pulsation of the commons
The pulsation of the commons: The temporal context for the cosmo-local transition,
By Michel Bauwens, Jose Ramos
[looks like there’s at least a shared section with their ecology of the commons chapter in david bollier’s collective (book/anthology)]
found here:
Michel Bauwens (@mbauwens) tweeted at 3:20 PM on Fri, Jun 19, 2020:
Michel Bauwens and Jose Raomos, “The pulsation of the commons: The temporal context for the cosmo-local transition” (Draft), https://t.co/PlCGSVg7Go
(https://twitter.com/mbauwens/status/1274089668645175298?s=03)Draft version of March 25, 2020 is also copied here for public viewing: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Pulsation_of_the_Commons
Draft version of a introductory chapter in a upcoming book on’Cosmo-local production’, edited by Jose Ramos with the assistance of James Gien Wong, Sharon Ede, and Michel Bauwens. This is a version without notes and references.
actually going to do notes/quotes from p2p page.. so i don’t accidentally edit doc:
intro
in this preliminary essay, we’d like to give the readers a sense of ‘timing’, and offer an explanation of the context in which a transformation to the new mode of material production and value creation occurs.
Pogany: the time for the chaotic transition has begun
Pogany concludes that our world, i.e. human society embedded in nature, is a ‘complex adaptive system’ and reminds us that such systems change through ‘punctuated equilibrium’, ‘chaotic transitions’ and ‘bifurcations’. This is a huge statement as it means that humanity doesn’t adapt to radically new situations through reasoned debate, but through shocks in the system.
This also means that societal transitions are also about the installment of new logics, not just a re-arrangement of the old system.
indeed.. like a re arrangement of how we do exchanges.. new logic would be sans exchanging ness
This view of Pogany, of world history as a ‘pulsation’, between stable systems and chaotic transitions, is very much in line with other understandings of long term human and natural history.
yeah.. i’m not sure if we get to new logic by history – because it’s mostly data from whales in sea world
The Handy Project and Mark Whitaker’s Ecological Revolutions
The original modality of humankind is commoning, which is when everyone contributes and partakes in a common pool; it is a prime mode in hunter-gathering bands the gift economy, in which the gift creates social obligations for a counter-gift becomes the dominant modality in more complex tribal societies; authority ranking, when in a class-based polity, the rulers must legitimize their domination through the redistribution of resources, and finally, market pricing, where prices allow for the exchange of resources deemed of equal value.
yeah.. i don’t think that’s legit common\ing .. ie: red flags: gift; obligations; counter-gift; rulers; ranking; legitimize domination; pricing; exchanges; equal value;..
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b free people
Today we see an exponential rise in knowledge commons; infrastructural commoning is also emerging rapidly, and not just in the southern European countries where state and market failure is the most obvious. A recent study on urban commons in the Flemish city of Ghent, showed the existence of nearly 500 urban commons, active in all areas of human provisioning (Bauwens and Onzia, 2017), a jump from the 50 existing ten years earlier.
yeah.. again i’d say .. not legit commoning.. has to be across the board [to get to the roots of healing.. it has to be all of us].. i believe commoning is a natural state of legit free/healthy people.. problem is we aren’t that.. and it can’t be part\ial.. for (blank)’s sake…
Karl Polanyi’s double movement vs Carlota Perez’s adaptation of the Kondratieff Cycles
Thus, both the Atlee and Roosevelt New Deal reforms were inspired by the forms developed as commons, but were then bureaucratized through there state-driven generalization to the whole society.
what attempt hasn’t been bureaucratized..?
this is why we haven’t yet gotten to global equity (everyone getting a go everyday).. aka: common\ing.. an undisturbed ecosystem..
Our preliminary conclusion: we are both going through a meta-historical event, the loss of our balance with nature at a global level, and at a change within the cycles of capitalism. Both these temporal events, which both lead to a re-strengthening of the commons, are converging in one single global process, which brings the necessity of a re-emergence of the commons to the fore.
i don’t think we’ve ever had legit common\ing.. and whether or not we did.. i don’t think we’ll get back/to it without a leap
commoning/humanity needs a leap.. to get back/to simultaneous spontaneity .. simultaneous fittingness.. everyone in sync..
Revolution and Phase Transition – the Notion of Seed Forms
For the development of capitalism we saw such early seed forms with the Italian city-states, mercantilism as the consolidation of this logic and the current era through forms of both predatory capitalism and green capitalism. Thus, the longue dureé of the phase transition we are part of is dependent on the creation of seed forms that ultimately ‘burst’ into the organizational logic of the societies from which they had been planted.
For the emergence of a post-capitalist commons political economy the seed forms are much more recent, from the 20th century, and the longue dureé can be seen through the distributed experiments (involving commons and commoning) that indicate and bring forth a new organizational logic.
yeah.. i don’t think we’ve seen any new logic yet
This is not to say that there will be no ‘revolutions’, but that they are the result of more long-term changes in the productive systems and structures, and the social forces they create.
and i think that long term change ness.. is actually just us perpetuating a broken feed back loop
so messed up.. and so obsessed w false data (ie: from hales in sea world.. we have no idea what free people are like) that we need a leap to get back in the sync of the dance of common\ing
If we have capitalism, it’s because we had capitalists, if we have a post-capitalist commons transition, it will be because we have commoners. So what then is the nature of these seed forms for a post-capitalist commons transition?
To recap, from Pogany we have learned that societies change through chaotic phase transitions, in which the old binding elements start disintegrating and new seed forms, preconfiguring potential futures, start competing in a Darwinian explosion. We can therefore not necessarily predict which seed forms will ultimately be the seeds of the successor system. Nevertheless, given the crucial role of the limits of carrying capacity to the growth of human societies, and the equally important role of mutualization in lower human footprints, we feel fairly confident that the current emerging p2p and commons-oriented seed forms, will play a crucial role in the current transition.
we need to do this first: free art-ists.. for (blank)’s sake.. otherwise.. not commoners.. the transitioning mech needs a simultaneous means for detox.. otherwise we’re just spinning our wheels/data
The Commons as Mutualization for the Anthropocene
this is the section that is ecology of the commons..
mutualization signifies humanity as more than just a passive traveller on planet.. producing effects comparable to grand geo shifts.. humans as 1\ force 2\ aware of force 3\ response
p2
The body of ideas and research on the commons is a critical part of the second movement of the Anthropocene—our capacity to interpret and understand ourselves in the current era;
i don’t know..? we keep missing this one.. ie: we keep going back to history and assuming that’s how natural humans act/respond.. when it’s really more like how whales in sea world respond/act.. we really have no idea
so.. history/research.. hasn’t really been helping us.. just analyzing/comparing/perpetuating non legit data
while the praxis of the commons, termed “commoning,” is critical to the third movement of the Anthropocene—our reflexive planetary responses
common\ing et al
This hypothesis was one of the key reasons for the creation of the P2P Foundation, as from the very beginning, we gave the following analysis of the global problematique:
1\ current political econ proceeds from pov of permanent/unlimited growth.. called this ‘pseudo-abundance’
2\ current political econ proceeds from pov that marketization and commodification are best way to manage/allocate immaterial resources as well..called this ‘artificial scarcity in world of immaterial resources.’
3\ two first mistakes compounded by fact that econ organization produces more/more human inequality
ie: cure ios city
Commoning as the Third Movement of the Anthropocene
same as on p 10-11 of ecology of the commons
By virtue of this second movement of the Anthropocene—our capacity to see ourselves as interdependent with other people and species for our wellbeing and common futures—the third movement of the Anthropocene is brought forth. This is a movement of “implication,” whereby the person through their emerging relational awareness is “plied into” a shared concern. They become aware that they share with others a common interest. A commons has shifted from something implicit, real but unidentified, to something explicit—its reality has been relationally formulated.
yeah.. i think common ing comes from what’s already in us (8b daily curiosities).. not from some shared concern that is plied? sounds a like a red flag we’re doing it wrong
sounds like group work in schools/job
The explication of a commons, a domain of shared concern, is simultaneously the invocation of a community who must steward the good of that commons—commoning.
‘must steward’ .. red flag
if legit commoning.. ‘must steward’ becomes ‘can’t not’
A particular commons can only be as such because it is valued by a particular group of people.
too many lines.. too many inspectors of inspectors.. to determine which group et al
..local inhabitants who want to protect such localized commons for their own use.These are the examples that Ostrom studied and gained fame for.
In the case of public and social commons, these are created by political entities such as municipalities, states,and federal systems, which are meant to extend a common good to a whole political community. Universal healthcare is one example of such a public commons, where a public good that a political community cares for
not the root of the problem..
ie: would need less ‘health care’.. if any.. if focus on maté basic needs
ie: a nother way
In Conclusion: Why will the transition be cosmo-local ?
We believe that cosmo-localization, understood in this specific way, ‘transcends and includes’ the best of the previous socio-economic systems, while also ‘negating’ its degenerative aspects.
__________
4 yrs later
via tweet [https://x.com/mbauwens/status/1843909696819998733]:
One of my most important essays:
* The Pulsation of the Commons
wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Pulsation_of_t
The Commons As A Perennial Mode Of Exchange
The Temporal Ebb And Flow Of Commoning
Introducing Pogany: The Time for The Chaotic Transition Has Begun
The HANDY Project and Mark Whitaker’s Ecological Revolution
Karl Polanyi’s Double Movement vs Carlota Perez’s Adaptation of The Kondratieff Cycles
Revolution, Phase Transition, and Seed Forms
The Commons as Mutualization for the Anthropocene
Commoning as the Third Movement of the Anthropocene
Conclusion: Why Will the Transition Be Cosmo-Local?
Towards Magisteria of the Commons
not checking all the sections for changes (since 4 yrs ago post was draft).. but adding notes/quotes from 2 (red highlighted) sections that i don’t think were there before.. and the beginning – discussion
notes/quotes:
Discussion
We argue that there is historic and contemporary evidence of a regular ‘pulsation of the commons’ in which periodically, local populations and spiritual reformers engage in the reorganizations of their local economy and social order by re-instituting commons institutions and practices, which heal the land and protect resources for the longer term, paradoxically recreating a surplus that generates a new expansive cycle. However, as our global system has exhausted several ‘frontiers’, we have reached a situation of global overreach. Our article therefore inquires into the possibility of re-enacting the restoration of the commons at a global scale, through protective ‘Magisteria of the Commons, i.e. global institutions that create a counter-power to the inter-state system as well as to transnational capital.We thereby also present an alternative paradigm to interstate competition and the domination of transnational capital, in the form of a cosmo-local world order, a new arrangement between the local and the global, whereby ‘everything that is heavy is local, and everything that is light is global and shared’.
need: a sabbatical ish transition
The Commons As A Perennial Mode Of Exchange
This text centers around the importance of a perennial human institution, that of the commons, which is one of the four basic modes of exchange identified by anthropologists.
needs to be sans mode of exchange.. rather.. just part of the ebb/flow of the dance
Alan Page Fiske, in his landmark book Structures of Social Life (1991), offers a fourfold typology of modes of exchange. A mode of exchange focuses not on how things are made and what the relations are of productive communities, as Marx did when he talked about a ‘mode of production’, but look at what the criteria are for the exchange of value, i.e. the allocation methods for who gets what in a given society. Fiske called them: Communal Shareholding, Equality Matching, Authority Ranking and Market Pricing.
Commoning occurs whenever human groups exchange with a ‘whole’, following the logic, ‘give a brick, get a house’. Commoning, doing something for the tribe, clan and family rather than for one’s own, is the primary way in which value was exchanged at the dawn of humanity. A hunter or gatherer would bring back the proceeds of their search for food, but this was done on behalf of the family, and there was a pre-established way in which these proceeds would be shared. Later on, human communities would collectively manage natural resources on which they were codependent, such as forests, estuaries, fishing rights, mountain slopes, grazing rights, etc… In the European Middle Ages, farmers would have access to a family plot, would have to work for their lord, but would also have access to common fields, managed by the village as a whole.
yeah.. too graeber violence/quantification law ness for the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
As tribal arrangements became more complex and grew in scale, the gift economy became more important, over-shadowing commoning. In this allocation method, a individual, family or clan would make a gift, which would create gratitude and a sense of obligation in the recipient, which would at a later time, want to give another gift and return, so as to re-establish the ‘equality’ which had been disturbed by the gift, hence the concept of Equality Matching to denote this type of exchange.
However, once we see stratified class societies emerging, the primary role of allocation becomes distribution according to rank, under the adage, “rule, protect and distribute”, hence ‘Authority Ranking’.These were the tributary or feudal modes. Since the 1600s, the primary mode of allocation has been “Market Pricing’, i.e. the capitalist form of the market.
While these modalities have co-existed across regions, cultures and epochs, the relative importance has evolved over time, as we already indicated. One modality dominates and the other modalities adapt to its dominance, and find new niches where their persistence makes sense.
In a review, McKenzie Wark (2015) summarizes it briefly: ‘Mode A is association, or rather the reciprocity of the gift. Mode B is brute force, or rule and protection. Mode C is commodity exchange. There’s also a Mode D, which transcends the others.’ Mode A consists of 2 phases, which correspond to the distinctions made by Fiske: the first modality of intra-tribal exchange is ‘non-reciprocal exchange’, in other words ‘commoning’, exchanging with a whole. The second phase, used for inter-tribal trading when these societies become more complex, is the reciprocal gift, used to create mutual social obligations and therefore also ‘peace’. When sedentarization occurs, and conflict cannot be avoided through nomadic strategies, the gift logic becomes necessary for inter-tribal peace-keeping. Mode D, emerging today, then combines the historical modalities A, B, C but under the coordination of a ‘new associationism’, a concept that is very close to commoning as I could confirm in a private email exchange with Kojin Karatani.
to me .. not legit common\ing (aka: the dance) if any form of m\a\p
As we agree with this interpretation of human history, we can apply these insights for a stylized summary of the history of the commons:
- In early tribal societal forms, commoning is the central mode of allocation, and is used for all resources pertaining to the survival of the kinship group, and it remains important in gift economy systems
again w the mode ness
- In feudal and state forms (Authority Ranking), the commons and the gift lose their dominance, but the commons retain an important function, for guaranteeing the collective management of vital natural resources; commons-based communities compose with the feudal order but also defend themselves.
need to let go of managing ness.. ie: let go of ostrom 8 ness
- But the exodus of the farmers from the countryside, in order to become workers in the cities, coincided with the emergence of a new form of commons: barring control and access to common natural resources, workers commonified their life risk, through a massive mutualization of income and health resources,which became the basis of the welfare state. Thus we could claim that capitalism privatized the natural resource commons, but state-ified the social commons.
mutual exchange symposium ness.. still not letting go enough
- With the emergence of digital networks, the commons are again emerging as a substantive practice, starting with the emergence of knowledge and open source commons after 1993, with the invention of the web and the browser, which democratized access to the Internet.
intellectness as cancerous distraction.. as is any form of democratic admin
to me.. nothing in ‘history’ showing we have had legit commoning to date
At the current moment in history, after a period of eclipse under the capitalist mode of production and allocation, the commons seem to be re-merging, particularly using the mechanism of what we call ‘peer production’, using “peer to peer” modalities. *Peer to peer is any social and technical system, in which peers can connect with each other, in order to communicate, exchange, but also self-organize and even create new ‘value circuits’.
*super.. to the tech system in which peers can connect.. but makes no diff if not detoxed first.. otherwise.. the communicate is whalespeak.. exchange and value circuits ie’s that not yet common ing
- Finally, we see the emergence of eco-systems of material production, which are also inspired by commons-based logics. For example, the multifactory-model, used by a network of 120 craft-based maker spaces across Europe, works around a common ecosystem for shared knowledge, their ‘Invisible Factory’. We could say that if the internet of communications stimulated the ‘peer production’ of so-called immaterial goods, i.e. knowledge, software and design, then the ‘internet of transactions’, which came into being with the blockchain, represents, through its shared and distributed ledgers which can be used for coordinating production flows, the possibility of material peer production.
again.. spinning our wheels in tragedy of the non common if still don’t grok legit needs..
need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
But the new technological affordances are only part of the explanation. We want to show and argue, in this paper, that there is a historical pattern in the ebb and flow of commoning in human history. Why are commons sometimes weakening to the point of disappearance, while they make strong comebacks at other times. This is why we believe, and posit with some confidence, that we are now entering a ‘new age of the commons’ , in which we expect them to take center stage.
only if we let go enough to try/see the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
The basic idea of the ‘pulsation of the commons’ is the following. Throughout history, even as the arrow of time proceeds and societies become more complex and evolve, an idea that was expressed in the sometimes mechanistic and deterministic social evolution theories that were popular in the 19th cy. and the early 20th cy, there is also a cyclic pattern. The full pattern has two different moments:
..as a reaction to this degradative phase, local productive communities, rooted in their territory which is degrading, seek to resist and eventually to redress, linked to religious and spiritual movements which express this discontent and desire for social harmony; if this movement overtakes the degradative forces, the commons, the mutualizing of resources to create abundance within a context of sufficiency, recreate old and new commons which had been degraded and weakened in the expansive phase. At some point, the health of the system is restored to such a degree that the desire for expansion grows again.
to me.. we have yet restored legit health
This dynamic is what we like to call: the pulsation of the commons.
Perhaps a word here for the visually oriented readers: what do you get when you combine a successive evolution of systems, each more complex than the other overall (which doesn’t mean superior in any moral sense, nor progress, but only: a tendential complexification of the social systems over time), but which are also determined by polarity switches ? The answer is: a spiral. In a spiral we can visualize each phase of complexity but at the same time, the line moves between polarities and the downward direction of the crisis moment is also visible.
to me.. this is where we need to say good bye cycle.. spiral ing just perpetuates myth of tragedy and lord
Towards Magisteria of the Commons
As we mentioned before, Peter Pogany explained how the welfare-state / neoliberal cycle, was marked by ‘weak multilateralism’ and a social contract between capital and labor, and he indicates that the new ‘stable system’, Global System 3, would be characterized by ‘strong multilateralism’ and a ‘compact between humanity and nature’.
need non hierarchical listening for that
The emergence of new commons-centric seed forms may give us an indication of how this could be achieved.
First of all, we have seen today the emergence of global open design communities that co-construct common knowledge, free software and open designs. These communities are digitally self-organized for producing knowledge commons through global common platforms. But with blockchain we have seen the emergence of open collaborative ecosystems that are based on open source code and community dynamics that operate at the global level, using incentive systems that attempt to align the multiple stakeholders. A number of these communities have been successful in creating socially sovereign crypto-currencies, a prerogative that used to be reserved to nation-states. They could be in effect considered to be ‘virtual nations’ that are constructing their own infrastructures.
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us.. ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
But people do not live in cyberspace alone, and this instantiates the realization of our cosmo-local principle: permaculturists for example, have their feet in the mud when they do the local regenerative agricultural practice, but AT THE SAME TIME, they are cosmically connected to permaculturists in the whole world!
This hints at the possibility of creating new layers of institutions, which we could call magisteria of the commons. Magisteria are interlocking sets of institutions that govern a particular domain at multiple levels. We have functioning magisteria for science, for politics, economics and culture. What we do not have are magisteria for the commons, i.e. interlocking sets of trans-local institutions that can protect human and extra-human institutions.
to me.. not common ing if governing, protecting, institutions et al
R30.org has proposed a ‘Global Thresholds and Allocations Council’, an institution of materials scientists that can keep track of the available stock of resources, that is aware of the negative thresholds that would endanger the continued existence and possibility of the production of a continued flow of services for the present and future generations. From this knowledge of thresholds follow the establishment of criteria for developing fair allocations of these resources. This would therefore require a ‘magisteria’, an institution that provides valuable enough services, so that competing entities wanting to avoid war and conflict over dwindling resources, would be motivated to join, just as European nations found it useful to join the EU after a generation of intense warfare on the European continent. This implies that the management of vital resources would no longer be solely determined by Westphalian state logics and corporate markets, but would at least be partially managed as commons for humanity and the living planet. The post-transition stable system will be a world that is no longer purely territorial and Westphalian, but has integrated accountability for the web of life, vital ecosystems and scarce non-renewable resources. It is likely the world described by Kate Raworth in her Doughnut Economics, a safe space for human development, in alliance with extra-human nature, that respects both the social floor of human wellbeing and the ecological ceiling of natural well-being, managed through commons magisteria powerful enough to protect human and extra-human communities.
to me.. all the reds.. more red flags we’re doing it/life/commoning wrong
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be you. 