Thanks for the thoughtful reply – and sorry for the delay in responding.

I agree on the idea of polarities. There is a continuum between the enterprise association-based state at one end, and the civil association-based state on the other. Once a state puts systems in place to tax a substantial portion of wealth, I believe it in effect incentivizes power struggles, in which groups vie to capture power and secure resources to advance their enterprise association agendas. Such struggles tend to be less intense in low-tax, lightly regulated jurisdictions (e.g. Hong Kong) where there are fewer gains (and losses) to be reaped from political victories relative to voluntary exchanges. Alvin Rabushka’s early work (in the 1970s) on Asian freeports and free zones found that ethnic rivalries tended to fade as civil association-based reforms rewarded shifts from zero-sum group political competition to voluntary business and social ventures.

In my view, a “partner state” for a P2P society is one that ensures a rule of law, in which no peaceful and honest ventures can be subordinated via discriminatory tax or regulatory measures to the substantive ends of any other. That said, I’m all in favor of contractual associations (e.g. neighborhood associations and cooperatives) of residents experimenting with various codes of conduct that they deem suitable, so long as these are transparent, subject to state-established uniform due process rules, and binding only upon expressly-consenting individuals. These conditions, I think, create conditions for P2P-based polities to learn, adapt, and thrive from the social and cultural innovations of free people within them.

What do you think?

Best,

Mark
@openworld

thanks for this interesting distinction, which makes sense, and that I wasn’t aware of. My question is the following: aren’t those polarities rather than totally different approaches.

let’s take the example of greece, where the neoliberal state is taking away 20-40% of social wealth, therefore also making it very difficult to have a civil life; can one, in those circumstances, follow a purely ‘civil’ approach, ignoring the organized attack against civil society?

so it seems to me that while in ‘normal’ circumstances (but when are circumstances ever truly ‘normal’?), one can achieve civil associations and ignore the faith of the state, this will rarely be actually the case. This is why I’m advocating the concept of a partner state, which ‘enables and empowers social production to occur’, but this is not the same as a corporate welfare state, which bails out financial predators but guts civil society in order to do so. In this context, you cannot ignore the present faith of the state, and be agnostic on it, but rather it also requires a political stance, apart and next to civil association. Once achieved however, then this new partner state should not substitute itself from civil society but do what is necessary, in creating the right conditions, so that civil association becomes optimally possible,

Your comments on this would be very welcome,

Michel

I like much of what you’ve posted, but believe a key distinction has been overlooked about two fundamentally different kinds of politics.

Michael Oakeshott, as noted in Wikipedia (below), identifies them as follows –

>>Oakeshott suggested that there had been two major schools of political thought. In the first, which he called ‘enterprise’ association, the state was understood as imposing some universal purpose (profit, salvation, progress, racial domination) on its subjects in which they were forced to participate. ‘Civil’ association however was primarily a legal relationship, in which laws imposed obligatory conditions of action but did not require choosing one action rather than another.

>>…Oakeshott describes the ‘enterprise’ and the ‘civil’ association in different terms. An ‘enterprise’ association is seen as based in a fundamental faith in the ability of the human to ascertain and grasp some universal “good” (i.e. the Politics of Faith), and the ‘civil’ association is seen as based in a fundamental skepticism about the human ability to either ascertain or achieve this universal “good” (i.e. the Politics of Skepticism).

>>Oakeshott saw power (especially technological power) as a necessary prerequisite for the Politics of Faith, because a) it allowed people to believe that they could achieve something great (e.g. something universally good), and b) it allowed them to implement the policies necessary to achieve this goal. The Politics of Skepticism, on the other hand, rests on the idea that government should concern itself with preventing bad things from happening rather than enabling ambiguously good events.

>>Oakeshott used the analogy of the adverb to describe the kind of restraint law involves. For example, the law against murder is not a law against killing as such, but only a law against killing ‘murderously’. Or, a more trivial example, the law does not dictate that I have a car, but if I do, I have to drive it on the same side of the road as everybody else. This contrasted with the rules of enterprise association in which those actions required by the directing purpose were made compulsory for all. (source: Wikipedia article on Michael Oakeshott)

I believe that politics in the sense of civil association among formal equals (horizontal vs hierarchical relationships) belong at the heart of emerging integral, P2P polities.

Best,

Mark Frazier
Openworld.com
“Awakening assets for good”
@openworld (twitter)