Trump – P2P Foundation

Beyond Humans as Labour

Michel Bauwens — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 08:00:00 +0000

For the last few years, there has been a huge debate about how automation will possibly destroy tens of millions of jobs; this fear has even moved Silicon Valley luminaries to join the basic income bandwagon. At the P2P Foundation, we have always insisted that though automation may indeed affect an important number of future jobs, the real issue is really where the surplus profit is invested, and who makes the decisions. There is indeed no dearth of demand for meaningful activity in this world, beginning with a huge need for regenerative economic practices that restore the ecosystem. Indy Johar makes a related and important point: the jobs that may be destroyed are jobs in which humans are really an extension of the machine, and in that sense, paradoxically, it is an opportunity to move beyond jobs, to a civilisation based on meaningful work and engagement. Last year, I joined the labour mutual SMart, which aims to replace subordinated labor, where you exchange your freedom for a wage, to post-subordinated labour, but with regular salaries and social protections. Succeeding in this shift will be a vital part of the commons transition. Thanks to Indy Johar to bring up this important topic.

Originally posted on provocations.darkmatterlabs.org

We face a paradigm shift in the role of humans in our economy — The rise of the real C-Economy.

Indy Johar: Most of our human economy has since the industrial & managerial revolution functioned to fullfill and comply with roles & processes for predefined value and imagination.

The industrial economy made humans “labour”, designed, focused and instrumentalised in the fullfillment of corporate value creation and the imagination of the few.

This industrial human economy is coming to an end; we have begun a transformation which is massively signalled by a confluence of drivers and trends, from the rise of innovation labs & start up culture – all seeking to grow the innovation pie of cities, to the arrival of platform corporates, driving the disintermediation of middle management, to the growing capability of AI, automation and algorithms to manifest the reality of post managerial city. In fact it could be argued – our current paranoia of Brexit and Trump – extends from a deep worry for the growing redundancy of human value & labour and our perceived future as an overhead and liability to the capital class.

The above list could go on, but what is becoming apparent is process driven, codifiable labour – “jobs for bad robots” will be automated and commodified – it is only a matter of time and its also time to say good riddance. We need to liberate Humans from having to be “bad robots” as the industrial revolution liberated us from being bad domestic animals.

But the emancipation of Humans from labour – does not mean a redundancy of Humans, in fact its means the freedom of Humans from labour to discover what it means to be human in the 21st Century.

This is a future which needs us to embrace the awesome capacity of humans – for discovery, for expeditions into the unknown, to mine the future, to care, create, dream.

This is a future which needs us to invest and create the conditions to unlock the full potential and capacity for all citizens to care, create and discover.

This is a future not designed to instrumentalise and passively enslave humans and drive compliance – through debt and wage incentives but to use “Universal Basic Income” to unleash and liberate purpose, care, collaboration and the capacity to dream and disrupt the future.

This is a future which requires us to reimagine “Management” from being a means of control to a means to emancipate, nurture grow care and capacity.

This is a future in which the conditions for unleashing the full capacity of all humans must be the new 21st century public utility – where spatial justice is foundational to unleashing our democratic humanity.

This is a future we requires us to start by embracing the relatively infinite possibility of humans – as opposed to our limited capacity to make roles and manage process.

This is a future which is not about supply demand matching labour markets but about making the fertile conditions to grow the dreamers, disrupters and discovers of the future.

This is a future in which humans are not an overhead on the balance sheet but its foundational fragile asset.

This is a future where the human(e) corporate will be defined by its capacity to drive the 4C revolution — collaboration, care, creativity, contextual intelligence powered by democratized agency – not its aggregative efficiency to manage financial capital and procure in scale; these efficiencies are likely to distributed and platformed to the whole economy – with rise of zero overhead platform bureaucracy.

This is a future in which investing for the human development of an organisation manifests on its asset register.

This is a future which embraces a tomorrow, where humans are the source of economy not redundant to its function.

This is a future Beyond Labour, embracing the coming Human(e) Revolution.

Dark Matter Laboratories is a Strategic Design Studio at Project00.cc working at the interface of Disruptive Technology, Human Development & System Change with world leading organisations to transform and embrace the future.

Photo by 96dpi

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Is it time for a post-growth economy?

The Rules — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 09:00:00 +0000

The growth-driven economic model we have adopted is killing our planet.

Jason Hickel: The crowds of protesters that confronted US President Donald Trump during his visit to London last week have channelled the world’s outrage at all that he represents. But despite this opposition, Trump’s base is expanding. Even those who baulk at his regressive positions – his racism, misogyny, divisiveness – are willing to hold their noses and line up behind him. Why? Because of his promises to deliver growth.

Politicians rise and fall on their ability to grow the GDP. It doesn’t matter what it takes, whether it’s ripping up environmental protections, gutting labour laws, or fracking for cheap oil: If you achieve growth, you win.

This is only the beginning. As we bump up against the limits of growth – market saturation, resource depletion, climate change – politicians will become increasingly aggressive in their pursuit of it. People like Trump will proliferate because everyone knows that we need growth: if the economy doesn’t keep expanding by at least two percent or three percent a year in developed countries, it collapses into crisis. Debts can’t be repaid, firms go bust, people lose their jobs.

The global economy has been designed in such a way that it needs to grow just to stay afloat. We are all hostages to growth, and hostages to those who promise it.

This is a massive problem because growth is tightly linked to environmental degradation. Growth of three percent may not sound like much, but it means doubling the size of the economy every 20 years – doubling the number of cars, smartphones, air miles… i.e. doubling the waste. Scientists tell us that we have already exceeded key planetary boundaries, and we can see the consequences all around us: deforestation, biodiversity collapse, resource wars and climate change.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. We can choose to create an economy that doesn’t require endless growth and thus take the wind out of the sails of politicians like Trump. In fact, it’s already happening: scholars and activists around the world are building the foundations for post-growth economics.

The first step is to challenge the myth that growth is required by society. Economists and politicians tell us that we need growth in order to boost people out of poverty. But of all the new income generated by growth, only five percent goes to the poorest 60 percent of humanity. Growth is an extremely inefficient and ecologically insane way of improving people’s lives. We can end poverty much more quickly, without any growth at all, simply by distributing existing income more fairly.

This is the core principle of a post-growth economy: Equity is the antidote to growth. There are lots of ideas about how to get there. We could introduce a global minimum wage and strengthen international labour laws. We could put a maximum cap on income and wealth. We could encourage and even subsidise worker-owned cooperatives so wealth and power are distributed more equally.

But we also need to do something about our structural dependence on growth.

For example, capitalism has a built-in incentive to increase labour productivity – to squeeze more value out of workers’ time. But as productivity improves, workers get laid off and unemployment rises. To solve this crisis, governments have to find ways to generate more growth to create more jobs.

There are proven ways to escape this vicious cycle. We could introduce a shorter working week as Sweden has just done, sharing necessary labour so that everyone can have access to employment without the need for perpetual growth. Or we could ease off on the labour requirement altogether by rolling out a universal basic income,funded by progressive taxes on carbon, resource-extraction, and financial transactions.

Photo by Christopher Lane Photography

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Michael Hudson on Junk Economics

P2P Foundation — Sun, 22 Apr 2018 10:00:00 +0000

d@w’s Paul Sliker and Dante Dallavalle talk with Michael Hudson, one of the world’s six economists who accurately predicted the 2007-2008 financial crisis. He explains how Orwellian doublethink is used to conceal how the economy really works.

Republished from leftoutpodcast

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Commons in the Time of Monsters: an Introduction to P2P Politics

Stacco Troncoso — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 08:00:00 +0000

Join me on Monday, 18th of September at Newspeak House in London at 7:00 PM for a workshop on the Commons, P2P, and Peer to Peer Politics. See you there!

Event Description

After 40 years of neoliberalization, the promised end of history has led to a decomposition of established hierarchical systems, including politics. This process has culminated in Brexit and Trump. While there are strong reactions against these, the current of political change cannot be rewound back towards neoliberalism. However, alternatives based on the logic of networks and Peer to Peer are emerging and gaining attention.

Join Stacco Troncoso from the P2P Foundation to discuss on how Commons-based peer production — the relational dynamic behind projects such as Wikipedia and Linux — can prefigure new heterarchical systems for dealing with complexity, and how the figure of the “commoner” can be seen as an emancipatory political subject. The discussion will also analyse the municipality coalitions which successfully won local elections in many of Spain’s major cities and how this process contributes to what we call a Commons Transition.

Free entrance
Event link

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Ten Theses on Trump

Michel Bauwens — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 09:00:00 +0000

The victory of Trump signifies the end of an era of neoliberal globalization in which the Western working and middle classes accepted the stagnation and decline due to the inevitable de-industrialization that was a unavoidable result of the neoliberal strategy. The tragedy, of course, is that the reaction takes the shape of a return to forms of national protectionism that are looking at the past, and at the expense of other minorities. Can we find new forms of organizing production, that are compatible with social justice and ecological sustainability? Can we retain and expand forms of trans-national cooperation? Our answer is that it is, indeed, possible to envisage such a re-orientation and transition, and that it will involve a crucial role for the Commons. Read on to see how the Trump moment can re-invigorate new strategies for human emancipation.

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.

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Understanding the current blocked ‘world conjuncture’, and why it produces ‘global Trumpism’

Michel Bauwens — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 06:12:52 +0000

This is one of the most clear-eyed analyses of I have seen on the state of global empire to date, and why it produces populist reactions on both the left (Syriza/Podemos) and the right (Trump, etc ..).

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.

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