When I first read Heikki Patomäki’s essay, I felt like cheering. A call to action, instead of more words and analyses of our common predicament, about which those in this list-serv already know so much.

However, early on, Heikki pulled back: “For many reasons, a detailed blueprint for a WPP is neither advisable nor possible.”

Without a blueprint, what then is this WPP? We do get some “contours”: morality and ethics that can be validated independently of the authorities that promulgated them; positive collective learning, which requires improvements not only in knowledge dissemination about our global interconnections but also in pathways for effective transnational participation. Thank you very much for referencing the Big History Project, and thank you to David Christian for expanding on the utility of creating this type of comprehensive learning platform. Let us not forget one of the most important contours: “the fundamental shift from the currently dominant national mythos to a global imaginary.”

I believe that a significant shift to a global consciousness is consistently manifesting—through the many transnational civil society movements—whether human rights, environment, inequalities, etc. Many progressives have been opposed to the globalization of recent decades (global capital movements, global trade increases, and expanded global telecommunications), not for spurring the consciousness of our interdependence and interconnectedness but for the exploitative and inequality-engendering effects.

Like it or not, we are in the planetary twenty-first century. We are indeed constrained by fears that the nefarious effects and ugly consequences of greedy oligopolists, cyber criminals, or just the sheer ineptitude to evolve a new economic and social model will derail the efforts towards cohesion. But for things to cohere, we have to be able to tell a story based on a largely shared vision of inclusive prosperity for the CEO in Kenya, the janitor in Finland, the textile worker in India, the construction worker in China, and the unemployed factory worker in Kentucky, USA.

My conclusion is that the call for a WPP is perhaps misnamed. Conceivably, we need a World Political Platform, with a clear set of objectives. If we have such a platform, then local governments, advocacy groups, associations, and organizations can adhere to the platform and work to accomplish the goals articulated therein through the political structures extant where they find themselves. There could be some type of linkages transnationally highlighting who was accomplishing what within such a framework. Vivienne Ming, the neuroscientist and AI expert has said that you need to “solve the problem first,” and then you figure out how the machines can help you. I think that the Sustainable Development Goals work is moving in this direction even if it was an inter-nation effort; many civil society organizations and businesses are using this framework to tackle poverty and inequalities and move to a green energy future.

Particularly useful to localized action under the WPP banner would be more and better methodologies for actually legislating, advancing policy reforms, and advocacy that would push the goals of a WPP to the top of many organizational agendas.

Vicki Assevero is an international lawyer with a longstanding interest in sustainable development.  She is the founder of The Green Market in Santa Cruz, Trinidad, a practical experiment in community-based sustainable development.

Photo by SeppoU

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I am sceptical for a number of reasons but primarily because I do not see a organic connection with anything that is unfolding on the ground.
What I see unfolding is quite different, and I believe our solutions must be in harmony with these more grassroots trends.

My starting point is the conviction that the famous double movement of Karl Polanyi, in which periods of market liberalization creating social chaos, make place for counter-epochs when the market is re-embedded in society under social pressure, is no longer functioning at the national scale.
We are now in the midst of such a Polanyan moment, in which the systemic crisis of 2008, has created a backlash of left and right-wing populisms, which are destabalizing countries, but do not seem capable to bring about any real systemic change at the nation-state level.

The main reason seems to me is that while Nation and State are operating at the national level, Capital is operating directly at the global level, and can destabilize any local/national attempt at reform. There isn’t any real form of internationalism at the level of political movements and institutions, and the left remains deeply embedded in nation-state logics of neo-Keynesianism. The exceptions, Varoufakis’ Diem25 movement, with its pan-European outlook, have not yet proven to have any real traction, and the inter-national sysem of cooperation is not strenghtening, but weakening.

However, in civil society, we see an entirely different situation. Global open source communities are characterized by the exponential growh of the numbers of code and coders; and a significant part of its workers is trans-nationally neo-nomadic, creating entirely different sub-economic systems; there is a tenfold growth of urban commons in the western cities (which I have documented myself in Ghent, Belgium, but is confirmed by various other studies), and their practices are moving from the mere redistribution of products and services, to actual cosmo-local production (shared code, relocalized material production) of energy and organic food. Many of the exploding number of local projects, are actually not local, but transnational in nature: as Enzio Manzini called them, they are ‘Small, Local, Open, Connected’.

For the network of commons and p2p-researchers associated and partnering with the P2P Foundataion, this means a changing focus, from the mere inter-national, to the truly ‘trans-national’. What is happening in the world today is that next to the geographic nations, there is the emergence of true global neo-nomadic ecosystems of cooperation.
So what I believe needs to happen is a change of focus. Of course, the national and the inter-national remain powerful and will do so for the foreseeable future, but at the same time, we need to build trans-national institutions, and strategies.

Elsewhere, we have argued for new models, such as the Partner State, and institutions for public-commons cooperation at the territorial level. But progressive forces should no longer see policy making as only focused on market value, on their own nation-state only, or on international political cooperation, but rather on the transnationalization of infrastructures. For example, right now, cities are coalescing to regulate the negative effects of Uber and AirBnB, but why not create, through city alliances, global open depositories for the ‘generative’ transformation of all bioregional provisioning systems, i.e. supporting the infrastructure for mutualization that is both local, but can benefit from global transnational knowledge sharing. Imaging having access to a global set of tools to develop FairBNB’s and MuniRide’s. Imagine, like it is already happening in France, building Assemblies and Chambers of the Commons, cooperating at a trans-national scale.

So rather than a World Political Party that would continue the paradigm of competitive politics, endlessly fighting on what is the ‘right program’, I would rather see the development of a global Commons Transition Coalition, rooted in actual reconstructive and prefigurative practice, but which can play a political role by representing the new forces of transformation, at the institutional level of inter-nationality. What we need, is a new configuration between the territorial nations, weakening as we speak , with the emerging transnational nations, growing rapidly.

Photo by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

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