[iDC] p2p and the cosmobiological tradition

[Michael Bauwens]

seems this message didn't make it:

Hi Armin,

>  So where would you locate yourself with your ideas of a P2P society?

it would be a tall order to summarize this in a blog entry, so just a few pointers

-
I see postmodernism mostly as deconstruction of all the illusions of
modernity, especially epistemologically, the illusion of objectivity,
etc ...

- the danger however, is to get mired in deconstruction,
to go on and on deconstructing. In my view, once we have deconstructed,
the big question remains, what can be reconstructed on top of these
epistemological ruins, is there still a possibility for human
emancipation. It's a little bit like therapy, which I see as getting
cured from all 'false' sufferings (the one's created by the human mind
itself), but once you are cured, real spiritual life, i.e. the
encounter with real suffering, only just begins.

I think the
political problems of this p-m sensiblity are compounded by its
historical origins in a era of defeat, and an obsession with the
strength of capitalism, I see a infinite competition in being
hypercritical of it, in seeing everything as being victimized by its
purported 'totality', thereby ironically and paradoxically becoming an
agent of it, because it ultimately discourages any effort to go beyond
it ...

- the left for me is 'narrowly', those forces born in
modernity and capitalism which either challenge its existence, or, try
to redistribute its value along more equitable lines. But it is also
tied to the system it combats, and also tied to a history of defeats.

Combine defeatist pm and defeatist leftism and you get a very toxic, discouraging brew.

This
is why my vision of p2p tries to be distinguished from it. It places
itself not in the struggle of the dying system, but in the struggle
within the new system being born. So to use an analogy, it's not about
serfs fighting their lords, but about the serfs fleeing their land to
the emerging free cities, and fighting for their place in the new
social order. They obviously remain related to their old positioning,
but the main focus is elsewhere.

Now to the text of Loren
Goldner. It appeals to me because he clearly claims to see, that the
left is indeed a child of modernity, but also of its illusions, in
particular the break with nature, and seeing the world and others and
everything as separated objects. It fights modernity, while itself
still being modern, and the postmodern, as an extension of it, suffers
from the same fate.

So reconnecting with the older, 'warm'
tradition, of those renaissance thinkers that were still connected to
the environment and the spiritual, who have/had retained a richness in
their relationality, seems to me a natural fit with peer to peer, which
is ultimately the working out of relationality in all its consequences,
just as modernity was about the working out of individuality in all its
consequences (Simondon).

Socialism was the historical
emancipatory project of the working class in industrial capitalism,
peer to peer theory is the historical emancipatory project of peer
producers who are already 'escaping' industrial and cognitive
capitalism; Socialism was about using the state to change the economy
and society; peer to peer is about the commons and civil society as
direct vehicls for a new relationality, to be built and constructed in
the here and now, as seed form for the new post-civilisation, while
capitalism crumbles (and our biosphere with it).

I still have to
check your link and a very interested in the new student struggles,
which may be a defining event for this and coming generations, just as
it was for the sixties generation,

Michel


 Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI


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