“The P2P movement is…at a historical juncture, where it has to start developing the ability for policy formulation and connect with social mobilizations…. the next step is changing the old institutional order itself, and this crucial step has barely started.” — Michel Bauwens, ( How does real change occur )
There comes a time in the history of the development of any new ideas when those who adhere to those ideas want to see them coalesce into a force for social change. Often this is accompanied by the urge to solidify into a platform of sorts. In the past when hierarchies were well-defined and points of entry into the social, economic, and political systems were clear, distributed social movements could gain leverage by adopting organizational forms that would give them the capacity to influence the larger systems in which they are embedded. New organizations, new businesses, new political parties, have all met with varying measures of success.
The key concern is that when you adopt an organizational form that is defined in terms of the “old” system, there are benefits and costs. Though the benefits may be an ease of putting pressure on the well-defined pressure points of the “old” system, one hidden cost is the fact that the old system continues to maintain its power to set the terms of interaction by controlling what organizational forms are allowed to participate. Hegemonic discourse theory has and continues to articulate the pros and cons of allowing your “enemy” to control the stage and the forms used thereon.
A concrete example of this tension often occurs in “green” business, where a key question centers around whether or not a “green business” is possible, or whether going “green” requires the abandonment of business (and capitalism) as a whole. Another example involves the inclusion of NGOs in United Nations processes, where the debate revolves around whether their participation constitutes progress or whether they have been co-opted into compliance by giving non-voting status.
The crux of the matter is that there are two ways to engage in social change:
- through existing systems
- outside of existing systems
As I wrote in one of my original papers on panarchy:
These transnational networks’ activities not only influence states but also serve as a means of social governance that functions independently of and in parallel to state governing. As Paul Wapner points out, “What is absolutely essential to recognize, however, is that it is not the entanglements and overlaps with states and the state system that make efforts in global civil society ‘political.’ Transnational activism does not simply become politically relevant when it intersects with state behavior…. At stake in this analysis, then, is the concept of world politics.” (Paul Wapner, “Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics,” World
Politics 47, no. 3 (1995): 339.)(from “Panarchy: Governance in the Network Age” )
The primary advantage of knowing these ways of engaging means that we can accept the participation of many traditional and non-traditional groups as long as they represent and support a set of core principles.
In today’s era of complex systems, panarchy, transnational networks, and distributed participation, I believe the costs of adopting the old forms frequently outweigh the benefits. Consequently I maintain the importance of non-unity. Nonetheless, even if the goal is to avoid a unified organization that can be made a target of attack or co-opted, but instead leverage the power of distributed participation, it is still useful, and perhaps even necessary, to outline a set of key principles that like-minded players will support.
To that end we are making an attempt to articulate those key principles here:
The Political Principles of Peer-to-Peer Advocacy
The point of such a list is simply this:
Anyone — politician, businessman, socialite, etc. — who claims to be acting in your interests, or claims to advocate for a movement with “p2p” characteristics, should be well-informed on the issues on the list and articulate in their advocacy of them.
[This post was created with the assistance of P2PF blogger Sam Rose and Smári McCarthy.]
A very timely post, Paul. Several useful linkages to current issues, including Malcolm Gladwell’s recent diatribe against the role of social media in political action.
David Weinberger has a particularly useful reaction to the Gladwell piece (and Gladwell’s doubling down on his position despite events in Egypt), which can be found here. Weinberger helpfully includes links to the Gladwell articles.
The key principles in the wiki link seem kind of thin. It’s a good beginning, but nothing that really generates passion. Until people can clearly see how their own lives would be better off, why would they change? In a p2p world, where are the jobs? How about health care? And education? And what’s the role of money? And on and on. Shouldn’t principles help people imagine another way of living? … I don’t know. This is all from someone with only limited knowledge of p2p foundational thought.
@Gary you are totally right. This is actually intended to be thin. We at http://futureforwardinstitute.com are out in communities talking with people from all sectors of communities about these concepts and how they might leverage them. So, to that this is a beginning articulation of politics in collaboration with P2P Foundation. When we are creating practical solutions based off of theory, we are posting that in collaboration with for instance http://appropedia.org, or http://wikieducator.org or http://socialmediaclassroom.com or http://localfoodsystems.org etc etc etc (all places we are active).
We’ll keep developing that wiki page, but we wanted to get the thinking down *while* we were thinking about it. Our core point (and the value that we think people can take away from this) is that you don’t want to run off and join a party as a first step towards actual p2p politics. This is advice from us that is applicable right now today. Instead, you want to learn to work directly with other people, to be a “party of one” person, who cooperates and collaborates with others where and when needed. We can co-create the our rules for participation on demand while we are trying to solve the problems of health care, money, and education. We don’t need to outsource that to representative government in every case. For instance, maybe with healthcare, we simply create donation networks to help each other fund costs? Or, maybe we create co-operatives of doctors and patients? Maybe we create co-operative-based drug companies that manufacture and distribute drugs in a whole new way, with a core mission to provide the medication at an ethical cost, and market and suggest use ethically, perhaps even opting first to base off of natural ingredients, and open sourcing the chemical compounds? In all cases, people need to know what government works and looks like if they try to do this stuff, so our wiki page is a start at saying YOU ARE THE GOVERNMENT