​The highly successful book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams is being adapted into a documentary called Inventing the Future.

The project is currently in the process of being crowdfunded, and you can find details on how to support it here.

With the rise of what Mark Blyth has called “Global Trumpism,” the historical moment beckons for answers that are novel and transformative. In light of this, elaborating on ideas established in the book, this film will be a unique glimpse into a post-work world. Not merely a talking-heads piece, ItF will also be an expression of life after capitalism and its discontents.

The future is already but not yet. This film will palpate the surface of art, culture, and politics, releasing the flows of imaginative creation to provoke thought and action towards possible futures that are not yet realized. Automation. Universal Basic Income. Post-Work. Collective Subjectivity. Human Flourishing. These are concepts that Inventing the Future will express and explore.

At the helm is Director Isiah Medina, whose debut feature 88:88 was hailed as a “masterpiece” and an “avant-garde sensation” after it played Locarno, TIFF, and NYFF (among others). Original authors Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams are co-crafting the script.

Photo by steevithak

The post Inventing the Future: a Documentary Adaptation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Behold today’s edition of Empire’s End—the biggest, best-ever 24/7 reality TV show! It’s been decades in preparation, with a budget in the trillions, a cast of billions! Its hero-villain is far more colorful and pathetic than Tony Soprano or Walter White. One day he and his team of oddball supporting characters appear to be winning bigly; the next, they’re crashing and burning. We’re all on the edges of our seats, alternately enraged, horrified, thrilled, or brought to tears in uncontrollable laughter. Who could bear to miss a minute of it?

Still, maybe at least some of us are better off severely limiting our consumption of American national news just now. It’s not that events in Washington won’t affect us. They most assuredly will. Rather, I’d argue that there are even more important things to attend to, over which we have far greater agency.

I’ve invested as much attention in the outrage-of-the-day distraction machine as anyone, spending scores of hours reading news reports and analyses, and I’ve written at least a half-dozen essays about our current tweeter-in-chief. And I’m here to tell you that full immersion in the news cycle is just not healthy.

Some readers may find this conclusion too cynical. I propose it only after a great deal of thought, and on the basis of two premises.

First Premise: We are at the end of the period of general economic growth that characterized the post-WWII era. I’ve written extensively about this, and there’s no need to repeat myself at length here. Suffice it to say that we humans have harvested the world’s cheap and easy-to-exploit energy resources, and the energy that’s left will not, much longer, support the kind of consumer economy we’ve built. Further, in order to keep the party roaring, we’ve built up consumer and government debt levels to unsustainable extremes. We’ve also pumped hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and oceans, putting the entire biosphere at risk. Yet our current economic and political systems require further, endless growth in order to avert collapse. Almost no one wants to discuss this situation—neither politicians nor economists. Therefore the general public is left mostly in the dark. Still, everyone senses a change in the air: despite jiggered statistics, workers know that their wages have stagnated or fallen in recent years, and members of the younger generation generally expect to earn less that their parents. This generates a persistent low-level sense of fear and dissatisfaction, guaranteeing a significant political shift such as we are seeing.

Second Premise: The new and current U.S. regime is adopting an essentially fascist character. When empires decline, people often turn to leaders perceived as strong, and who promise to return the nation to its former glory. In extreme instances, such leaders can be characterized as fascist—using the word in a generic sense to refer to authoritarian nationalism distinguished by one-party rule, the demonization of internal and external enemies (usually tinged with some form of racism or anti-Semitism), controls on press freedoms, and social conservatism. Here’s the thing: Once a nation turns decisively toward fascism, there’s rarely a turning back. Fascist regimes ruthlessly hobble and destroy all opposition. Typically, it takes a foreign invasion or a complete economic-political-social collapse to reset a national government that has gone fascist.

Now, put these two premises together. Those who get the second premise but miss the first tend to conclude that, at least until the new regime neutralizes significant opposition within the government, there is still something we can do to make everything turn out okay—in the sense that life would return to “normal.” Just defeat the fascists, no matter what the cost. But the end of growth ensures that, beyond a certain point, there will be no more “normal.” We’re headed into new territory no matter what.

Taking both premises into account, what are the likely outcomes?

It’s possible that the Trumpist insurgency will succeed in rooting out or suppressing opposition not just in Congress and the media, but also in Executive-branch departments including the CIA and FBI. In that case we may see at least a few years of authoritarian national governance punctuated by worsening financial and environmental crises, all against the backdrop of accelerating national decline. It’s just a guess, but the regime may have only two more months to somehow overcome resistance within the intelligence community; if it can do so, then the task of undercutting the judiciary and the media can be pursued at a more leisurely pace over the next year or two. But thanks to Premise One, short-term success probably will not lead to a regime that is stable over the long term. Eventually, no matter how vigorously it suppresses real or perceived enemies, the U.S. federal government will collapse as a result of war, economic crisis, or the simple ongoing erosion of biophysical support systems. At that point a possible trajectory for the nation would be to break apart into smaller geographically defined political entities.

However, the short-term success of the current regime is not yet guaranteed. It is still entirely possible that establishmentarian Democratic and Republican members of Congress, working with with renegade CIA and FBI mid-level officials and mainstream media outlets, could mire the new leadership in a scandal that is too deep to survive. Or, if Republicans lose control of Congress in 2018, articles of impeachment could be brought against Trump. This would not, however, guarantee a return to status quo politics in Washington. Not only does Premise One guarantee that the old status quo is no longer tenable, but also on its own terms the political system is now too broken and the nation too divided. In this scenario, pro-regime and anti-regime elites might just continue to escalate their attacks on one another until the whole system crashes—as I explained in a previous essay, citing the conclusions of ecologist Peter Turchin, which he based on his comparative study of over a dozen ancient and modern societies in analogous circumstances.

It’s just a guess: if the regime is successful in the short term, we might get a slower crash; if it fails, we might get a faster one. In any case, there’s no national team to root for that is capable of restoring the status quo ante Trump, at least not for long, if that is even desirable. Under either scenario, competent local governance might provide significantly better living conditions than the national average (more on that below), but the overall picture is pretty grim. A few years from now I expect that we’ll be in very different territory socially, politically, and economically. This is not a conclusion that I relish, but it’s one seemingly demanded by history and logic.

Nevertheless, what we do in the meantime could make a big positive difference to people and planet, both over the short term and also over the long term. Here are some specific things you can do:

1. Disengage from the spectacle. Learn what you need to know in order to assess immediate threats and general trends, but otherwise avoid spending long periods of time ingesting online, print, radio, or televised media. It’s bad for your mental health and takes time away from other items on this list.
2. If you haven’t already done so, make a personal and family resilience plan in case of a temporary breakdown in the basic functions of government (everyone should do this anyway in view of our vulnerability to earthquakes or weather disasters). Where should you be living? Are you growing any of your own food? Do you have some food and water in storage? Have you reduced your energy usage to a minimum, and installed solar PV (with short-term battery backup) and hot water solar panels? Do you have some cash set aside?
3. Work to build community resilience. If and when national governance breaks down, your local community’s degree of social and biophysical resilience will make all the difference for you and your family. Biophysical resilience relates to local food, water, and energy systems. A socially resilient community is one in which people are talking to one another, institutions for resolving disputes are trusted, and people look out for one another. Identify organizations that are building both kinds of resilience in your community and engage with them. These could be churches, civic government, non-profit organizations, food co-ops, energy co-ops, health co-ops, neighborhood safety groups, local investment clubs, or Transition groups. Get involved with existing organizations or start new ones. Yes, it takes a lot of time. But friends are more important than money in the bank—especially in times of social and political upheaval.
4. Direct some of your resilience-building efforts toward long-term and nature-centered concerns. This might take the form of conservation work of various kinds. In my last essay, I discussed assisting the migration of forests in the face of climate change. Carbon farming and providing wild bird and insect refuges are other options—not (only) because they’re enjoyable hobbies but because they help maintain the biophysical resilience of the ecosystems we depend on. Again, this is work that proceeds best in the company of others.
5. Take some time for the conservation of culture—arts and skills that are their own reward. Connecting with others in your community by enjoying or playing music together, singing, dancing, or making visual art deepens relationships and gives life more dimension and meaning.

While the legal and social functions of liberal democracy persist, vigorous and sustained protest efforts could help rein in the fascist tendencies of the new American government. Participating in protests could enable you to get to know other members of your community. On the other hand, protest could further fragment your community if that community is already deeply divided politically—and it could eventually get you in a lot of trouble depending on how things work out, since protest under fascist regimes doesn’t produce the same result as protest in a liberal democracy.

Don’t obey the new leaders when they call for actions that undermine democracy and justice; instead, choose to actively disobey in ways that actually matter in the long term. Refuse to define yourself in terms of the regime. Yes, at certain moments in history it is necessary to take a stand one way or the other on a particular issue (such as the issue of slavery in mid-nineteenth century America), and in the days ahead some issue may require you to plant your flag. But this historical moment may be one when many real heroes and heroines choose to engage in ways that are not scripted by any of the elites.

Photo credit: Michael Hogan/flickr.

The post Disengage from the spectacle appeared first on P2P Foundation.

1/THE UNDERLYING DYNAMICS OF CAPITALISM: The presidential victory and ongoing support for Donald Trump in the USA reflects the crisis of neoliberal globalization and the underlying dynamics of capitalism.

These dynamics include not only the environmental externalities, such as peak resources and climate change, but also the social externalities, essentially the impoverishment of the western working and middle classes and how, for example, this affects attitudes towards migration. Note also that peak resource calculations are not in contradiction with the current oil glut, but paradoxically part of it (see Bio-Physical Triggers of Political Violence).

2/EMPIRE vs NATION-STATE: The following struggle therefore emerges. Pro-neoliberal forces seek to maintain the benefits of Empire at the cost of both the internal population and the more nationally bound industries. Trump-backing forces accept that they can no longer dominate Empire, and are ready to endanger it to save the USA as a nation-state. Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry align with Trump in a desperate attempt to maintain profits by slashing social and environmental costs. Other right-wing populist forces have broadly similar designs for their own national realities. Hence the support for Trump from the more nationally-oriented business leaders and the energy sector fearing climate change costs and regulations. The idea is to retreat back to the nation-state, only accept trade that poses no threat to national capital, and repatriate trillions of dollars stashed abroad through the “imperial” multinationals. This explains the neoliberal elite opposition to Trump.

3/THE CLASS COMPROMISE: The class compromise of neoliberalism has been gradually rendered unworkable. This compromise included acceptance of the cultural aspects and desires expressed by the 1968 uprising (and thus, of cultural, gender and other minority rights), and a relative alliance with the postmodern, post labor left that supported it (while actively de-industrializing to the detriment of western industrial labor). ‘Neoliberal economics preferences’ allied to ‘liberalized cultural preferences’, if you like. Indeed, it is important to understand that just as the labor left institutions became coopted in the New Deal/ Welfare state model, so also did much of the pro-rights left represented by identity politics (see the Boltanski/Chiapello book for for an inquiry into this). The Trump forces in contrast vow alignment with the white working class and those sharing certain laborist or productivist values, at the cost of Otherization. It is mobilizing, and creating a convergent enemy: the amalgam of neoliberal business elite and the cultural elite.

Hence the alignment between pro-neoliberal politics and the cultural left. This was represented by the Clinton-Obama coalitions in the US, while social democrats elsewhere also shifted from industrial labor to more privileged “creative” workers, managing the neoliberal retrenchment of welfare provisions and effectively orphaning industrial workers, leaving them ripe for manipulation by right-wing populism.

4/CULTURE AND OTHERIZATION: The focus on cultural rights leaves the cultural left understandably opposed to the Otherization and overt racism/genderism of the Trump coalition. They largely feel obliged to offer some degree of support to the neoliberal regime which granted cultural rights and reforms. Given the undermining of the neoliberal compromise, however, this seems a mistake. Instead, it will be necessary to realign with the needs and interests of industrial labor, and to build grand coalitions that no longer sacrifice blue collar workers’ interests on the altar of neoliberal globalization. As we will see below, we believe the Commons is that new glue.

5/PROTECTIONIST RE-NATIONALIZATION: The Sanders forces thus more realistically represent those sectors of the left focused on re-creating synergy between progressive labor and the cultural left, intent on building a new coalition. Hence the use of moderate language by Sanders in an effort to maintain bonds with those parts of labor that voted for Trump. However, this means maintaining a broad orientation towards restoring New Deal principles and support for Keynesian politics and, crucially, the same orientation towards re-industrialization and the restoration of the nation-state. Both right- and left populism, despite their great and significant differences, share the nostalgia for a strong nation-state, but lack any vision of going ‘beyond’ it. This orientation also continues to posit contradictions between the workers in different nation-states. The proposed protectionist re-nationalizations and re-industrializations do not sufficiently address global issues and the need for transnational cooperation in tackling them. A return to nation-state protectionism does not adequately address the needs for transnational solidarities between commoners the world over.

6/COALITIONS OF CONTRADICTIONS: Both coalitions, therefore, have their contradictions. For example, Trump needs the support of both labor and their unions, but also of the no-tax Republicans. This means he must cut the budget while simultaneously needing trillions for infrastructural investment. He needs to retreat from Empire, but also needs to pacify the defense establishment. He needs Big Oil, but at the cost of environmental disruption. He wants to increase profitability at the cost of social and environmental disruption, and at the risk of eventually alienating his labor base to appease his industrial supporters. The radical right may talk ‘labor’, but their main base remains the angry declining middle classes who are eager to slash their costs of production.

7/THE DECOMPOSITION OF “NORMAL”: The Obama and Sanders coalitions have their own contradictions. They remain stuck between a rock and a hard place, between a disintegrating neoliberal globalization and a nation-state reality that’s just impossible to restore.

8/COSMO-LOCALIZATION AND THE WORKFORCE: Thus, the emerging P2P/Commons approach has a crucial role to play in making the Sanders coalition more realistic, by offering new strategies for re-industrialization which are not based on going back to the old models, but on going forward towards a cosmo-local model of production, ‘where everything light is global, and everything heavy is local’. Advocating for this subsidiarity of material production, combining deep global cooperation with deep mutualization of infrastructures is the only recipe for global re-industrialization on a ecological footing, with the re-creation of massive employment opportunities and livelihoods. This model offers solutions not only for the US and European workers, but for populations worldwide. This requires that commoners make their own turn towards focusing more broadly, not only on knowledge workers but on all workers and the rest of the population, through offering perspectives for sustainable livelihoods, centered around the cities and their bioregional contexts. Trans-national institutions that can supplement the likely failings of both corporate neo-globalization AND neo-statist restorations will also be need to be created, based on the current emergence of global productive communities, global ethical entrepreneurial coalitions and the commonification of public services in support of it.

9/THE PARTNER STATE APPROACH: The big issue for the Commons movement and emergence is the immaturity of a lot of these potential solutions, which are far from being embraced by sufficient critical masses. Thus, the Commons is as dependent on aligning with the progressive nation-state restorers, as the other way around. Such huge transitions are impossible to carry out well without the support of state institutions (what we call the Partner State approach). Hence, one of the strategic priorities is a dialogue between the labor left (a la Sanders and Corbyn), the cultural rights movements, and the emerging commons movement along with regenerative business orientations and sustainability coalitions. Indeed, the only interesting coalition with potential elite forces are those that fully support ecological transitions and ‘fair deals’ with the larger population on the fruits of labor and the Commons. However, there are numerous grassroots generative and ‘entre-donneurial’ forces that could be aligned with the Commons as its livelihood branch.

10/THE PREFIGURATIVE COMMONS ECONOMY: In the meantime, as Arthur Brock and others have suggested, we must accelerate construction of the prefigurative commons economy, with its respect for the sharing of knowledge (free movements), just distribution of the social surplus (solidarity economy), and ecologically viable production for human need (political ecology). This is the micro-coalition of the Commons, which undergirds our participation in the larger social and political mobilizations now unfolding.

Lead image by Alisdare Hickson. Additional image by ResistFromDay1.

The post Ten Theses on Trump appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“With tech leaders swiftly capitulating to Trump, tech workers are building a rank-and-file movement against Trumpism”

Excerpted from Rebecca Solnit:

“One of the loudest voices in this movement belongs to Maciej Ceglowski, a Polish-American developer and entrepreneur. Ceglowski has long enjoyed a loyal following for his sharp insider critiques of Silicon Valley. Since the election, he has emerged as a withering critic of the tech industry’s rapid accommodation to the new administration. He is also the main force behind Tech Solidarity, a new group that has become the leading hub for tech organizing against Trump.

The first meeting of Tech Solidarity took place in San Francisco on 28 November. Since then, they’ve expanded to Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, and Washington DC. The meetings aren’t entirely public – to obtain an invitation, attendees must contact Ceglowski via email or the encrypted messaging service Signal. Crucially, participants are asked not to disclose the identity of anyone else in attendance. This promise of anonymity is indispensable for fostering candid conversations among tech workers, who tend to be heavily bound by nondisclosure agreements.

These gatherings are already proving to be important incubators for grassroots initiatives. The inaugural Tech Solidarity meeting in San Francisco helped produce the Never Again pledge, a public declaration by tech workers that they will refuse to build a database identifying people by race, religion, or national origin. The pledge went live on 13 December – the day before Silicon Valley’s top executives made the pilgrimage to Trump Tower to sit down for a summit with the president-elect.

The organizers of the pledge are keenly aware of their industry’s history. The Never Again site refers to IBM’s well-documented role in providing the punch-card machines that streamlined the Holocaust – a history the company has never fully acknowledged or apologized for. Which makes it all the more chilling that IBM has gone out of its way to court Trump since his victory.”

The post Movement of the Day: Tech Solidarity against Trumpism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

First, whatever you think of government policies on such matters, the national and local governments of a major part of the world’s population — and state and local governments of a major share of the U.S. population — are already committed to large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and in many cases have already achieved them. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that the state functions as the “executive committee of the capitalist ruling class,” as Marx put it. And sometimes it pursues long term collective interests of capital, like preventing total collapse of the biosphere, despite the short term interests of some or even most capitalists. This is not to say its motives are good, that there aren’t much better ways of doing things, or even that it’s especially competent in carrying this stuff out. But Rube Goldberg machine though it may be, at least the state sometimes acts to limit the damage resulting from its own previous actions to subsidize wasteful energy and transportation inputs and encourage fossil fuel consumption.

At the global level, countries participating in the Paris Agreement seem likely, for the most part, to continue pursuing their individual commitments even if the U.S. drops out. China, until recently driving most of the world’s new fossil fuel consumption, may position itself politically as the new global climate leader simply because it has stabilized fossil fuel consumption and is leading the world in adding renewable energy capacity for economic reasons.

In the U.S., 24 states have already beaten their 2022 carbon emissions goals, and California — 12% of the U.S. market — is pushing higher reduction standards than even Obama had committed to.

Second, far more than government policies, laws of nature and economics that are beyond Trump’s control are driving reduced fossil fuel consumption, and will continue to do so — even if Trump greenlights Keystone, the Dakota Access pipeline and every other proposed pipeline project in the country. The basic laws of physics and geology behind Peak Oil and Peak Fossil Fuels — most importantly the tendency of remaining sources of fuel to have lower and lower energy return on energy input (EROEI) — have not been repealed.

Current low oil prices result mainly, not from new unconventional fuel recovery techniques — which are generally much lower in EROEI than older extraction methods — but from Saudi Arabia pumping oil from its old reserves at unsustainable levels for political reasons and hastening their exhaustion.

Recurring energy price spikes have created a strong incentive to decouple economic productivity from energy consumption, so that American CO2 emissions have fallen by 10% over the past decade for mostly economic reasons. Power plant carbon emissions are already three quarters of the way to Obama’s Clean Power Plan reduction goals of 32 percent. And this trend will likely continue despite Trump simply because we seem to be near peak demand for fossil fuels, regardless of the supply side.

Even as carbon-powered plants are being retired, renewables account for about two thirds of new American generating capacity.

China, currently the source of 30% of CO2 emissions, is levelling off — and may even have peaked — fossil fuel consumption for reasons largely unrelated to the Paris agreement.

And on a global level, CO2 emissions have been levelling off for about three years and are now virtually flat — a projected growth of 0.2% for this year — compared to their previous growth trajectory.

Third, and most importantly, human creativity and cooperation are making renewables more and more attractive — and economical — relative to fossil fuels. A decade ago Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken, in Natural Capitalism, argued that existing low-hanging fruit technologies, if applied to all new buildings, appliances, cars, etc., could achieve a factor five reduction in energy consumption — in most cases at an actual cost savings up front. All that was needed was to speed up the adoption curve. We may now have arrived at that point.

Solar generating technology has been falling in cost exponentially — solar panels cost about a quarter as much per watt as they did ten years ago. We see announcements of new breakthroughs in the most costly bottleneck — storage capacity — on an almost weekly basis. And some of the most promising innovations are open-source, created by commons-based peer production, foreshadowing the society that will emerge from its cocoon when our current world of states (including Trump) and global corporations finishes dying off.

For that matter, we’re not exactly rolling over and playing dead even when it comes to the stuff Trump can do. Climate activists all over the Midwest are blocking trains transporting supplies to the DAPL construction site.

When it comes to the survival of humanity, don’t put your faith in princes — but don’t let them scare you too much, either.

Photo by Rubí Flórez

The post Trump Or No Trump, We’ll Bury the Carbon Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In a nutshell, as no other has the Trump media campaign sensed the end of the era neoliberal globalization, and to use the new p2p media and micro-targeting to bring manipulative communication and propaganda to new heights.

The article also explains the very radical attempt to destroy both Old Media and the Deep State, which it sees as it enemies, along with the Blue Church, it is the rights movement that created new equalities that made neoliberalism palatable.

The article also suggests that classic resistance strategies are unlikely to succeed, and that new instances of collective intelligence will be necessary in the counter-offensive.

In this particular sense, what Jordan Greenhall proposes is very congruent with the approach of the P2P Foundation.

We must not abandon prefigurative politics but strengthen and speed them up, while seeking connection with the huge defensive mobilizations that will emerge as a counter-reaction.

In 2015, I took a swing at assessing the shape and state of our global challenges. Looking back, that essay is still well worth a read, but it is high time for an update.

While many things have changed in the world in the past two years, 2016 saw what looks like a phase transition in the political domain. While the overall phenomenon is global in scale and includes Brexit and other movements throughout Europe, I want to focus specifically on the victory of the “Trump Insurgency” and drill down into detail on how this state change will play out.

I use John Robb’s term “Trump Insurgency” here to highlight the fact that the election of 2016 was not an example of “ordinary politics”. Anyone who fails to understand this is going to be making significant errors. For example, the 2016 election is not comparable to the 2000 election (e.g., merely a “close” election) nor to the 1980 election (e.g., an “ideological transition” election). While it is tempting to compare it to 1860, I’m not sure that is a good match either.

In fact, as I go back and try to do pattern matching, the only real pattern I can find is the 1776 “election” (AKA the American Revolution). In other words, while 2016 still formally looked like politics, what is really going on here is a revolutionary war. For now this is war using memes rather than bullets, but war is much more than a metaphor.

This war is about much more than ideology, money or power. Even the participants likely do not fully understand the stakes. At a deep level, we are right in the middle of an existential conflict between two entirely different and incompatible ways of forming “collective intelligence”. This is a deep point and will likely be confusing. So I’m going to take it slow and below will walk through a series of “fronts” of the war that I see playing out over the next several years. This is a pretty tactical assessment and should make sense and be useful to anyone. I’ll get to the deep point last — and will be going way out there in an effort to grasp “what is really going on”. I’ll definitely miss wildly, but with any luck, the total journey will be worth the time.

Own the battlefield, own the war.

Front One: Communications Infrastructure.

All modern warfighters know that the first step of any conflict is to disrupt the enemy’s communications and control infrastructure.

Our legacy sensemaking system was largely composed of and dominated by a small set of communications channels. These included the largest newspapers (e.g., NYT and Washington Post) and television networks (e.g., CNN, CBS, Fox, etc.). Until very recently, effectively all sensemaking was mediated by these channels and, as a consequence, these channels delivered a highly effective mechanism for coordinated messaging and control. A sizable fraction of the power, influence and effectiveness of the last-stage power elites (e.g., the neocon alliances in both the Democratic and Republican parties) was due to their mastery at utilizing these legacy channels.

It is important for anyone planning in the contemporary environment to recognize that the activities of the Trump Insurgency are entirely different to all previous actors. Rather than endeavoring to establish control over the legacy infrastructure, the Trump Insurgency is in the process of destroying it entirely and replacing it with a very different architecture. One that is intrinsically compatible with its own form of collective intelligence.

It is clear to me that the Insurgency is engaged in “total war”. They are simultaneously attacking the legacy power structures on multiple fronts (access, business viability and, in particular, legitimacy) while innovating entirely novel approaches to the problem of large scale communications and control (e.g., direct tweets from POTUS). Their intent is not to play with or even dominate the legacy media — but to eliminate them from the field entirely and to replace them with something else altogether.

This approach is strategically optimal. The Trump Insurgency represents a novel model of collective intelligence in general. It is the first truly viable approach that is connected directly with the emergent decentralized attractor that has been driving technical/economic disruption for the last several decades. This form of governance is structurally incompatible with the legacy media architecture. It is intrinsically dissonant with the kind of top-down, slow, controlled, synchronized approach of the old media. It therefore both must dismantle this architecture and replace it with one that is in synch with its mode of operation and, thereby, benefits massively by hamstringing any collective intelligence that works in the old top-down fashion (i.e., all existing forces currently at play).

To use a concept from Gilles Deleuze, the Trump Insurgency is a nomadic war machine and it is in the process of smoothing the space of communication. To use a simpler metaphor, if you imagine the Trump Insurgency as highly effective desert guerrillas, they are currently in the process of turning everything into a desert. The Establishment, optimized for “jungle conflict”, is going to have a hard time.

From where I sit, it seems evident that the Insurgency’s ability to read-plan-react (their “OODA loop”) is simply of a higher order than the legacy power structures. For at least the past 18 months, the Insurgency has been running circles around the the Establishment and the old media. Accordingly, I fully expect the Insurgency to win this fight. Specifically, for all functional purposes, I expect the memetic efficacy of the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, MSNBC and related channels to be near zero within the next two to four years. I would not be surprised to see several of these entities actually out of business.

Note, the relative position of “new media” such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is harder to predict. I suspect that most of the important conflict of this front will take place here. Right now, all of new media is controlled by forces broadly opposed to the Insurgency. Yet the Insurgency must establish dominance on this territory. They can accomplish this either by capturing these existing platforms (aka “bend the knee” capitulation) or by moving the center of power to new platforms that are aligned with the Insurgency (e.g., gab.ai replacing Twitter). If you think that this latter is highly unlikely, I strongly urge you to reexamine your models and assumptions.

My sense is that the decisive decision in this conflict is whether the “new media” remain coupled to the legacy power structures (and their OODA loops) or decouple and enter into a direct conflict for “decentralized supremacy” (see my last point below). If they choose the former, they will lose. If they choose the latter, the outcome is hard to predict.

Front Two: The Deep State

In ordinary politics, an elected candidate is expected to integrate with and make relatively small fine-tuning changes to the existing state apparatus and the mass of career bureaucrats that make up most of the actual machinery of government (AKA the “deep state”). Thus, while the Obama Administration might differ quite significantly from the Bush Administration in political theory and intent, the actual impact of theses differences on the real trajectory of the “ship of state” is relatively small.

My assessment is that the Trump Insurgency has identified the Deep State itself as its central antagonist and is engaged in a direct existential conflict with it.

Normally this would be an easy win for the Deep State. However, I expect this front to be the most challenging, uncertain and dangerous of the war. The Deep State is massive, has access to vast resources and capabilities and has been in the business of controlling power for decades. But two things are moving in the Insurgency’s favor.

First, the Deep State appears to be fragmented. For example, the “Russian Hacking” scenario of the past two months looks surprisingly uncoordinated and incompetent. I don’t know exactly what is going on here, but it is clearly not the product of a unified and smoothly operating Deep State.

Second, it seems highly likely that the Deep State is prepared to fight “the last war” while the Insurgency is bringing an entirely different kind of fight. The Deep State developed in and for the 20th Century. You might say that they are experts at fighting Trench Warfare. But this is the 21st Century and the Insurgency has innovated Blitzkrieg.

Let’s take a look at the “fake news” meme for example. This has all the earmarks of a Deep State initiative. Carefully planned, highly coordinated, coming from all authoritative directions, strategically targeted. My read is that this was a Deep State response to the Communications Infrastructure fight. But it looks like this initiative has not only failed, but that the Insurgency has been able to leverage its decisive OODA loop advantages to turn the entire thing around and make “fake news” its own tool. How? By moving rapidly, unconventionally, in a very decentralized fashion and with complete commitment to victory.

If my read is correct, the balance of the struggle between the Deep State and the Insurgency will be determined by how quickly the Deep State can dispense with old and dysfunctional doctrine and innovate novel approaches that are adequate to the war. In other words, is this the Western Front (France falling in six weeks) or the Eastern Front (the USSR bleeding and giving ground until it could innovate a new war machine that could outcompete the Wehrmacht).

If my read of the situation is correct (which, of course, it very well may not be), then the Deep State would be ill advised indeed to undertake any major efforts in the next 12–24 months. For example, an “impeach Trump” initiative, would almost certainly be an enormous strategic disaster. In spite of the apparent strength of the Deep State, the Insurgency’s superior OODA loop would likely result in an Insurgency victory in this fight — and victory here would greatly strengthen the Insurgency’s position. (Can you say “Emperor Trump?)

From the opposite direction, the Insurgency would be well advised to Blitzkrieg. Right now it has the advantage of an approach and a model that its opponent doesn’t understand and can’t react to effectively. But the Deep State is deep. Given time it could learn how to win this fight. If the Insurgency wants to win, it needs to radically reduce the Deep State’s strategic agency quickly. This means moving fast and moving decisively.

I cannot overstate how deeply dangerous this fight is. Classically, when a long-standing hegemony (cf “Pax Americana) is weakened and distracted by intra-elite conflict, rivals like Russia and China will see an opportunity to move from a hegemonic to a multi-polar world and can be tempted into adventurism. In these conditions, even the slightest mistake can push the system into nearly catastrophic conflict.

Front Three: Globalism

Anti-globalist rhetoric was one of the most enduring and central features of the Trump campaign. Indeed, if Trump clearly stood for anything, resisting the “false song of globalism” was it. And all evidence in the post-election environment is that the Trump Insurgency will indeed be actively anti-globalist.

What is flat out astounding is the relative ease with which Trump has been able to cut through globalist Gordian Knots. For half a decade, the Trans-Pacific Partnership was an unstoppable juggernaut. Until, that is, Trump decided to end it. Perhaps this is evidence of a “below the surface” weakness that made TPP a paper tiger. Perhaps it is evidence of the relative balance of power between nationalist and globalist institutions. At least when the nationalist institution is the United States. (Compare the Greeks vis a vis the EU). Perhaps it is evidence of a larger scale anti-globalist conflict that has been raging for nearly a decade and has been surfacing all over the place (Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, etc.).

In any event, it is a significant victory and I am certain that it will embolden the Insurgency. At this point, I expect the Insurgency to cut deep into globalist power institutions (the World Bank, the UN, various treaty organizations) and, more importantly, globalist-allied national institutions like the Federal Reserve. The Globalists have an odd connection to power. Generally, they must move through influence and threat to elites, with a non-trivial amount of mass level propaganda to smooth the way. The Insurgency is broadly immune to globalist propaganda, the Insurgency elites seem unlikely to play ball with globalist elites or to back down under threat. At this point, I see only two real moves available to the globalists. 1) economic destabilization hoping to turn “the people” against the Insurgency; 2) some kind of some kind of social/military destabilization.

But I don’t give the globalists much of a chance. Of all of the major world powers, only the EU is currently dominated by globalists, and with the victory of Brexit and the surge of nationalism in France, the Netherlands, etc., even the Eurocrats are on the run.

By moving quickly and decisively against the Deep State allies of globalism at home and erecting nationalist resilience to global institutional influence (e.g, high tariffs and protectionist monetary policy), combined with shaping a narrative that points all bad economic news directly at globalists, the Insurgency might well be able to cut most globalist power off at the knees.

Notably, even large multi-national corporations — until recently appearing to be pulling the strings of political policy — seem to be rapidly capitulating to the Insurgency. The two major globalist forces that have not yet been publicly tested are the energy companies and the banks. What will happen here remains to be seen. A cynic might suggest that the Insurgency itself is only superficially populist and in fact really simply represents the interests of Energy and Banks against other elites. That cynic might be right, we shall see.

The net-net result of this front will be a significant weakening of the post-War global institutional order and a rebalancing of power along not yet fully understood nationalist alignments. It is not clear what effect this change will have. For example, one might expect “global scale” issues like climate disruption or terrorism to lose focus and efficacy — but that isn’t clear. It is certainly plausible that nation-to-nation alliances can make significant forward progress in even these areas of interest. Particularly if you assume that globalist agendas were extracting value from global scale crises rather than resolving them.

Moreover, there is no reason to believe that a multi-polar nationalism will be less stable over the long term than a hegemony. History has certainly cut both ways. Perhaps what is most clear is this: the period of transition as globalist forces struggle to maintain power while nationalist forces are not yet in any form of stable equilibrium with each-other is a moment (possibly lasting years) of extreme danger.

Bacteria developing antibiotic resistance.

Front Four: The New Culture War

Last week, Reddit user notjafo expressed something important. It is worth reading his entire post, but the gist is this: the left won the culture war of the 1960’s — 1990’s. And the Trump Insurgency does not represent “the next move” of the old right in that old war. It represents the first move of an emergent new culture. One that is directly at war with the “Blue Church” on the ground of culture itself.

“The Blue Church is panicking because they’ve just witnessed the birth of a new Red Religion. Not the tired old Christian cliches they defeated back in the ’60s, but a new faith based on cultural identity and outright rejection of the Blue Faith.” — /u/notjfao

While I can nit pick at some of his analysis, broadly speaking I agree. As of 2016, the shoe is on the other foot — the counter culture has become the mainstream and the Insurgents are the new counter culture.

Similar to the other battles, this Culture War front is characterized by a distinction between a more powerful and established Blue team organized around and fighting “the last war” and a Red team still in flux but beginning to figure out how to fight from the future. And, as per the other fronts, until the Blue team figures this out, it will continue to lose ground without understanding why.

In this case, however, the superior OODA loop of the Insurgency is only part of the strategic shift. Of far more importance is the fact that the Insurgency evolved within a culture broadly dominated by the values and techniques of the Blue Church and therefore, by simple natural selection, is now almost entirely immune to the total set of “Blue critique”.

In other words, if we map the arc of the culture war from the 1950’s through to the 1990’s we will see the slow emergence of a set of strategies, techniques and alliances on the part of the emerging Blue Church that became increasingly perfected and effective over time. For example, the critical power of the epithets “racist” or “sexist” which had little or no traction in the 1930’s and 1940’s had, by the 1990’s become decisive.

Yet, even as the Blue Church was achieving dominance, the roots of the Insurgency were being laid. And, like bacteria becoming increasingly immune to an antibiotic after constant exposure, those aspects of the emergent “Red Religion” that were able to survive at all began to coalesce and expand. What has now erupted into the zeitgeist is something new and almost completely immune to the rhetorical and political techniques of the Blue Church. To call an adherent of the Red Religion “racist” is unlikely to elicit much more than a “kek” and a derisive dismissal. The old weapons have no more sting.

Moreover, the Red Religion does not intend to engage the Blue Church in any way other than “outright rejection.” It considers the Church and its adherents to be acting in bad faith by default and the doctrines of the Church to be little more than a form of mental illness. Accordingly, the Red Religion has no intention of dialogue, conversation or even sharing power with the Church.

The Blue Church should expect to meet the Red Religion in war. And in this conflict the Red Religion has the advantage.

In the nature of every movement that has endured the crucible of selection, the Red Religion is much more coherent and focused than the dominant Church which is criss-crossed with internal conflict and in-fighting. The Red Religion was born into and optimized for new media (e.g, optimized for memes rather than films) and as the balance of power shifts from 20th Century media to 21st Century media, this inures to the advantage of the Reds. Going deeper, even as the Red Religion has developed an immunity to most of the primary techniques of the Blue Church, it has simultaneously developed its own memetic/values structure connected with deep human values that stem from ancient “tribal selection” and are highly attractive to the portions of the human family (men and women) who are focused on protecting and defending their tribe (hence the Red Religions’ intrinsic focus on Nationalism).

In other words, over the short to mid term, most of the humans who are best prepared to wage war — who are most attuned to and psychologically ready for war — will be attracted to the Red Religion. They will be focused, almost entirely immune to the entire portfolio of Blue weapons and they will be armed with and optimized for 21st Century techniques of waging culture war.

As a consequence, the result of this conflict will almost certainly be fatal for the Blue Church. We are already witnessing it, in the form of both an increasingly desperate “doubling down” on obviously impotent attacks and a creeping demoralization within the fabric of the Church. I expect to see this accelerate and as the Insurgency wins on other fronts, the set of alliances that hold the Church together will begin to unravel and the Church will collapse.

The sooner that happens, the better it will be for everyone.

Right now, the Church is killing us. While it is holding many important, necessary values, it is also holding a ton of stuff that is deeply dysfunctional. But by monopolizing the instruments of culture and power, it inhibits us like a well meaning but overbearing parent from being able to form the new innovations in culture, practice and value that are necessary to our age. The collapse of the Blue Church is going to lead to a level of “cultural flux” that will make the 1960’s look like the Eisenhower administration. As the Church falls away, the “children of Blue” will explode out in a Cambrian explosion and reach out to engage in all out culture war with the still nascent Red Religion.

This Culture War will be unlike anything we have ever seen. It will take place everywhere all at once, constrained less by geography than by technical platform and by the complex relationship between innovation and power on an exponential technology curve. It will be a struggle over not just the content, but the very sense and nature of identity, meaning and purpose. It will mutate so quickly and will evolve so rapidly that all of our legacy techniques (both psychological and institutional) for making sense of and responding to the world will melt into so much tapioca. This will be terrifying. It is also the source of our best hope.

Bacteria developing antibiotic resistance.

The War for Collective Intelligence

If you’ve made it this far (or chose to skip directly here), take a breath and settle in. This is the interesting part. For that precious few who prioritize understanding over brevity, what follows will make much more sense if you have read my Foundational Assumptions, The Coming Great Transition, Introducing Generation Omega and The Future of Organization.

For those who want the tldr, it is this: we live in a non-linear world, stop thinking linearly.

Once you have accepted this as the task, you will eventually come to an important conclusion: you can’t. By yourself, you can’t think non-linearly. This isn’t your fault. Individual human beings can’t think non-linearly. Only “collective intelligences,” those agents of “inter-subjective consciousness” can. To put it more simply, we implement and do things as individuals. We innovate as tribes. And the world we live in today — the world of the 21st Century — is a world of continuous innovation.

In this environment, for the first time ever in history, the ability to innovate is decisively superior to the ability to deploy power. Prior to today, the rule of “the battle goes to whoever gets there the first with the most” was a decent rule of thumb. Of course, this has never been strictly the case. Most of the great stories of history are built around moments of innovation where the smarter but less powerful group was able to outwit and undermine their opponent with superior technique, technology and strategy. Over time the balance has slowly but consistently moved in the direction of innovation. Ask Turing and Oppenheimer about the accelerating pace of innovation as it relates to war.

The conflict of the 21st Century is about forming a Collective Intelligence that can outwit and out innovate all of its competitors. The central challenge is to innovate a way of collaborating and cohering individuals that maximally deploys their individual perspectives, capabilities, understandings and insights with each-other. Right now, the Insurgency has the edge. It has discovered some key ways to tap into the power of decentralized collective intelligence and this is its principal advantage. While it is definitely not a mature version of a decentralized collective intelligence, it is substantially more so than any collective intelligence with which it is competing and unless and until a more effective decentralized collective intelligence enters the field, this advantage is enough.

Like all wars, the shape of this particular conflict will be highly dependent on path, timing and surprise. Right now, for example, the relative difference in power between the Establishment and the Insurgency is large, and while it continues to lose it’s impact, power still matters. At the same time, while the Insurgency has a meaningful advantage in “collective intelligence” this advantage is not overwhelming. Thus the details of the situation that I describe above.

So, for example, if the Deep State uses its power advantage as a way to stall until until it can innovate a collective intelligence advantage, it has a decent chance. (Of course, becoming a decentralized collective intelligence is going to be really hard for the actual individuals who make up the Deep State to understand and accept.)

But watch out as the conflict evolves. As the Insurgency cuts down and unplugs legacy power structures (e.g, the media, the intelligence agencies) and replaces them with more fluid and innovative approaches (e.g., gab.ai and Palantir) the balance will begin to tip quickly. If the Establishment cannot stave off the Insurgency in the next 4–5 years, that phase of the war will be over.

Then the real question. Does the Insurgency and the Red Religion represent a stable attractor in the 21st Century. Can it form a collective intelligence that is able to select-against and out-compete all comers. If so, what does this look like? My sense is that this is ultimately a highly unstable state. While tribalism (nationalism) can be very potent in the short term, it is ultimately a deeply unstable ship to navigate the oceans of the future.

Or is there a different timeline where one of the “children of Blue” discovers an approach that is more intelligent still — one that is more fit to ride the wave of exponential technology and global scale crisis? One that is more fully in line with the true nature of inter-subjective consciousness? One that can scale without losing its coherence? One that is adequate to the whole set of existential challenges of the 21st Century?

Such an eventuality is certainly possible — although the most robust collective intelligence is likely to be more purple than red or blue. How likely? Well, right now I think we have a decent chance but really do believe that the die will be cast in the next 3–5 years.

For those who want to take action, I have three recommendations:

1. The Blue Church, the Deep State, the Old Media and all the other aspects of the Establishment are holding you back. Free your mind. This is going to be much harder than it sounds. For most people, if you are under 40, your entire development has taken place within the context of the Blue Church. Many of your deepest assumptions and unconscious values are going to have to be examined with brutal honesty and courage.
2. All Collective Intelligence is gated by Sensemaking. Right now, our collective sensemaking systems are in complete disarray. We don’t know who or what to trust. We barely even know how. Find ways to improve your individual sensemaker and collaborate on collective sensemaking systems. This should get easier as the old media and the Blue Church collapse.
3. Both #1 and #2 require other people. And, since all of our old ways of collaborating with other people are either suspect or obsolete, you are going to have to learn how to build real faithful relationships the old fashioned way. Get much better at making friends. I don’t mean casual acquaintances. And I definitely don’t mean social network contacts. I mean the kinds of people who ready willing and able to actually care for you — even at risk to themselves. Not because of shared ideology or even shared mission, but because of the deep stuff of human commitment.

Good luck.

Note from the author:[Note: this was published in Deep Code and is intended to be challenging and to move the conversation forward. Comments that are thoughtful and contribute will be greatly appreciated. Comments that are not will be deleted.]

Photo by herae30

The post How to counter the radical counter-revolution of the Trump Insurgency appeared first on P2P Foundation.

First of all it’s true, as many Leftist critics say, that Trump’s hardcore fascist voters simply don’t care if liberal commentators, mainstream journalists or fact-check websites prove his statements to be lie; they just laugh. And they just laugh at repeated statements that “this is not normal,” from liberals who judge the behavior of Trump and his henchmen from traditional civics textbook standards of legitimate behavior.

But that’s not the point. We’re not talking about converting hardcore fascists or racists; they may be his base, but they were probably well under half of total Trump voters. The Trump vote included a sizeable number of people who voted for him only reluctantly, and are already experiencing buyer’s remorse. Some of them voted for a black man in 2012, but just couldn’t stomach Clinton. Bad as she is, I really have to wonder about someone who considered Clinton less tolerable than Trump; but be that as it may they’re not fanatics and more of them regret their decision every day. And then there are the people who voted for Obama, and normally would have voted for a Democrat this year, but just stayed home because… well, you know. All these groups are reachable by exposing Trump’s lies, showing them how he’s materially hurting him, and pointing out his extreme deviations from previous standards of normalcy.

I’m not saying all these things are enough by themselves. They must be combined with some demonstration — even a small one — that resistance exists, and that it’s effective. We got that to some extent with the post-election protests, and to a larger extent with concrete actions by advocacy groups and state and local officials demonstrating their intent to resist authoritarian federal encroachments. But the demonstrations on Inauguration Day, and the Womens’ Marches around the world — in Washington alone twice the depressed turnout at Trump’s swearing-in — were a huge show of willingness to resist.

John Robb, a national security theorist who specializes in networked resistance movements and writes at Global Guerrillas, sees it as the potential spark for what he calls an “open source insurgency” against Trump (“The Open Source Protest to Oust Trump,” January 21). He has used that term in the past to refer to Al Qaeda Iraq, the Tahrir Square movement, M15 and Syntagma, Occupy, and the insurgencies for Sanders and Trump last year.

The Women’s March provided what Robb calls a “plausible promise,” which is essential for open source insurgencies. In practical terms, it’s more or less what I described as a demonstration that resistance exists and it’s effective. That starts a feedback of further protests, with strengthen the plausible promise and generate still more protests. These have brought down autocratic regimes like the Shah’s, Ceaucescu’s and Mubarak’s.

Robb dismisses criticism that all the attendees at the Women’s March, or all the potential components of an anti-Trump insurgency, are not on the same page about objectives or tactics. Like liberals and members of the verticalist Left who dismissed Occupy for not having “representatives and a platform,” they miss the point. The only thing they need to agree on is the demand for Trump to go, and be replaced by someone or something that is not as bigoted or pro-plutocrat as he is.

And they don’t need to agree on tactics or operate from a single playbook. Far better is a stigmergic, permissionless movement of movements, with a full-court press by all sub-currents, tendencies and affinity groups engaged in whatever they feel most comfortable with and they are best at. The most agreement that’s necessary is to cut each other some slack in the way of tolerating diversity of tactics, or at least putting more effort into fighting Trump than into criticizing each other’s methods.

To my fellow occupants of the left end of the anti-Trump spectrum, I would add that, like it or not, we won’t win without the help of liberals and center-left types — including those who voted for Clinton, and even those who continue to support her. And like it or not — pace Robb — short of impeachment Trump is less likely to be removed by insurrection or replaced by a soviet of workers’ deputies, than by a Democratic candidate in 2020. I say, without any apologies, that this will help our cause. I argued earlier, when I thought Clinton was likely to win, that — awful, authoritarian neoliberal war hawk though she is — hers would likely be a caretaker administration in which both the country and the Democratic Party would shift further leftward. And more importantly, it would be a more conducive environment for social, economic and technological shifts outside the state towards economic decentralism, self-managed and networked institutions, and commons-based peer production, without fear of large-scale state repression. I think these shifts will continue under four years of Trump; but they’ll continue that must faster under even the most shamelessly opportunistic neoliberal Democrat (think Cory Booker), as surely as they would have under a Clinton administration. And given the way Berniecrats have already started taking over party machinery in states where he won the primaries, and the replacement of a four-year contingent of Boomers by one of Millennials, there’s a pretty good chance the 2020 Democratic nominee will be significantly better than Clinton or Booker.

Either way, as an anarchist, I don’t see electoral politics as the main avenue — or even a significant one — for positive action to build the kind of society we want. But — again — I make no apologies for offering aid to those fighting to replace the current regime with one more conducive to our process of building counter-institutions.

In the meantime, mass demonstrations aren’t the only kind of resistance we’ve got. Divisions within the state threaten to severely weaken Trump. Even though they’re not exactly our allies, large blocks within the ruling machinery — including not only officials at the state and local level, but disgruntled members of the permanent bureaucracy and “Deep State” at the federal — will likely be quietly resisting and monkey-wrenching Trump in ways we can scarcely imagine. These include sabotage like bureaucratic delay and working to rule, as well as leaks from all levels of the bureaucracy. Malcolm Gladwell noted in a recent interview that it will be the easiest time ever for journalists to get dirt from very high-ranking “anonymous sources.” You can bet that whatever kompromat Putin has on Trump, it pales in comparison to what’s lying around in the basements at Ft. Meade and Langley. And remember — Edward Snowden wasn’t a high-ranking official. He was just some schmoe contract worker who know how to download stuff onto a thumb drive; the NSA has no way of knowing how many other people have done, or continue to do, the same thing.

We saw some limited displays of what looked to be sabotage from the national security bureaucracy, via leaks and so forth, against the Bush administration after the scandals surrounding Richard Clarke and Valerie Plame. Some speculated it would evolve into a full-blown war by the Deep State to unseat Bush in the 2004 election. It didn’t happen — that time.

Put together mass resistance to encroachments by the authoritarian state, and sabotage by disgrutled state functionaries at every level of government, and you get what Frances Fox Piven calls for: “Throw Sand in The Gears of Everything” (The Nation, Jan. 18). And such throwing of sand in the gears, she argues, deepens elite cleavages at the very top.

Even ordinary householders can take in and shield immigrants. And all of us can render registries useless by insisting on registering ourselves as Muslims or Mexicans or Moldovians. A sanctuary movement gives lots of people a role that matters. Most important, in our complex federal system, where the policies of the national government depend on cooperation by state and local authorities, these local movements have the potential to block initiatives by the incoming Trump regime.

If movements are to become an important force in the politics of the Trump era, they will have to be movements of a somewhat different kind from the labor, civil-rights, and LGBTQ activism of the recent past that we usually celebrate. Those were movements focused on progress, on winning measures that would remedy long-standing injustices, and they were movements that some elites also endorsed. Now the protests will have to aim not at winning, but at halting or foiling initiatives that threaten harm—either by redistributing wealth to the very top (the Trump tax and energy plans), or by eliminating existing political rights (the cancellation of DACA, the Obama executive order that protected undocumented-immigrant children, known as Dreamers), or by jeopardizing established protections and benefits (the looming prospect of privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, or the threat to turn funding for public education into a system of vouchers for charter schools). So how do resistance movements win—if they win—in the face of an unrelentingly hostile regime? The answer, I think, is that by blocking or sabotaging the policy initiatives of the regime, resistance movements can create or deepen elite and electoral cleavages.

Even the most conventional and civics texty form of such cleavages — this is me talking, not Piven — like peeling off the three most moderate Republicans to deny Trump a Senate majority, is more likely when the public is perceived to be angry and unruly, and Trump to have feet of clay.

And our own most important order of business — actually building the kind of society we want, right now — is also an important component of the resistance. Creating ways to support ourselves and each other outside the state — small-scale open-source manufacturing in neighborhood cooperative workshops with tools a handful of blue collar salaries could pay for, permaculture community gardens on vacant lots and rooftops, edible landscaping on yards in the cul de sacs, community land trusts, squats in abandoned buildings, community policing by armed Black Panther patrols and Copwatch, community technology initiatives in cheap, open source off-grid power and waste recycling, barter currencies, free culture and open source software, multiple-household cohousing institutions, micro-villages, friendly societies and other associations for pooling costs and risks and organizing mutual aid, new radical labor unions on the pattern of OURWalmart and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, revived guilds and cooperative temp agencies for freelancers and precarious workers — every one of these things is not only a building block of the future post-capitalist society, but strengthens us against Trump and his ilk right now. And every one of these things shows people that, while Trump’s promises of help only lead to betrayal, our own ability to create a better world for ourselves working together is very real. And that is a plausible promise indeed.

Many of us are afraid. We’d be fools not to. But they should be more afraid.

Lead image from the Women’s March on Norway by Lynn D. Rosentrater.

The post An “Open Source Insurgency” Against Trump? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Warsan Shire

There is something more lasting, more threatening, more monstrous than the figure of a fire-breathing enemy in the distance: and that is the abstracted notion of enmity itself. I am not speaking of enmity as a state of being at odds with another. I am speaking to the heart of the modern project and its account of selves as independent entities in constant, inescapable friction with ‘not-selves’. This colonial notion of enmity has its effects in failing to see the fault lines that pressure us into assuming that difference means separation, and intimacy, sameness. It is denying the significance of my entanglement with you, and participating in the modern obscenity of total independence.

You see, it’s not just that those we label ‘Muslims’, ‘refugees’, and ‘primitives’ are like us in stunning ways – it’s that they are the very condition that make ‘us’ possible. I cannot fully account for myself if my account leaves you out of its logic. As such, in a game of sides, the greatest thing suffered is the loss of the other side. As America enacts nationalistic walls and ‘America First’ borders to ‘save’ those within from the monsters without – the supposed enemies skirting the boundaries – and as people boldly take to the streets to protest and insist on the decency of being hospitable in a time of painful dispossessions and widespread homelessness, may our work be disciplined by the humility of recognizing that this is not an effort to redeem those lingering at the airports. This is not even about bringing more people in. There is much more at stake than a seasonal, charitable feeling of inclusiveness.

Borders are not merely lines that mark where things end and others begin, they are substantiating practices of identity-making and world-building. They are how things come to matter, and how others stop mattering. We are just as involved in this vast conspiracy about what home means, how power is distributed, how bodies are marked, and how stories become meaningful.

This whole saga is about reworking our practices of being at ‘home’. This is about meeting the hauntings that have been repressed by our modern claims to transcendence, and staying with their ghostly moanings and stirrings long enough to know we are just as undone. Those severely affected by Trump’s signature are heralds of the very conditions that we all now live in; they are critiques of our complacency and doctrines of arrival. We may not notice it but we are subjects of this modern eliding power, of shopping malls and their claims on what food means, of giant pharmaceutical interests and their investments in what health means or does not mean, and of regimes of discursive power that deify human interests over and above non-human becomings.

I suppose our work would take on more powerful tones when we see that this is not merely about letting people in; it is about meeting the estranged other in all her fascinating strangeness, in all her monstrosity, in all her wounded Samaritan-ness, and pausing long enough to be met, to be struck, to become a with-ness to the leaking truth: that we are all in this together.

The post On Muslim Bans, Borders and What Home Means appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Demagogues thrive amid fear and insecurity, which is why they paint the world in such dark terms. It’s a strategy that has put right-wing populist leaders in power in an Axis of Egos: from Brazil to Turkey, the Philippines to Russia, authoritarian strongmen like Trump are on the rise. Meanwhile, many centrist liberals, like the Democratic Party in the US, have been so intent on rejecting left-wing populist solutions, and so sure of their ability to beat anyone running on a white supremacy platform with its misogyny and homophobia, that they opened the door for Mr. Trump to walk straight through. Their preference is always to maintain the status quo that has served them so well.

As dangerous as the election of Trump is for the world, we can also see in this moment the truth that we simply cannot rely on the electoral political system to save us, because it is designed to prevent the fundamental change we need. Its own survival is at stake and it will marshal all its champions and resources to defend itself and stop the emergence of a new system. But when we work, or continue working for change from the ground up; when we build or keep on building new ways of living and being with each other where we live; when we construct or keep constructing the future we know is possible with our own hands, rather than hoping distant leaders will build it for us, we find our true power. Finally, when we combine that with the unbending hope that has powered change through the ages, we know our power has meaning.

A 400-year-old economic system is dying and another is struggling to be born. Change on this scale is not going to be smooth or easy. We should not be surprised, then, that moments like this?—?where the establishment is dealt a body blow?—?become more and more common. We can despair when that blow comes in the form of right-wing extremists, or we can step-up. We are the ones we are looking for, who can and must grasp the opportunities in these crises that are undoubtedly there.

So it’s time to come together, taking time to remember the earth. Remember all the successful struggles for justice that came before us, and imagine all those to come. Find each other and help midwife the inevitable transition that brings forth from the ashes of neoliberal capitalism a system that works for the good of all life on Mother Earth. This is not just activism; this is our responsibility as human beings alive as this all unfolds.

This is why we are here.

The post What do we do about Trump… appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We recommend watching at least the first fifty minutes of this stellar presentation by Mark Blyth. At the end of his lecture, he notes both of these reactions to the current crisis, for which no clear escape seems at hand, are in fact about a return to local control by national governments. What is missing therefore is a new global outlook that is not neoliberal globalization, nor simple localism. This is I believe, what the analysis of the P2P Foundation actually provides, which keeps global cooperation intact, while aiming for the ‘subsidiarity of material production’. You’ll here much more about this in the course of this year.

The post Understanding the current blocked ‘world conjuncture’, and why it produces ‘global Trumpism’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.