will lead to a renewed awareness of the interconnectedness of everything on Earth, and a more sustained response to the troubles the planet is facing.

“We have one generation to lay down biosphere consciousness,” Rifkin says. “No other generation has had this weight, one generation called upon to save the species. We need to join together in the virtual and physical world to make this happen.”

Fittingly, the feature-length documentary itself, distributed by Vice Media, has been made available for free on YouTube. Watch it here.

Header image is a screenshot from the film

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Item 1: The Political Economy of Peer Production

This is the essay which led to the creation of the P2P Foundation and the elaboration of ‘p2p theory’. This first essay appeared in CTheory and explains the basis of our understanding of the importance of the peer to peer dynamic in our society, and how it both within and outside of capitalism:

• The Political Economy of Peer Production. CTheory, October 2, 2006. Retrieved from http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499  Re-published Post-Autistic Economics Review, issue 37.

(other version at: http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue37/Bauwens37.htm )

Item 2: A primer on P2P and the Commons

Written and arranged in 2016, this longer brochure is aimed at explaining all the basic elements of our approach, with explanatory illustrations and graphics:

• Bauwens, M., Kostakis, V., Troncoso, S. & Utratel, A. M. (2017). Commons Transition and P2P: a primer. Transnational Institute & P2P Foundation.

Item 3: The Practices of P2P

The P2P approach aims to be a ‘low theory’, i.e. it aims to understand and generalize ideas that stem from the real practices of the peer to peer -driven communities. Here we identify ten ‘seed forms’, that we think we be part of our co-constructed post-capitalist future.

• 10 Ways to Accelerate the Peer-to-Peer and Commons Economy

Item 4: What Needs to happen with capital and with the market ?

• From Platform to Open Cooperativism

Two movements mesh cooperative traditions with the digital revolution: Platform Cooperativism, and Open Cooperativism. How do they relate?

• Cooperativism in the digital era, or how to form a global counter-economy

Can we transform the renting economy of Uber and AirBnB into a genuine sharing one? Platform cooperatives must become open and commons-oriented.

Item 5: How do we fund the transition, i.e. using capital for the commons

• Bauwens, Michel and Vasilis Kostakis. 2014. “From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons”

• Bauwens, M., & Niaros, V. (2016). Value in the Commons Economy: Developments in Open and Contributory Accounting. 

This is a bit longer, but contains our fundamental vision of a shift in value regime and on getting ‘value sovereignty for the commons, while using open and contributive accounting to account for all contributions; as well as ‘transvestment’ techniques to transform external financing from capital and state sources, to actual expansion of the commons while creating fair livelihoods for the commoners.

Item 6: P2P Politics and the transformation of the state form

• Blueprint for a Partner State

In this article, we focus on the simultaneous transformation of state, market and civil society , but with special attention to the concept and practices of an enabling state which supports autonomous commons-based initiatives: the Partner-State The Partner State is a concept where public authorities assist in the direct creation of value by civil society, and promote commons-based Peer Production.

(A more elaborate version  in a peer-reviewed journal is here at http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-7-policies-for-the-commons/peer-reviewed-papers/towards-a-new-reconfiguration-among-the-state-civil-society-and-the-market/ )

• Commons in the Time of Monsters

Can Commons and P2P practices offer viable solutions for our present and future social, political and ecological crises? This is the story of how it’s done in a time when the old is dying but the new is not fully born.

Item 7: The mechanics of the transition

• Beyond Jeremy Rifkin: How Will the Phase Transition to a Commons Economy Actually Occur? 

Other authors who recently turned to the commons such as Jeremy Rifkin, Paul Mason, and George Monbiot, are not always very precise about how the transition can occur. A short attempt to explain after reading Rifkin’s book.

Item 8: What about values and spirituality ?

• The Next Buddha Will Be a Collective: Spiritual Expression in the Peer-to-Peer Era. ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation Issue: Volume 29, Number 4 / Spring 2007 Pages: 34 – 45. Draft version retrievable via

The Reality Sandwich version of the above text is shorter and more accessible (long version here ). This short article deals with many of the same themes: If we can have P2P economics why not P2P Spirituality?  

Item 9: Introducing Cosmo-local production

Design global, manufacture local: a new industrial revolution?

An article at The Conversation, by Vasilis Kostakis and Jose Ramos. This article introduces a new mode of production, where the design is developed as a global commons and the manufacturing takes place locally, through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in mind.

• Kostakis, V., Niaros, V., Dafermos, G., & Bauwens, M. (2015). Design global, manufacture local: Exploring the contours of an emerging productive model. Futures, 73, 126-135. 

This article aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on post-capitalist construction by exploring the contours of a commons-oriented productive model. On the basis of this model called “design global-manufacture local”, we argue that recent techno-economic developments around the emergence of commons-based peer production and desktop

Item 10: Living within ecological limits, in our cities and bioregions

• PEER TO PEER AND THE COMMONS: A MATTER, ENERGY AND THERMODYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE. By Xavier Rizos and Celine Piques. 

One of our 3 strategic priorities has been the open source circular economy and our detailed studies of the ecological impacts of cosmo-local production methods.

But this new report does two more things:

1) first of all, it grounds our approach in biophysical economics, the only real economics, as we cannot have an economics that is in permanent overshoot vis a vis our planet’s regenerative capacities

2) second, it establishes the crucial historic and present link between the development of commons-based provisioning systems as the very key strategy to radically diminish the human footprint of our societies

• A Commons Transition Plan for the City of Ghent

Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Niaros were asked to conduct a research project to identify urban commons project, convey the wishes of leading contributors and creators of these projects, and suggest a longer-term institutional design for cooperation between the public sector and the commons.

This is the english Executive Summary of the report, which contains a number of graphics on public-commons partnership approaches.

A fuller treatment on urban commons-based transitions is available in a new report published for the Boll Foundation:

• Changing Societies through Urban Commons Transitions

• Kostakis, V., Latoufis, K., Liarokapis, M., & Bauwens, M. (2017). The Convergence of Digital Commons with Local Manufacturing from a Degrowth Perspective: Two Illustrative Cases.

The emerging discussion about the sustainability potential of distributed production is the starting point for this paper. The focus is on the “design global, manufacture local” model. This model builds on the conjunction of the digital commons of knowledge and design with desktop and benchtop manufacturing technologies (from three-dimensional printers and laser cutters to low-tech tools and crafts). Two case studies are presented to illustrate three interlocked practices of this model for degrowth. It is argued that a “design global, manufacture local” model, as exemplified by these case studies, seems to arise in a significantly different political economy from that of the conventional industrial model of mass production. “Design global, manufacture local” may be seen as a platform to bridge digital and knowledge commons with existing physical infrastructures and degrowth communities, in order to achieve distributed modes of collaborative production.

Lead photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

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From the notes to the video:

Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society. Taken from a lecture given by Jeremy Rifkin as part of the RSA’s free public events programme.

The RSA is a 258 year-old charity devoted to creating social progress and spreading world-changing ideas. For more information about our research, RSA Animates, free events programme and 27,000 strong fellowship.

The post Jeremy Rifkin’s recommended presentation on The Empathic Civilization appeared first on P2P Foundation.

III. Re-imagining the Polity for a Networked Humanity

However promising the new forms of open source governance outlined above, they do not of themselves constitute a polity. The new regimes of collaboration constitute mini- and meso-systems of self-organization. They do not comprise a superstructure of law, policy, infrastructure and macro-support, which is also needed. So what might such a superstructure look like, and how might it be created? Can we envision some sort of transnational polity that could leapfrog over the poorly functioning state systems that prevail today?

A first observation on this question is that the very idea of a polity must evolve. So long as we remain tethered to the premises of the Westphalian nation-state system, with its strict notions of absolute sovereignty over geographic territory and people and its mechanical worldview enforced by bureaucracies and law, the larger needs of the Earth as a living ecosystem will suffer. So, too, will the basic creaturely needs of human beings, which are universal prepolitical ethical needs beyond national identity.

It may simply be premature to declare what a post-Westphalian polity ought to look like – but we certainly must orient ourselves in that direction. For the reasons cited above, we should find ways to encourage the growth of a Commons Sector, in both digital and non-virtual contexts, and in ways that traverse existing territorial political boundaries. Ecosystems are not confined by political borders, after all, and increasingly, neither are capital and commerce. Culture, too, is increasingly transnational. Any serious social or ecological reconstruction must be supported by making nation-state barriers more open to transnational collaboration if durable, effective solutions are to be developed.

While states are usually quite jealous in protecting their authority, transnational commons should be seen as helping the beleaguered nation-state system by compensating for its deficiencies. By empowering ordinary people to take responsibility and reap entitlements as commoners, nation-states could foster an explosion of open-source problem-solving and diminish dependencies on volatile, often-predatory global markets, while bolstering their credibility and legitimacy as systems of power.

But how might we begin to build a commons-friendly polity? After all, the most politically attractive approaches have no ambitions to change the system, while any grand proposals for transforming neoliberal capitalism are seen as political non-starters. I suggest three “entry points” that can serve as long-term strategies for transformation:

1) begin to reconceptualize cities as commons;

2) reframe the “right to common” (access to basic resources for survival and dignity) as a human right; and

3) build new collaborations among system-critical social movements so that a critical mass of resistance and creative alternatives can emerge.

These three general strategies are not separate approaches, of course, but highly complementary and synergistic.

1. Cities as a Workshop for System-Change

One of the most promising places to start building a new polity is in cities. In Barcelona, Bologna, Seoul, and many other cities, citizen movements based on the ideas of “the city as a commons” and of “sharing cities” are taking root. Both approaches assert the shared interests of ordinary residents over those of the usual overlords of city government – real estate developers, economic elites, “starchitects” and urban planners.[44] They recognize the city and its public spaces, communities and opportunities as products of commoning. A commons framing is deliberately invoked to make new moral and political claims on common resources in urban settings – to demand a “right to the city”[45] – and so inaugurate a self-feeding spiral of social practice and a new discourse. Citizens acting as commoners can insist on greater citizen participation not just in policymaking but in directly developing innovative projects and solutions. Network platforms can foster all of these goals.[46]

In Bologna, for example, the city government is undertaking a landmark reconceptualization of how government might work in cooperation with citizens. Ordinary people acting as commoners are invited to enter into a “co-design process” with the city to manage public spaces, urban green zones, abandoned buildings and other urban resources. The formal legal authority for this innovation, the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons, is now being emulated by other Italian cities.

City governments could augment this general approach by building new tech infrastructures that enable greater citizen engagement. For example, instead of ceding the software infrastructure for taxi service or apartment rentals to Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and other well-financed “gig economy” corporations, city governments could require the use of shared open platforms for such market activity. This could enable multiple players to compete while improving regulatory oversight of basic labor and consumer protections, and privacy protection for personal data.

City governments could also take advantage of the new “Top Level Domains” – better known as TLDs – that are now available on the Internet for city names. TLDs are the regions of the Internet denoted by .com, .org and .edu. Over the past few years, the little-known Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) – which manages TLDs — has been pushing the idea of TLDs for cities. The idea is that cities could use their unique TLDs like .rome or .paris to improve access to various aspects of city life. For instance if you were new to Brooklyn Heights, you could go to brooklynheights.nyc and find all sorts of civic, community and commercial website listings for that neighborhood – the library, recycling resources, parking rules, links to relevant city officials. And yes, the businesses.

City TLDs are a potentially transformative civil infrastructure that could be as consequential as the “street grid” layout of Manhattan adopted in the 1800s. Why should this enormous planning authority, which has such far-reaching implications for the life of a city, be auctioned off to private domain-name vendors, who would then re-sell “Brooklyn.nyc” and “hotels.nyc” to the highest bidder with minimal city oversight? It essentially cedes the future of a city to short-term commercial imperatives. TLDs should be treated as commons infrastructure and used to enhance neighborhood identities and bottom-up participation.

Network platforms are an especially attractive way to actualize the idea of “the city as commons” because they can enact all sorts of open source principles: low barriers to participation, transparency of process, bottom-up innovation, social pressure for fair dealing and resistance to concentrated power and insider deals.

One powerful way to advance commoning in cities is through the skillful use of open data. The ubiquity of computing devices in modern life is generating vast floods of data that, if managed cooperatively, could improve city life in many creative ways. Open data systems could be used to host participatory crowdsourcing, interactive collaborations among citizens and government, and improvements in municipal services (street repairs, trash removal, transportation).

The City of San Francisco recently used an open source model to explore how best to transform its busy Market Street thoroughfare into a more pedestrian-friendly, traffic-free promenade. To help ascertain what might appeal to ordinary city residents, the city issued an open call to artists for proposed street installations along a two-mile stretch of the boulevard. This elicited dozens of clever ideas – performance spaces, relaxation zones, even a six-sided ping-pong table. City planners chose fifty of the projects for a real-world experiment over the course of three days in 2015 to see how people would actually engage with the artworks. The Market Street prototyping helped enlist a large and diverse group of the public to generate ideas that might otherwise seem too daring or unusual.

The City of Los Angeles has been another pioneer in using open networks, open data and crowdsourcing of information to improve city life. The city’s open data portal, DataLA, offers data for everything from the city budget and the regional economy to crime locations, building inspections, property foreclosures, parking citations and even checks written by the city government. The data portal has helped people measure the effectiveness of government and build public trust in government. It has also been used in creative ways to solicit people’s knowledge in providing “geo-references” to historic photos. The HistoricPlacesLA project has been described as an “open-source, web-based, geospatial information system for cultural heritage inventory and management.”[46] The City has also created a special smartphone app, PulsePoint, which can help deal with medical emergencies anywhere in the city. It identifies a patient’s location and any CPR-trained individuals who may be nearby, while providing CPR guidance. The app suggests a way that cities could use smartphones to coordinate needs with responses instantly: a versatile model for the future.

Using smartphones to crowdsource real-time data is another way that a city could use commoning to reinvent the role of government. The City of Los Angeles’ fascinating (non-financial, non-exclusive) collaboration with Waze, a Google-owned traffic and navigation smartphone app offers several lessons. The system is used by an estimated 30 percent of Los Angeles drivers to learn about traffic accidents and other road situations, and its massive usage has made it a de facto infrastructure tool for city transportation and data managers. The City gives Waze timely data about active road construction projects in order to alert drivers about potential or actual traffic delays – and Waze, for its part, collects crowdsourced reports about traffic and sends them to city transportation officials every two minutes. (There is no collection of any personally identifiable information.) Even though this is a public/private partnership – not a true commons – it suggests the great power of bottom-up sharing on network platforms. Of course, such data aggregation is no substitute for real investment in the physical commons of transport infrastructure and public space, but used wisely it could facilitate more citizen-focused improvements.

City governments (or state or federal governments, for that matter) could leverage bottom-up, interactive collaborations such as these by developing their own open APIs (application programming interfaces) on electronic networks – similar to those used by the iPhone and other platforms. This would enable governments to collect real-time data and make more dynamic, responsive choices “in cooperation” with its citizens. City governments could also perform automatic oversight of regulated entities without the complexities of conventional regulation. Sensors for water or air quality, for example, could provide real-time data portraits of an airshed or watershed. By using tamper-proof data-flows from remote devices, some of the expense of in-person inspections could be avoided and the quality of enforcement improved.

The huge potential of open data networks raises important questions about governance structures, however. How should crowdsourced information be managed and governed – by proprietary companies? City governments? Citizens as commoners? As the controversial growth of Uber and Airbnb has shown, there are great risks in such power being held by a few large tech companies answerable primarily to investors. Yet very few city governments have shown leadership in using networked systems to advance public designs for public purposes. There is a need to set forth some commons-based governance alternatives because they are the most likely to align civic needs and realities with the ultimate policies and decisions.

Fortunately, there are a number of pacesetter projects experimenting along these lines. In addition to the Bologna Regulation mentioned above, the European Cultural Foundation is actively exploring the role that artistic and cultural commons can play in improving cities. The Ubiquitous Commons project is developing a prototype legal/technological toolkit to empower people to control the personal data they generate from countless devices, especially in urban contexts. The Open Referral Initiatives is developing a common technical language so that information systems can “speak” to each other and share community resource directory data. The beauty of these and other initiatives is that they invite broad participation and address immediate, practical needs while contributing to a very different paradigm of governance – one that fosters commons and commoning.

2. The Right to Common as a Basic Human Right

The “right to the city” asserted by commoners is essentially a human right – a moral and political claim of access to resources that are essential to life, and to a right to participate in their use and management. So it is worth situating this entire struggle in the context of human rights law and social movements. The goals of commoning and human rights law have, in fact, a very long, entangled history. They go back at least 800 years, when King John adopted the Magna Carta and its lesser-known companion document, the Charter of the Forest, as a way to settle a bitter civil war. The Charter of the Forest (later incorporated into the Magna Carta) recognizes the claims of commoners to the common wealth that belongs to them as human beings, and who depend upon certain resources for their everyday subsistence.

For example, the Magna Carta formally recognized in writing the right of commoners to access and use forests that the King had previously claimed as his alone. It helps to remember that commoners in the thirteenth century relied on forests for nearly everything – wood to cook their food and build their houses, wild game to eat, plants to feed their cattle, acorns to fatten their pigs. The problem is that their long-standing customary use of the forest and other common resources was not legally recognized – and so the King and his lords could (and did) arbitrarily ignore the moral and human rights of commoners. The Magna Carta was a frank acknowledgment that commoners indeed have human rights – the right to use the forest, the right to self-organize their own governance rules, and civil liberties and rights to protect them from the sovereign’s arbitrary abuses of power.[48]

There are other strands in this legal history of human rights and commons that are too involved to discuss here; my co-author Burns H. Weston, an international human rights and law scholar, and I explore them more fully in our book Green Governance. Suffice it to say that it is entirely consistent with human rights law for it to squarely embrace the right of universal access to clean air, water, food and other resources and ecosystems that are essential to life.

The problem is that human rights champions have historically sought to fulfill these rights within the prevailing system of law and commerce, i.e., the neoliberal state and markets. But given its commitments to individual property rights, “free markets” and economic growth, it should not be surprising that the actual vindication of human rights is a problematic affair. The idea of human rights has been aspirational, frequently stymied by hostile structures of the state, law and commerce. Surely it is an apt moment to consider how various types of common-based governance (as described above) could actualize human rights in more robust, stable ways.

To try to advance human rights law in such directions, Weston and I in 2013 proposed a Universal Covenant Affirming a Human Right to Commons- and Rights-based Governance of Earth’s Natural Wealth and Resources.[49] It is our attempt to win recognition for the human right to “green governance” – to manage resources as commons, and thus to actualize human rights more reliably than existing systems of national and international law now do. A related effort should be the “reinvention of law for the commons,” a topic that I addressed in a 2015 research memorandum.[50] The paper calls for a new field of inquiry and legal innovation — commons-based law – to consolidate the disparate areas of law that are trying to protect collective resources and practices from enclosures while providing affirmative legal support for people to enter into commoning.

3. Building a Convergence of System-Critical Movements

The third strategic approach I want to suggest for building a new polity supportive of the commons is through an ongoing convergence and alignment of diverse system-critical social movements. The failures of neoliberal capitalism are coming at the very time that promising new modes of production, governance and social practice are exploding, especially through decentralized, self-organized initiatives on open networks that can often out-perform both the market and state.[51] The people developing these new systems are essentially creating a new parallel economy – sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, as in Greece and Spain. The innovators are not politicians, CEOs or credentialed experts, but ordinary people acting as householders, makers, hackers, permaculturists, citizen-scientists, cooperativists, community foresters, subsistence collectives, social mutualists and commoners: a vast grassroots cohort whose generative activities are not really conveyed by the term “citizen” or “consumer.”

Through network-based cooperation and localized grassroots projects, millions of people around the world are managing all sorts of bottom-up, self-provisioning systems. There are also many new types of citizen-actors and mobilizations seeking system change, ranging from cultural surges such as Occupy, the Arab Spring and Las Indignadas to more durable long-term movements focused on cooperatives, degrowth, the solidarity economy, Transition Towns, relocalized economies, peer production, and the commons.

These movements are developing new visions of “development” and “progress,” as seen in the buen vivir ethic in Latin America, for example, or in “go local” movements in the US and Europe, and the FabLabs and makerspaces. The new models also include alternative currencies, co-operative finance and crowdequity investments to reclaim local control, transition and indigenous peoples’ initiatives to develop sustainable post-growth economies, the movement to reclaim the city as a commons, and movements to integrate social justice and inclusive ethical commitments into economic life.

These movements are not only pioneering new types of collective action and provisioning, but also new legal and organizational forms. The idea of “generative ownership” as a collective enterprise is being explored by leaders of co-operative finance, community land trusts, relocalized food systems and commons-based peer production. Each is attempting to demonstrate the feasibility of various commons-based ownership structures and self-governance – and then to expand the use of such models to show that there are attractive alternatives that can mature into a new economic ecosystem.

The general approach here is to change the old by building the new. The demonstration of feasible alternatives (renewable energy, cooperativism, relocalization, etc.) is a way to shift political momentum, constitute new constituencies for system change, and assert a new moral center of gravity. To work, however, the alternatives incubated outside the existing system must achieve a sufficient coherence, intelligibility, scale and functionality.

The commons can act as a shared meta-language among these highly diverse groups because the commons expresses many of the core values and priorities of many “system-change” movements. Like DNA, which is under-specified so that it can adapt to local circumstances, the commons discourse is general enough to accommodate myriad manifestations of basic values and principles. More than an intellectual framework, the commons helps make culturally legible the many social practices (“commoning”) that are often taken to be too small and inconsequential to matter – but which, taken together, constitute a different type of economy. In this fashion, the commons discourse itself has an integrative and catalytic potential to build a new type of networked polity. Michel Bauwens, Founder of the P2P Foundation, and his colleague John Restakis argue that the state can be reinvented as a “Partner State” in support of commons and peer production. Bauwens cites Bob Jessop, arguing that:

One the one hand, market competition will be balanced by cooperation, the invisible hand will be combined with a visible handshake. On the other hand, the state is no longer the sovereignty authority. It becomes just one participant among others in the pluralistic guidance systems and contributes its own distinctive resources to the negotiation process … official apparatuses remain at best first among equals. The state’s involvement would become less hierarchical, less centralized and less directive in character. The exchange of information and moral suasion become key sources of legitimation and the state’s influence depends as much on its role as a prime source and mediator of collective intelligence as on its command over economic resources or legitimate coercion.[52]

The idea of the partner state is intriguing, but will require further theoretical elaboration and investigations in how it might be politically actualized. One serious attempt at this in the context of digital commons is the Commons Transition Plan prepared by Bauwens in conjunction with a research project sponsored by the Government of Ecuador in 2014.[53] It attempts to envision state policies that could help bring about “a society and economy that functions as common pools of shared knowledge in every domain of social activity.”

Conclusion

A new polity is not something that can simply be declared or imposed. It must be co-enacted over time. We must co-evolve into it by living as commoners. It is therefore difficult to project what a new polity might look like today; too many developmental realities must occur. It will be emergent, which is to say, it will manifest a different structural logic and organization than we presume is possible today. Standing at the base of a never-ascended mountain, we cannot really know which path to take and what the view from the peak will look like.

In the meantime, it is clear that the nation-state as a governance regime is facing serious new pressures. It exists in a highly interconnected world in which transboundary interactionsare extensive and routine. Transborder flows are not just commercial in nature, but also involve transfers of ideas, values, projects, policy initiatives, and visions for humanity. As the peer-to-peer velocity of cross-border exchange reaches new intensities, the nation-state and international treaty systems will face new insurgent pressures from below. How could it be otherwise? The question is whether the needs of people at the micro, everyday level can be brought into closer alignment with the conduct of macro-institutions.

The Internet and digital technologies are certainly bringing this issue to a head as they catalyze and organize new sorts of bottom-up political and cultural energies. It remains unclear whether those energies will fracture the old polity and its governance systems, and give rise to a new commons-based techno-economic social paradigm and polity – or whether the Googles and Facebooks of the world, and their corporate brethren, will succeed in reinventing capitalism in the age of electronic networks, assuring their ongoing mastery, perhaps in more ominous, unequal and coercive forms.

I do believe that fostering the social practices and norms of commoning may be one of the few pathways to develop transformational change. It offers many points of access for participation. It energizes bottom-up pressures and innovation from the edge. It can generate goods and services to meet real needs outside of capitalist structures, or through more benign localized market hybrids and systems of mutualized support. It provides a flexible, evolving template for change that works in diverse contexts and yet it articulates a core set of principles with a post-capitalist logic.

We have lived as vassals within the massive market/state edifice and its cultural matrix for so long that it somehow surprises us to have the pilot come on the intercom and announce that we’re all in this together, and that our agency as individuals acting collectively will be the only way to secure our future. It is entirely appropriate, then, that we turn to our neighbors on either side of us, introduce ourselves, and begin the formidable task of reinventing new types of commons. In the process, the eventual inter-networking of commons will give birth to an emergent global polity whose dimensions cannot be fully imagined today but which aspires to emancipate humanity from the limitations of modernity. The commons is no magic talisman, nor a panacea. Nor are network platforms. But they do enable us to rediscover that sovereignty does not ultimately reside in the state or market (especially in these times), but within ourselves, together.

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Footnotes

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Michael McAllum:

“Technologies can engender revolutionary effects. Technology that is disruptive at a civilisational scale, occurs when particular technologies (in the contemporary situation networking, robotic and energy technologies) reorder, replace and integrate, certain dimensions of human life, while excluding others previously used to establish ‘meaning’; how we connect, organise, express culture or enable power. Consistent with this disruptive characterisation Castells postulates, what these networks are doing is redefining cultural and social meaning, in ways that hitherto have been defined by ‘place’ on the one hand and the ‘functionality of wealth and power flows’ on the other. Others like Katz extend exploration of these technology effects. They assert that just as the ethos of mechanical progress influenced the 2nd Industrial Age, so too the design and the use of the technology has assigned a number of new meanings to network technology devices, an Apparatgeist, that was never intended when the technology was created. In a sense, the machines have become us—and for that matter, more than us—to a point where one of the defining characteristics of individuality and our age—what we call ‘work’—“will soon come under threat from forged labourers and synthetic intellects”. So pervasive will be their impact “the future will be a struggle of assets against people, as the resources accumulated by our creations serve no constructive purpose or are put to no productive use”629. As the technologies evolve or are replaced by newer and smarter versions, the revolutionary effects of the never ending redefinition of meaning permeate ever deeper into the existing fabric, eroding what is and providing opportunity to establish what might be (a process previously described as pseudomorphosis).

* Disruptive Technology enables Discontinuous Form

If technologies enable ‘meaning’ to be redefined, and if such reconstitutions are widely shared, then the entire social and economic fabric is also rearranged to an extent that it can only be described as revolutionary. For example, with almost ubiquitous technological connectedness (a central tenet of Rifkin’s sense of revolution) Perez argues what distinguishes a technological (network) revolution from the emergence of interesting but random technologies is the strong interconnectedness and interdependence of the participating technologies in how they influence markets and societies, together with their capacity to profoundly transform economies, institutions and society itself. Figure 5.4 suggests that it is at deeper levels of reality that redefinition, due to the introduction of a particular technology, becomes important. This importance might be measured by the capacities any particular technology creates, to enable transformation; to redefine society at a structural level—thereby reframing worldviews and creating new myths and metaphors—that defines revolution at a scale that is material.

* Why Network Technologies Undermine Continuity

Almost paradoxically, an understanding that it is the reconstitution of meaning that matters in transition and transformation assists in understanding the dialectic tension that exists between the widespread dissemination of network technologies and at the same time the evident capacity of some of those technologies to undermine the existing system (particularly capitalist economic systems). While the implications of this tension and the possibility that it will usher in a post model, will be explored later in this chapter, there are a number of more generalised effects that might be considered.

Firstly, they enable a radical redefinition and rearrangement of transaction costs. This has profound implications, for both margins (on both the supply and demand side) and on the formshape-size of organisations. Secondly, as was alluded to earlier, advances in robotics and cognitive technologies will see the end of work, as we understand it. If this is as rapid, as some argue, then how wealth is socially distributed to allow any kind of economy (be it for accumulation or exchange) will require a different alternative to work as a wealth distribution mechanism. The third reframing reflects the tension engendered by technologies that allow for significant global, and therefore non-state based, economic activity. This allows particular classes of actors to avoid or go beyond the frameworks of any particular nation whose policy settings they perceive are not in their best interests, thereby challenging the close connection that the nation state has with economy. While each of these contentions is important and are worthy of further exploration within the context of this study, what they demonstrate both separately and together is that networking technologies create significant disruption to current arrangements, and the potential for the reconstitution of an economic system or systems that is different from these arrangements.”

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* PhD Thesis: Making Sense of Rifkin’s Third Industrial Revolution: Towards a Collaborative Age. McAllum, Michael J C. Thesis submitted to The University of the Sunshine Coast. Under the supervision of Dr. Sohail Inayatullah & Dr. Marcus Bussey. Submitted: June 7, 2016

* Situating the Post Capitalist Proposition

Michael McAllum writes:

Rifkin, in his latest work The , extends his earlier argument that capitalism will move from a vertical to lateral orientation to assert:

[T]he Capitalist era is passing and although the indicators are still soft and largely anecdotal, the Collaborative Commons is ascendant and by 2050 it will most likely settle in as the primary arbiter of economic life.

He contends there are essentially three reasons for this.

Firstly, with the use of network technologies the capitalist system is increasingly able to produce constructs of simplification and efficiency (competitive advantage) that enable near zero marginal cost and “if that were to happen the lifeblood of capitalism [margins] would dry up”6. This proposition suggests that this drive for competitive advantage is inherent in the system and, as each new advantage is obtained, the margins available reduce. Logically, this will reach a point when there is no margin left and the system is at its limits. When that occurs, then the only option is to expand the market into areas of what were considered societal responsibilities (e.g. prisons, health, security) 700 until the same point in the process occurs again.

Secondly, the entropic bill for industrial capitalism has arrived, because the economic model and its related energy system see environmental effects as unaccountable externalities. Consequently, the energy systems on which capitalism depends must rapidly change if Collapse is to be averted, thus “throwing the whole economic model into question”.

Thirdly, Rifkin proposes the emerging Collaborative economy is developing as a viable, perhaps even preferred, alternative to a capitalist model that is, by design, systemically inequitable.

While some of Rifkin’s propositions are still evolving, a prime concern of this thesis (as has been stated) is to determine if there is also a contemporary body of literature that supports his fundamental proposition that the system is at is limits. An exploration of Rifkin and Transformist contentions is important because an understanding of the outcomes (not proof!) to these propositions has implications for mentality, philosophy and narratives of engagement with a global community who currently do not see any viable alternative to a mythology that argues (in a rephrasing of a Churchillian quote on democracy) “as a system, capitalism is not perfect but it is far better than the alternatives”. However, it should be noted that, to date, the use of ‘alternative’ has always been contained within the boundaries of the contemporary discourse (capitalism v socialism). ‘Alternative’ as it is used here describes a transformational imperative, one that stands outside of contemporariness because either the system is at immanent limits, or a better option is in prospect.

* The Post Capitalist Option

As Rifkin’s articulation of his current (evolutionary) understanding of post capitalism architecture has been detailed earlier in this thesis, what remains unresolved is the support that it has. Two issues in particular serve as useful points of reference for considering this support: changes in the dynamics of economic and power relationships, and a repurposing of markets from accumulation to exchange.

Rifkin contends that a reconstitution of the relationships between the actors is central to the post capitalist proposition of how value is created and captured. In post capitalist literature there is explicit support for the proposition that in the current market accumulation model the emphasis is hierarchical, one of control of labour and capital, whereas in the post capitalist system the emphasis is on participation and sharing. This is what Rifkin terms privileging of collaboration over competition. Kostakis and Bauwens describe it as “a model where the relations of production will not be in contradiction with the evolution of the mode of production”. This is now possible because network technologies enable socio-technological arrangements that are not only able to compete (and often outperform), in terms of transaction costs with hierarchical entities, but by design they create a framework for social as well as personal benefit.

The explicit rejection of the mechanistic model permits the development of relationship webs that are unconstrained by previous modes of control as “there is a structural connection between the key defining properties of commons-based peer production and the possibility of engagement in creative, autonomous, benevolent and public spirited undertakings”. The viability of such networks also provides for the development of alternatives for those Dussel describes as they who are not.

It allows:

…an internal exodus by which the autonomous production of social life is made increasingly possible (with non cooperation with the dominant capitalist model) and an outer movement that can muster resistance and strike at the heart of power.

This different arrangement also reconfigures the investor-producer-consumer relationship; what Rifkin terms prosumers. These are either citizens or consumers who have an active role in more than one aspect of the value creation process (hence prosumer) whereas typically, involvement has been only at the point of purchase. Depending on the nature of the value creation process this relationship may focus on how work is done (as exemplified in 3D printing), where and how consumers can give as well as receive (evident in smart grid power production), or in decision making (e.g. by investing and then buying particular types of music they like). It is also encouraging a radical rethink in how services like health are delivered. “The consequence is a new decentralisation of organisation whose base will, in chosen and spontaneous groups, fulfil certain functions and whose membership will be overlapping and not exclusive”. The attractiveness of the ‘prosumer’ archetype is near-zero information sharing costs; little fixed cost prior to production; the ability to customise rather than prototype; no waste, ‘just in time’ production; and the development of relationships that encourage innovation. In essence it is a disruptive logic that redefines value creation in ways that privilege economies of one over scale; can be conceptualised as a ‘space of flows’ across a multitude of public good and private interactions; and distributes control among the actors in a manner that encourages collaboration rather than advantage. Finally, the significance of this technology-relationship congruence in a post capitalist model is that it provides a platform, consistent with Rifkin’s theorising, through which critical environmental, social and economic issues might be addressed.

One of the dearly held mythologies of the capitalist model is that the market is a neutral, non-value driven ‘invisible hand.’ Proponents of markets for exchange, not accumulation, differ. They argue current markets are capricious, ownership-centric and exhibit all the system tensions described above. Instead they propose new models of cooperation (microfinance, co-operative infrastructure, decentralised energy) that operate in pseudomorphic-like arrangements within the existing system as prototypes of market commons. These Commons, manifestations of lateral power, are potentially spaces that “provide opportunities for virtuous behaviour, ones that are more relevant to virtuous individuals and (therefore) the practice of effective virtuous behaviour may lead to more people adopting these virtues as their own”. These are, as Wallenstein suggests, one of the alternatives for a world in a period of structural chaos. They point to a future where the rights of the group, as well as those of the individual, are a permanent feature of society. This evolution of post capitalism is not simply the adaptive evolution of capitalism as propounded by Kaletsky, Picketty and Bryjolfsson, and one that Rifkin in earlier works termed distributed capitalism. Rather, it represents a systemic break, an acceptance that the model has little adaptive capacity left. It makes available through access models what previously could only be owned, be that physical property or knowledge. What emerges, Mason describes as “new forms of society that (through networks) prefigure what comes next”, and Rifkin characterises as ‘ zero marginal cost society’ that can take the human race from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance over the course of the first half of the twenty-first century”.

* Conditions for success of a Post-Capitalist Transformation

However, using a macrohistorical framing, this thesis has deconstructed Rifkin’s narratives into seven theories using CLA as a framework for that deconstruction. It asserts that each of these theories, acting in ways that reinforce the others, provides a logical and coherent, but linear, narrative. It also suggests that these theories (of limits, discontinuous change, stages of history, empathic consciousness, leadership, post capitalism and transformation) explore layers of reality that, while concentrating the gaze on the near future, require consideration of reality that is ‘beyond the litany’ of that gaze. It is postulated that these considerations reveal a range of challenges and tensions that significantly impact both the transition and transformation Rifkin is proposing.

These include the following:

o The entropic effects (the environmental crisis) of the industrial economy cannot be resolved inside an economic system that privileges ‘growth’ and ‘quantity of life’ as prime drivers of society.

o New energy and communication technologies, acting as ‘infrastructure’, are nomothetic in their nature and influence. As such, they challenge the continuation of mechanism and vertical power, and they privilege post-carbon futures, ecological thinking and collaboration.

o At the core of the (theory of) revolution is a reconception of time, form and space that will have three effects. The first is a contest between competing senses of reality in the short term (mechanism v collaboration). The second is to actualise the design of transformed social, economic and institutional fabric so that it does not recreate the issues that created the ‘crisis of limits’ in the first place. The third will include in that design an accommodation and acceptance of multiple senses of time in a way that no one sense of time is more important than any other, but also in a way that any given sense of time does not imperialise itself at the expense of these others.

o If a shift in the nature of empathic consciousness is fundamental to the success of both transition and transformation—that is, from a psychological (individualistic) sense to a planetary level—then it needs to be complemented by philosophical approaches that are ‘beyond the horizon’ of modernity: a way of thinking that does not put the Western episteme, nor the role of humans as masters-of-nature, at the center of the discourse. This reconstitution of identity requires a rethinking of ‘presence’ or being-ness.

Given these challenges, the success of any transition and transformation will consequently be conditional on three dynamics: new kinds of leadership; a different economic model; and the speed of transition.

Therefore:

o As a result of the shift from vertical to lateral power, leadership will necessarily become distributed in scope, and both networked and collaborative in nature (a new cosmopolitanism that can be localised). By definition it will privilege partnership over dominator models, and because of the nature of partnership, it will have many forms.

o The future will require the development of ‘post-capitalist’ economic models that replace a contemporary system that cannot either confront the (unsustainable) limits it has created, nor the consequences of zero margins that many technologies now enable. This will see markets of accumulation replaced with ‘post-growth’ markets of exchange; self-reliant models developing in a revitalised civic sector; and ownership models giving way to ‘access and use’ models.

o The success, though, of this transition will be conditional on its speed. If it fails to occur in a timely fashion, the entropic effects will rapidly overwhelm whatever progress has been made towards a new Collaborative Age.

Rifkin’s Third Industrial Revolution is therefore conditional. It is an argument that, whilst focused on the near-term future, is binary in its options (Transform or Collapse). Consequently, one of the benefits of placing this narrative within the wider macrohistorical discourse has been to identify other possibilities that might be between, or even outside of, the spectrum Rifkin describes.”

More and fuller excerpts here.

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The post What to think of Rifkin’s Post-Capitalist Approach? (part two) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

* PhD Thesis: Making Sense of Rifkin’s Third Industrial Revolution: Towards a Collaborative Age. McAllum, Michael J C. Thesis submitted to The University of the Sunshine Coast. Under the supervision of Dr. Sohail Inayatullah & Dr. Marcus Bussey. Submitted: June 7, 2016

McAllum first distills the theoretical underpinnings of Jeremy Rifkin’s way of thinking:

“In summary these theories are:

1. A Theory of Limits.

An argument about the entropic effects of current socioeconomic arrangements.

2. A Theory of Discontinuous Change.

Causes of change based on the proposition that significant changes in energy form and use, together with different communication technologies, have disruptive and radical effects on the societies where such changes are realised and expressed.

3. A Theory of History.

The framing of the history of these discontinuities as a series of identifiable and sequential revolutions have culminated in the Third Industrial Revolution and thus might be described as ‘Stages of History’.

4. A Theory of Empathic Consciousness.

Advocacy of the view that humanity’s biophysically determined sense of empathic consciousness frames as our collective sense of time and space and is reframed by our individual metaphysical choices.

5. A Theory of Leadership.

The development of a number of concepts that interwoven create a ‘sinew of leadership’; a social code that enables networks to act appropriately and synergistically in ways that can be widely shared and accessed by many actors in multiple locations. These actors through choice, not positional power, embed this social code through agency in their activities, products and services across the civil and private spectrum. Over time those who understand the need for transformation become widely distributed within and beyond the established order. They include key policy makers required to create the frameworks for future infrastructure, scientists and technologists who are providing the enabling mechanisms, and finally, ‘prosumers’ who are taking advantage of emergent transformational effects.

6. A Theory of Post Capitalism.

This argues that the current system is at its limits. Further that discourses which privilege the Khunian view of mechanistic organisation and the US senses of individualism as the basic unit of society are both incompatible with, and insufficient for, the emerging collaborative society, as well as the perpetuation of the capitalist model, upon which the current system rests. If these discourses and the hegemony they have created (mythology) are prolonged, there is no exit from cumulative entropic effects. On the other hand the development of a new kind of infrastructure (the Internet of Things) together with a post capitalist collaborative economy provides the basis for escape.

7. A Theory of Transformation.

Only two possible future scenarios are available as future options. These are either Transform or Collapse, on the proviso that the former occurs in a timely manner.

However, a sense of coherence needs to go beyond a litany of applied or empirical explanations. It requires an understanding of the systemic changes that are either explicit or implicit in these theories; the worldviews that are privileged in those systems; and identification of the mythologies, metonymies and metaphors that underpin those worldviews. For instance, the central role of mythology and the use of the metonymic ‘hydraulic civilisation’ allusion is better understood if one accepts, as Rifkin believes, significant shifts in the mastery of energy and communication technology reframe our sense of space and time, and that they have been and are, as a consequence, transformative in nature.”

The author then introduces Jeremy Rifkin’s Theory of Post Capitalism:

“Two of Rifkin’s most important contentions—the effects of entropy on the global environmental system and the effect of energy efficiencies as drivers of growth—are largely neglected in conventional economic theory. While his early work, for the most part, sets out the logic and evidence for these propositions, his later works articulate potential responses to the challenges these contentions raise. The evolution of this ‘challenge and response’ process has lead him to a point where he has declared that the essence of the current economic system (capitalism) “is passing, not quickly but inevitably and that in its place a new economic paradigm, the Collaborative Commons is in the ascendant”.

Substantiation of this declaration requires Rifkin to: theorise about systemic limits and new options as alternatives to the current model; identify worldviews alternative to those that underpin the capitalist ethic; and at least proffer some possibilities for future metaphors and mythologies.

At the outset it should be noted that, while some would regard Rifkin’s views as ‘of the left’, he is not a Marxist economist, in the accepted sense of that term. For the Marxists, the question is not about whether or not to ‘exploit, grown and own,’ rather the issue is about who controls or has the right to ‘exploit, grow and own.’ In contrast, Rifkin questions the concept of production and its entropic effects per se. As such, he might be more accurately characterised as an ‘individualist’ in the European sensibility, where “the emphasis is on inclusivity, diversity, quality of life, sustainability, deep play, universal human rights and the rights of nature”393. It is within this context that, in the Zero Marginal Cost Economy, he notes mixed feelings about the passing of the capitalist era, and is somewhat surprised that an economic system organised around scarcity and profit could almost counter intuitively spawn a system of nearly free goods, services and abundance, that will see its demise. For Rifkin, the emergence of the Collaborative Era that in earlier works he has described as distributed capitalism and lateral power, provides the opportunity to reframe world views that if they were to continue would (and still do) provide the greatest challenge to “the survival of our species in recorded history”.

The strands of Rifkin’s Theory of Post Capitalism litany are several. Firstly, as was explained in an exploration of his Theory of Limits, he argues that Adam Smith’s economic model is flawed in two important ways. These include the Newtonian view on which it is based, and the lack of regard it has for the entropic effects that are consequential to the growth-and-accumulation imperative inherent in the model. Secondly, he argues that this same model has reached the outer limits of how far it can extend growth aspirations, within an economic system deeply dependent on oil and other fossil fuels. He then posits that the emergence of a new energy and communications infrastructure will reinvent the way the world does business. By design, in the manufacturing realm, it will shift the way of life from highly capitalised, giant, centralised factories, equipped with heavy machines, to economic models that are distributed, modular and personalised in their relationships between buyer and seller. Most importantly, through the way it is designed and constructed, this process must occur with fewer entropic effects.

This realignment of how economic activity occurs also alters the dynamics of relationships and the exercise of power. It favours lateral ventures both in the social commons and in the market place on the assumption that mutual interest pursued jointly is the best route to sustainable economic development. This is a different kind of capitalism; one that is distributed in its nature and which fundamentally reconfigures the temporal and spatial orientation of society. It changes the nature and cost of transactions and offers the possibility of new ways to organise and manage economic activity. As an economic model, it is systemically different in its modality and therefore, it requires a different kind of theorising. Moreover, it must be asked: can an economic system, which is systemically different, be understood through the same lens used to theorise the existing system?

If it is to be considered through the lens of the current system, then it differs in three important ways.

The first is that the logic of a system, contingent on substantive margins on both the supply and the demand sides—what we call profits or accumulations—cannot be sustained if those margins are almost zero.

The consequence in Rifkin’s view will be that:

…capitalist markets will continue to shrink into narrow niches where profit-making enterprises survive only at the edges of the economy…relying on very specialized products and services.

The second is that the nature of the market function, however that is expressed, changes from an opportunity for accumulation to an opportunity for exchange. In this model, capitalism is ‘distributed’, premised on the idea that everybody can trade and exchange, without the controls that exist in the current proprietary models. In this reformulated future, and given that markets are, at least in part, an extension of socio-economic identity, we can assume that an understanding of economic identity for both individuals and communities is reframed as well. In a real-time, near-term, future world existing market mechanisms are too slow and “a new economic system will be as different from market capitalism as the latter was from the feudal economy of an earlier era”.

Thirdly, with less opportunity for capital accumulation, the ability to ‘own’ property is less available; ‘mine versus thine’ becomes harder to sustain and the focus shifts to an interest in access to shareable goods and services.
In Rifkin’s later works, the shift from ‘property ownership’ to ‘access’ to goods and services is a tangible expression of the challenge the Third Industrial Revolution poses to a highly embedded pattern of economic thought: a worldview integral to the concepts of capitalism. Nothing, he argues, is more sacrosanct to an economist than property relations, for these are an explicit representation of a commitment to economic growth.

If the possibility is considered that the idea of property accumulation will be gradually set aside, this new Age will “bring with it very different conceptions of human drives and the assumptions that govern human economic activity”. These contemplations of what will constitute economy are deeply problematic in the current order, yet to limit their characterisation to being simply components of an economic revolution is too narrow a lens through which to understand what is, or what might, occur. This is because their impact is and will be a reflection of different motivations and constitutions of identity.

While having traced the rise and establishment of the private property rights, and the consequences of those rights, in some detail, in all his works since The European Dream (for it was not always that way), he contends that, in a collaborative future, social capital plays an increasingly important role. This is because the accumulation of social capital enables increased access, rather than ownership, to networks where the cost of participation is plummeting as communications technologies become cheaper. The consequence of this rebalancing of capital is “a shift in emphasis from the quantity and worth of one’s possessions to the quality of one’s relationships [and] requires both a change in spatial and temporal orientation”406. As such, it is likely to play a far more significant role in economic life that will increasingly take place in a Collaborative Commons.

From the systemic shift, and a worldview that reconstitutes property rights as a process of access not ownership, what emerges is a new series of case studies and metaphors about collaboration and commonality that reflect the swing from a scarcity to an abundance mentality. This new mentality is not the kind of abundance that, as Gandhi observed, provides for every human’s [sic] greed, rather it is an abundance that, anchored in our ecological footprint, provides enough to satisfy every human’s [sic] need.408 Therefore, it is a step away from a materialist ethos to one of sustainability and stewardship, where nature becomes a community to preserve, rather than a resource to exploit409. Rifkin contends that the absence of the fear of scarcity mitigates against the desire to over consume, hoard and over indulge, and while not quickly removing the dark side of human nature, encourages the development of a new cultural social code. This he sees emerging in at least a portion of younger generations who have “grown up in a new world mediated by distributed, collaborative, peer-to-peer networks”.

Rifkin therefore argues his Theory of Post Capitalism from three premises.

The first is that the system conditions that already exist in the present growth-focused construct make its continuation impossible. In this sense, these conditions are a reflection of Sorokin’s principle of immanent change. He also posits that the attributes and ubiquity of the new infrastructure, known as the Internet of Things (IoT), by design and structure undermines core principles on which the present capitalist model is based.

Secondly, he asserts that these networked, lateral and distributed arrangements privilege relationships over ownership, thereby creating conditions for economic activity and social arrangements that are systemically incompatible with the culture and ethos of the contemporary economy. In this way, the forces that have been unleashed are “both disruptive and liberating and are unlikely to be curtailed and reversed”.

Thirdly he submits that economic systems are situated within larger human systems and therefore, when an economic system changes, so do philosophies, institutions that exist within those systems, and ultimately social and cultural conventions. In this way Rifkin’s Theory of Post Capitalism steps beyond the disciplinary boundaries in which economic theory is normally considered and it links to the other transdiciplinary (and perhaps uni-disciplinary) theorising critical to the Third Industrial Revolution contention.

McAllum then offers Macrohistorical Commentary:

The unsustainability of economic systems and their role in civilisational change have preoccupied all macrohistorians and many contemporary transformational theorists. Unlike Marx and Gramsci, who theorised over the ownership arrangements of the capitalist system, perhaps only Sarkar, among the macrohistorians, comes closest to offering an alternative economic model that is ‘distributed by design’. For Sarkar, like Rifkin, unabated accumulation and misuse of wealth is a central problem. The goal, in his narrative, is for a good society to provide all individuals with the basic requirements of life in the way that Ghandi’s ‘Swadeshi’ defines them, and to ensure that in the process, wealth is used for benefit and not hoarded. However, for Sarkar, economy and economic growth has a subordinated role as it only exists “to provide physical security such that women and men can pursue intellectual and spiritual development”. Spengler also rails against ‘money thought’: “the grand legacy of the Faustian Soul”. He maintains that little attention has been paid to the presumptions that underpin the thinking of Hume and Adam Smith: that its privileging of materialism ignores the soul that is at the heart of culture.

The consequence is that “the heroic and the saintly withdraw into narrower and narrower circles and the cool bourgeois take their place. [Thus] in the frictions of the city, the stream of being loses its rich form” and the culture inevitably declines. The only way out of this crisis is for “power to be overthrown by another power”. The question this assertion poses is: is a change in system conditions, as described by Rifkin, sufficiently powerful to effect the revolution Spengler prescribes, or will some other more explicit agency be required? The linkage or otherwise of economy to ‘soul’ also preoccupied Toynbee.

He argued:

– Western humanity [sic] has bought themselves [sic] into danger of losing their souls through their concentration on a sensationally successful endeavor to increase material well being. If they [sic] were to find salvation they [sic] would only find it only in sharing the results of material achievement with the less materially successful majority of the Human Race.

This was not an argument by Toynbee for some kind of socialism; indeed to the contrary. Rather it is questioning ‘where to next?’ for the ‘psychic energy’ that has been capitalism’s driving force and which fashioned the industrial revolution, for as Schumpeter suggests “stabilized capitalism is a contradiction in terms”.

Similar themes to those expressed in Rifkin’s Theory of Post Capitalism are emerging among some modern transformational theorists. They have, of course, the advantage of contemplating the contemporary condition in ways that earlier macrohistorians could not. While their views, in relation to understanding Rifkin, will be explored in some detail later in this thesis, a number do contemplate the end of capitalism, the emergence of the distributed or collaborative economy and a future of access, not ownership. This suggests that Rifkin’s Theory of Post Capitalism has both intellectual precedent and contemporary support.”

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Rifkin is sometimes accused on not problematizing the transition to the zero-marginal cost society, but in this interview, he stresses the importance of struggle and self-organization for the control of production and the distribution of its fruit.

Video interview Jeremy Rifkin, President Foundation on Economic Trends, ETUC/ETUI conference ‘Shaping the new world of work’, 27-29 June 2016

Photo by CiuPix

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In an amazingly prescient essay, “The Exit From Capitalism Has Already Begun,”journalist and social philosopher André Gorz in 2007 explained how computerization and networks are causing a profound crisis in capitalism by making knowledge more shareable. He argues that shareable knowledge and culture undercuts capitalist control over the global market system as the exclusive apparatus for production and consumption (and thus our “necessary” roles as wage-earners and consumers).

The essay, translated by Chris Turner, originally appeared in the journal EcoRev in Autumn 2007 and was reprinted in Gorz’s 2008 book Ecologica. It’s worth revisiting this essay because it so succinctly develops a theme that is now playing out, one that Jeremy Rifkin reprises and elaborates upon in his 2014 book The Zero Marginal Cost Society. 

Let’s start with the conundrum that capital faces as computerization makes it possible to produce more with less labor.  Gorz writes:

The cost of labor per unit of output is constantly diminishing and the price of products is also tending to fall. The more the quantity of labor for a given output decreases, the more the value produced per worker – productivity – has to increase if the amount of achievable profit is not to fall. We have, then, this apparent paradox: the more productivity rises, the more it has to go on rising, in order to prevent the volume of profit from diminishing. Hence the pursuit of productivity gains moves ever faster, manpower levels tend to reduce, while pressure on workers intensifies and wage levels fall, as does the overall payroll. The system is approaching an internal limit at which production and investment in production cease to be sufficiently profitable.

Over time, Gorz explains, this leads investors to turn away from the “real economy” of production, where productivity gains and profits are harder to achieve, and instead seek profit through financial speculation in “fictitious” forms of value such as debt and new types of financial instruments. The value is ficititious in the sense that loans, return on investment,  future economic growth, trust and goodwill are social intangibles that are quite unlike physical capital. They depend upon collective belief and social trust, and can evaporate overnight.

Still, it is generally easier and more profitable to invest in these (fictitious, speculative) forms of financial value than in actually producing goods and services at a time when productivity gains and profit are declining.  No wonder speculative bubbles are so attractive:  There is just too much capital is sloshing around looking for profitable investment which the real economy is less capable of delivering.  No wonder companies have so much cash on hand (from profits) that they are declining to invest. No wonder the amount of available finance capital dwarfs the real economy. Gorz noted that financial assets in 2007 stood at $160 trillion, which was three to four times global GDP – a ratio that has surely gotten more extreme in the past eight years.

Meanwhile, climate change adds yet another layer of difficulty because it virtually requires an abrupt retreat from capitalism, as Naomi Klein argues in her recent book This Changes Everything.  Gorz made this point quite clear:

“It is impossible to avoid climate catastrophe without a radical break with the economic logic and methods that have been taking us in that direction for 150 years. On current trend projections, global GDP will increase by a factor of three or four by 2050. But, according to a report by the UN Climate Council, CO2 emissions will have to fall by 85% by that date to limit global warming to a maximum of 2° C. Beyond 2° C, the consequences will be irreversible and uncontrollable.

“Negative growth is, therefore, imperative for our survival. But it presupposes a different economy, a different lifestyle, a different civilization, and different social relations. In the absence of these, collapse could be avoided only through restrictions, rationing, and the kind of authoritarian resource-allocation typical of a war economy. The exit from capitalism will happen, then, one way or another, either in a civilized or barbarous fashion. The question is simply what form it will take and how quickly it will occur.

“To envisage a different economy, different social relations, different modes and means of production, and different ways of life is regarded as “unrealistic,” as though the society based on commodities, wages, and money could not be surpassed. In reality, a whole host of convergent indices suggest that the surpassing of that society is already under way, and that the chances of a civilized exit from capitalism depend primarily on our capacity to discern the trends and practices that herald its possibility.”

This is where the many initiatives and movements that revolve around the commons, peer production, the solidarity economy, co-operatives, Transition Towns, degrowth, the sharing and collaborative economy, and much else, come in. These are all harbingers of a different way of meeting everyday needs without becoming ensnared in utopian capitalist imperatives (constant growth, ever-increasing productivity gains, profits from the real economy). Pursuing this path ultimately destroys a society, as we can see from years of austerity politics in Greece.

In other words, the most promising way to resolve the capitalist crisis of our time is to start to decommodify production and consumption – i.e., extend and invent non-market ways to meet our needs.  Indeed, we need to reconceptualize “production” and “consumption” themselves as separate categories, and begin to re-integrate them — and our role as actors in them — through commons-based peer production.

Fortunately, the Internet and digital technologies are enormously helpful in this process.  They are already converting proprietary knowledge, know-how, and branded products into freely shareable public knowledge, via commons. This is the basis for a different kind of economy, one that can transcend the anti-social, anti-ecological imperatives that prevail today.

Gorz reminds us that innovation is less about meeting real needs than about creating monopoly rents:  “The proportion of the price of a commodity that is rent may be ten, twenty or fifty times larger than its production cost. And this is true not only of luxury items; it applies also to everyday articles like trainers, T-shirts, mobile phones, CDs, jeans, etc.”  That is why so much innovation is focused not on utility or even profits per se, but on inventing new forms of rent:

“Everything in [the proprietary market] system stands opposed to the autonomy of individuals, to their capacity to reflect together on their common ends and shared needs, to agree on the best way of eliminating waste, to conserve resources, and to develop together, as producers and consumers, a common norm of “the sufficient” – or of what Jacques Delors has called a “frugal abundance.” Quite clearly, breaking with the ‘produce more, consume more’ trend and redefining a model of life aimed at doing more and better with less presupposes breaking with a civilization in which we produce nothing of what we consume and consume nothing of what we produce; in which producers and consumers are separated, and in which everyone is opposed to herself in as much as she is always both producer and consumer at the same time; in which all needs and all desires lead back to the need to earn money and the desire to earn more; in which the possibility of producing for one’s own consumption seems – wrongly – out of reach and ridiculously archaic.

“And yet ‘the dictatorship over needs’ is losing its power. Despite the explosion of expenditure on marketing and advertising, the hold that corporations have over consumers is becoming more fragile. The trend towards self-providing is gaining ground again as a result of the increasing proportion of immaterial contents in the nature of commodities. The monopoly on supply is gradually slipping away from capital.”

Read the whole essay. Gorz’s impressive, big-picture analysis helps explain why we need to extend or create non-market alternatives such as commons-based peer production: It’s the only sustainable way to build a more humane, ecologically benign order.

Originally published in Bollier.org

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