Peer2Politics

Meet the hardest working man in Commons Oriented Peer Production, Michel Bauwens at the Melbourne School of Design on December 4th.

Here’s Michel Bauwens’ contribution to this years, Ouishare Fest: The Age of Communities Michel earnestly talks about the opportunities and challenges of the FLOK Society — Free, libre, open-knowledge society — a project founded by three government institutions in Ecuador, aiming to make a transition to an open-knowledge common society. To find out more, please read FLOK’s Transition Plan.

This May June edition of the Cook Report looks at Ecuador and the context for the FLOKsociety project.

Michel talks about his role as director of research on the FLOKSociety project, his experience in Ecuador, and the various research streams embedded within the project.

A must-listen trialogue between Michel Bauwens, Dmytri Kleiner and John Restakis sketching out proposals for radical new economic models that draw on the best from the Co-op, commons and P2P and Venture Communism movements. This conversation was originally recorded by KMO of the C-Realm Podcast.
 

The Zeitgeist Movement Ecuador invited Michel Bauwens to talk about a possible transition towards a Resource-based economic model and the “hacks” he proposes to achieve this (edited to include English audio only).

Work on developing Commons Based Reciprocity Licenses (or CBRLs, for short) continues apace here at the P2P Foundation. When speaking of the types of licenses, we often find it hard to explain how they fill a niche in the alt. license spectrum, falling somewhere between the straight up copyleft and the popular Creative Commons Non-Commercial License.

Two men whom inspire me for their wicked clarity, deep humility and tireless work : Toke Moeller co-founder of the Art of Hosting and Harvesting conversations that matter and Michel Bauwens of the Commons Strategy group (CSG) and P2P foundation. Both work in great complexity and connect current challenges of our world with ancient wisdom, historical patterns and sustainable practices – opening paths for a future that makes more sense.

Continuing our coverage of FLOK Society’s recent “Buen Conocer” summit, we’re glad to present this special long-form conversation between Open Access chronicler Richard Poynder and Michel Bauwens, held just before the summit took place. The interview is specially noteworthy for being a very honest across-the-board examination of FLOK as a process, including both its virtues and the unavoidable pitfalls it has faced. Read on for more.

The aim of this book is not to provide another critique of capitalism; rather to contribute to the ongoing dialogue for post-capitalist construction and discuss how another world could be possible. We build on the idea that the peer-to-peer infrastructures are gradually becoming the general conditions of work, economy and society, considering peer production as a social advancement within capitalism but with various post-capitalistic aspects in need of protection, enforcement, stimulation and connection with progressive social movements. Using a four-scenario approach we attempt to simplify possible outcomes and explore relevant trajectories of the current techno-economic paradigm within and beyond capitalism. The first part of the book begins with an introduction (chapters 1 and 2) of the techno-economic paradigm shifts theory which sees capitalism as a creative destruction process. Such a dynamic, innovation-based understanding of economic and societal development arguably allows for an integral bird’s-eye-view of future scenarios (chapter 3) within and beyond the dominant system. Sharing the conviction that the globalized economy is at a critical turning point, we describe the four future scenarios; namely, netarchical capitalism, distributed capitalism, resilient communities and global Commons. Netarchical and distributed capitalism (chapters 4 and 5) are parts of the wider value mode of cognitive capitalism and form, what we call, the mixed model of neo-feudal cognitive capitalism (chapter 6). On the other, the resilient communities (chapter 7) and the global Commons (chapter 8) reside in the hypothetical model of mature peer production under civic dominance. We postulate that the mature peer production communities pose a sustainable alternative to the capital accumulation, that of the circulation of the Commons. Hence, we make tentative transition proposals for the state, the market and the civic domain towards a Commons-based economy and society (chapter 9). Finally, we conclude with remarks and suggestions for future action.

Gordon Cook has been kind enough to transcript Michel Bauwens’ presentation at last year’s Border’s to Cross Conference in Amsterdam. We’ve also included the video at the end for good measure, (so you can see Michel being “invited” offstage for going over his allotted time).