[cxxxiii]

Networked format, note 2:

This analysis is confirmed by Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire, the already classic analysis of globalisation that is very influential in the more radical streams of the anti-globalisation movement:

"The traditional parties and centralized organizations have spokespeople who represent them and conduct their battles, but no one speaks for a network. How do you argue with a network? The movements organized within them do exert their power, but they do not proceed through oppositions. One of the basic characteristics of the network form is that no two nodes face each other in contradiction; rather, they are always triangulated by a third, and then a fourth, and then by an indefinite number of others in the web. This is one of the characteristics of the Seattle events that we have had the most trouble understanding: groups which we thought in objective contradiction to one another--environmentalists and trade unions, church groups and anarchists--were suddenly able to work together, in the context of the network of the multitude. The movements, to take a slightly different perspective, function something like a public sphere, in the sense that they can allow full expression of differences within the common context of open exchange. But that does not mean that networks are passive. They displace contradictions and operate instead a kind of alchemy, or rather a sea change, the flow of the movements transforming the traditional fixed positions; networks imposing their force through a kind of irresistible undertow."

(http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24806.shtml)

[cxxxiv]

Counternetworking strategies bv the security services:

A report from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has paid particular attention to the innovative organising methods of the alterglobalisation protesters, and to their use of technology: internet before and after the event and cell phones during the events. It concludes that with these innovations, established police powers have great difficulty to cope:

 

"Cell phones constitute a basic means of communication and control, allowing protest organizers to employ the concepts of mobility and reserves and to move groups from place to place as needed. The mobility of demonstrators makes it difficult for law enforcement and security personnel to attempt to offset their opponents through the presence of overwhelming numbers. It is now necessary for security to be equally mobile, capable of readily deploying reserves, monitoring the communications of protesters, and, whenever possible, anticipating the intentions of the demonstrators."

[cxxxv]

TextMob

"Protestors at last week's Democratic National Convention had a new tool in their arsenal - a text messaging service designed just for them. "TXTMob," as the service is called, allows users to quickly and easily broadcast text messages to groups of cellphones. The system works much like an electronic b-board: users subscribe to various lists, and receive messages directly on their phones. During the DNC, protest organizers used TXTMob to provide activists with up-to-the minute information about police movements and direct actions. Medical and legal support groups also used TXTMob to dispatch personnel and resources as the situation demanded. According to TXTMob developer John Henry, over 200 protestors used the service during the DNC. TXTMob was produced by the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA), an art and engineering collective that develops technologies for political dissent. The IAA worked closely with the Black Tea Society, an ad-hoc coalition that organized much of the protest activity during the DNC, to design the system. According to a Black Tea member who chose to remain anonymous, "TXTMob was great! When the cops tried to arrest one of our people, we were able to get hundreds of folks to the scene within minutes."

(http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0408/msg00003.html ; see also appliedautonomy.com for the makers of the program)

[cxxxvi]

Representation can occasionally be used, but only as a temporary technique amongst others:

"There are different sorts of groups. Spokescouncils, for example, are large assemblies that coordinate between smaller `affinity groups'. They are most often held before, and during, large-scale direct actions like Seattle or Quebec. Each affinity group (which might have between 4 and 20 people) selects a `spoke', who is empowered to speak for them in the larger group. Only the spokes can take part in the actual process of finding consensus at the council, but before major decisions they break out into affinity groups again and each group comes to consensus on what position they want their spoke to take (not as unwieldy as it might sound). Break-outs, on the other hand, are when a large meeting temporarily splits up into smaller ones that will focus on making decisions or generating proposals, which can then be presented for approval before the whole group when it reassembles. Facilitation tools are used to resolve problems or move things along if they seem to be bogging dow!n. You can ask for a brainstorming session, in which people are only allowed to present ideas but not to criticize other people's; or for a non-binding straw poll, where people raise their hands just to see how everyone feels about a proposal, rather than to make a decision. A fishbowl would only be used if there is a profound difference of opinion: you can take two representatives for each side--one man and one woman--and have the four of them sit in the middle, everyone else surrounding them silently, and see if the four can't work out a synthesis or compromise together, which they can then present as a proposal to the whole group."

(http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24704.shtml )

[cxxxvii]

Profile of the neo-militants of the alterglobalisation movements

"Ce que je voudrais d'abord préciser c'est que les néo-militants ne sont pas particulièrement attachés aux structures associatives au sein desquelles ils évoluent. Des organisations comme AC!, ou la plupart des collectifs de sans-papiers ne proposent aucune procédure d'adhésion à leurs militants. Le néo-militantisme remet en fait sur le devant de la scène, l'individu en tant qu'acteur autonome et singulier et s'écarte des anciens modèles d'organisation fondés sur des principes d'adhésion totale.  Je ne sais pas si on peut véritablement dire qu'Internet sert au recrutement... En tout cas, l'une des spécificités de la communication sur réseau est de mettre en lien des personnes qui appartiennent à des espaces sociaux (et géographiques) dissemblables. Internet créé une espèce de solidarité technique et offre de nouvelles potentialités relationnelles à partir desquelles peuvent se tisser ponctuellement des alliances inédites. Le point commun des néo-militants est leur capacité à se mouvoir sans se laisser arrêter par les frontières. Les liens les plus recherchés sont à cet égard ceux qui autorisent le franchissement d'espaces au sein desquels les connexions étaient peu développées... Le recours aux réseaux télématiques rentre quand même en résonance avec certaines caractéristiques des nouvelles formes de militantisme que sont l'individuation des formes d'engagement et la volonté de s'associer en toute indépendance. Internet permet une implication personnelle limitée, souple, facilement maîtrisable et circonstanciée, dont la suspension momentanée ou définitive n'engendre qu'un faible coût de sortie. Il autorise surtout l'enrôlement de personnes qui n'auraient pu trouver leur place dans le fonctionnement des groupements militants traditionnels fortement structurés. Les rapports entre les militants s'effectuent de moins en moins à partir d'un sens hérité, c'est-à-dire en fonction d'un enracinement en rapport à une identité ou à un territoire, mais selon un mode électif fondé sur une modalité de partage communautaire non-territoriale ou a-territoriale susceptible de s'exprimer, il est vrai, via l'Internet."

(Fabien Granjon, interview in NetPolitique.net newsletter)

Book: L'Internet militant. Fabien Granjon. Apogee, 2001

[cxxxviii]

the P2P principles of the alterglobalisation movement

": in North America especially, this is a movement about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy. Ultimately, it aspires to be much more than that, because ultimately it aspires to reinvent daily life as whole. But unlike many other forms of radicalism, it has first organized itself in the political sphere--mainly because this was a territory that the powers that be (who have shifted all their heavy artillery into the economic) have largely abandoned.

Over the past decade, activists in North America have been putting enormous creative energy into reinventing their groups' own internal processes, to create viable models of what functioning direct democracy could actually look like. In this we've drawn particularly, as I've noted, on examples from outside the Western tradition, which almost invariably rely on some process of consensus finding, rather than majority vote. The result is a rich and growing panoply of organizational instruments--spokescouncils, affinity groups, facilitation tools, break-outs, fishbowls, blocking concerns, vibe-watchers and so on--all aimed at creating forms of democratic process that allow initiatives to rise from below and attain maximum effective solidarity, without stifling dissenting voices, creating leadership positions or compelling anyone to do anything which they have not freely agreed to do. The basic idea of consensus process is that, rather than voting, you try to come up with proposals acceptable to everyone--or at least, not highly objectionable to anyone: first state the proposal, then ask for `concerns' and try to address them."

(http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24704.shtml )

[cxxxix]

Al Qaeda as global networked guerilla's, by David Ronfeldt

"As many analysts have noted, the new information media are enabling terrorists and insurgents to augment their own communication and coordination, as well as reach outside audiences. The online media also suit the oral traditions that tribal peoples prefer. What merits pointing out here is that the jihadis are using the Internet and the Web to inspire the creation of a virtual global tribe of Islamic radicals -- an online umma with kinship segments around the world. This can help a member keep in touch with a segment, or re-attach to a new segment in another part of the world as he or she moves around. Thus the information revolution, not to mention broader aspects of globalization, can facilitate a resurgence of intractable tribalism around the world. Al Qaeda and its ilk are a leading example of this."

(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_3/ronfeldt/index.html )

See the Global Guerilla blog for the most thorough continuing analysis of globalised networked terrorism, at http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/ ;

Martin Shubik, in his paper "Terrorism, Technology, and the Socioeconomics of Death" conludes that "rapid technological improvement and global information transfer (part of a larger context of interconnectivity) has produced a spike in the ability of small groups to produce mass casualties." See at http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cp/p09b/p0952.pdf

[cxl]

P2P organising (i.e. leaderless resistance) on the extreme right:

Here's an example of P2P organising at the extreme right, related to what is reportedly one the fastest growing radical religion today, the Odinists:

"Today, the number of white racist activists, Aryan revolutionaries, is far greater than you would know by simply looking at traditional organizations. Revolutionaries today do not become members of an organization. They won't participate in a demonstration or a rally or give out their identity to a group that keeps their name on file, because they know that all these organizations are heavily monitored. Since the late 1990s, there has been a general shift away from these groups on the far right. This has also helped Odinism thrive. Odinists took the leaderless resistance concept of [leading white supremacist ideologue] Louis Beam and worked on it, fleshed it out. They found a strategic position between the upper level of known leaders and propagandists, and an underground of activists who do not affiliate as members, but engage instead in decentralized networking and small cells. They do not shave their heads like traditional Skinheads or openly display swastikas."

(http://www.splcenter.org/cgi-bin/goframe.pl?refname=/intelligenceproject/ip-4q9.html)

[cxli]

An analysis of the coordination format in France by Maurizio Lazzarato in Multitudes, at http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=1446; Futur Anterieur magazine, the predecessor of Multitudes magazine, has dedicated a special issue to analyzing this format, at http://multitudes.samizdat.net/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=338

[cxlii]

Miguel Benasayag on the new forms of political and social struggle:

"C'est pourquoi nous pensons que toute lutte contre le capitalisme qui se prétend globale et totalisante reste piégée dans la structure même du capitalisme qui est, justement, la globalité. La résistance doit partir de et développer les multiplicités, mais en aucun cas selon une direction ou une structure qui globalise, qui centralise les luttes. Un réseau de résistance qui respecte la multiplicité est un cercle qui possède, paradoxalement, son centre dans toutes les parties. Nous pouvons rapprocher cela de la définition du rhizome de Gilles Deleuze : «Dans un rhizome on entre par n'importe quel côté, chaque point se connecte avec n'importe quel autre, il est composé de directions mobiles, sans dehors ni fin, seulement un milieu, par où il croît et déborde, sans jamais relever d'une unité ou en dériver ; sans sujet ni objet.»

"La nouvelle radicalité, ou le contre-pouvoir, ce sont bien sûr des associations, des sigles comme ATTAC, comme Act Up, comme le DAL. Mais ce sont surtout - et avant tout - une subjectivité et des modes de vie différents. Il y a des jeunes qui vivent dans des squats - et c'est une minorité de jeunes -, mais il y a plein de jeunes qui pratiquent des solidarités dans leurs vies, qui n'ordonnent pas du  tout leur vie en fonction de l'argent. Cela, c'est la nouvelle radicalité, c'est cette émergence d'une sociabilité nouvelle qui, tantôt, a des modes d'organisation plus ou moins classiques, tantôt non. Je pense qu'en France, ça s'est développé très fortement. Le niveau d'engagement existentiel des gens est énorme. »

(http://www.peripheries.net/g-bensg.htm)

Miguel Benasayag on the new 'radical subjectivities':

"Contrairement aux militants classiques, je pense que les choses qui existent ont une raison d'être, aussi moches soient elles..Rien n'existe par accident et tout à coup, nous, malins comme nous sommes, nous nous disons qu'il n'y a vraiment qu'à décider de changer. Les militants n'aiment pas cette difficulté; ils aiment se fâcher avec le monde et attendre ce qui va le changer. C'est toujours très surprenant: la plupart des gens ont un tas d'informations sur leurs vies, mais "savoir", ça veut dire, en termes philosophiques, "connaître par les causes", et donc pouvoir modifier le cours des choses. Oui, l'anti-utilitarisme est fondamental. Parce que la vie ne sert à rien. Parce qu'aimer ne sert à rien, parce que rien ne sert à rien. On voit bien cette militance un peu feignante qui se définit "contre": on est gentil parce qu'on est contre. Non! ça ne suffit pas d'être contre les méchants pour être gentil. Après tout, Staline était contre Hitler! "

(http://www.peripheries.net/g-bensg.htm)

[cxliii]

Documentation on the concept of the Multitudes

Editorial, on the 'theory of the multitude', at http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-3/4-3editorial.pdf ; From Capital-labour to Capital-life, by Maurizio Lazzarato, at http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-3/4-3lazzarato.pdf ; The Entrance of the Multitude in Production, at http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-3/4-3virtanen.pdf ; Controlling the Multitude, at http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-3/4-3vahamaki.pdf; On the valorisation of informatic labour, at http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-3/4-3vann.pdf

the concept of the multitude summarized:

" we can summarize the contemporary concept of the multitude as follows:

The multitude is positioned between the individual and the group; it is a "multiplicity of singularities"

The multitude operates through relationality and cooperation, which establishes "the common" or a set of partially-overlapping common affects, issues, and experiences.  The multitude positions itself against the social contract tradition, and therefore against the inevitability of modern sovereignty and the "state of exception"

The central problematic of the multitude is the "problem of the political decision," or how the common can be constituted while fostering difference. The question the multitude asks of itself is "can the multitude self-govern?" rather than the question asked of the multitude -- "is the multitude governable?""

(http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=423)

Y. Ichida, summarizing the concept of the "Multitude" on the Multitudes mailing list:

"In immaterial production, the products are longer material objects but new social (interpersonal) relations themselves. It was already Marx who emphasized how material production is always also the (re)production of the social relation within which it occurs; with today's capitalism, however, the production of social relations is the immediate end/goal of production. The wager of Hardt and Negri is that this directly socialized, immaterial production not only renders owners progressively superfluous (who needs them when production is directly social, formally and as to its content ?); the producers also master the regulation of social space, since social relations (politics) is the stuff of their works. The way is thus open for `absolute democracy', for the producers directly regulating their social relations without even the detour of democratic representation."

Toni Negri on the Multitudes, Difference, and the Common:

"Cet ennemi de l'Empire, que nous avons appelé « multitude », est un ennemi qui, sur tous les terrains, cultive ses différences. Or, ces différences ont une base commune, qui est d'abord le refus du commandement et de l'exploitation par le capital collectif au niveau impérial. Ce contenu de rébellions, de révoltes, d'essais de réappropriation du pouvoir vient de différents côtés, et surtout des travailleurs. La véritable opposition reste les travailleurs : le concept de multitude reste donc un concept de classe, même s'il est beaucoup plus étendu que le concept de classe ouvrière. C'est une chose que le pouvoir n'arrive pas à appréhender, car elle se transforme constamment selon les singularités qui la composent, et qu'on ne peut définir ni comme classe, ni comme masse, ni comme peuple : elle se renouvelle sans cesse..."

 (original article, not full available online, at http://www.politis.fr/article1115.html)

Elicio, on the political philosophy of the multitudes

«Cette complexité sociale, nous l'appelons la « multitude « , car nous essayons d'utiliser une expression capable d'indiquer une complexité non synthétisable de la structure de la société post moderne et ses acteurs multiples. La multitude, que nous définissons comme l'expression de l'ensemble de toutes les figures de l'assujettissement de la société post moderne, a bouleversé la théorie politique et la théorie de l'organisation sociale. En effet, la multitude a comme caractéristique de ne s'identifier à aucun programme commun, à aucune « synthèse stratégique « politique. Le concept de « synthèse « est plus vécu comme une réduction de la complexité de ses expressions sociales et culturelles, comme une certaine hybridation politique, un processus de réduction de sa forcede subjectivité. Le concept de « synthèse « est vécu aussi comme un acte politique de la « perte d'identité « . La perte d'identité est considérée par la multitude, comme le commencement de l'introduction des mécanismes des modifications de ses besoins réels. Dans ce cadre conceptuel, la multitude fonctionne dans la construction des processus d'organisations autonomes. Cette forme d'organisation a comme caractéristique de se déployer autour et par des micro-actions au quotidien et cherche à répondre aux besoins de la vie de tous les jours. C'est dans cette démarche que la multitude produit ses revendications et ses négociations. Pour la multitude, le quotidien est considéré comme le lieu privilégié de lutte, le lieu de vérification de l'efficacité de son action politique, le lieu du changement. L'action politique ou sociale a un sens pour la multitude si elle est capable de modifier « le quotidien« , « le présent « . La lutte et l'engagement sont considérés comme des instruments pratiquespour essayer de réaliser des modifications concrètes dans la vie de tous les jours, dans un souci permanent d'élargissement de sa superficie sociale, d'hégémonie sur les pratiques socioculturelles de la vie de tous les jours. Approfondissons ce thème pour mieux comprendre l'idée de ce qu'est le « changement dans le quotidien « . Commençons avec la définition de ce que sont unrapportsocial ou un acte politique.

Pour la multitude, il n'y a pas d'acte politiquesans modification du présent. Donc, l'acte politique, devient la forme collective et personnelle de définition d'un espace social à conquérir et la définition d'une démarche à adopter pour la modification du présent. Le présent est considéré commeune fractionde la vie. Dans cette démarche le programme politique devient la construction d'un projet concret de transformation d'une fraction de la vie, c'est-à-dire de la modification du présent.

Pour la multitude le processus de transition d'un rapport social à un autre est le « remplacement « d'un acte de vie (vie économique et sociale) par des gestes de liberté au quotidien. Ces gestes représentent des espaces de liberté.Desgesteset desespacespour la construction d'un micro projet personnel : la réalisation de ses rêves. Rêves en tant que réalisation d'un désir personnel et /ou avec d'autres pour un rêve collectif (projets de transition) pour affirmer sa liberté de vivre comme on le désire. Ces actes, « la construction d'un rêve « , sont des premiers filaments (de vie autonome) qui se super posent et étouffent une fraction des micro pouvoirs de la représentation impériale. Dans cette démarche, le concept de lutte est conjugué au présent sans « futur « , « l'idée de futur « est vécue comme un concept dépassé, obsolète. Concept assimilé dans un sens de défaite.....de l'auto exploitation : l'histoire du socialisme réel ! Pour la multitude, il n'y a pas de victoire si la vie de tous les jours n'a pas été modifiée, élargie, enrichie. Si cette condition n'est pas réalisée « le rapport social « restera le même. C'est dans cette définition que la multitude considère les « partis politiques « comme des institutions de la négociation sociale, les conçoit plutôt comme les représentants des « courants d'un pouvoir unique « et en aucun cas comme une expression populaire de souveraineté. La multitude est la représentation de l'expression philosophique et sociale de la complexité du monde réel qui produit richesse et sens. Elle ne croit pas aux mécanismes de la représentation, à la délégation de ses volontés, à une représentation nationale d'élus professionnels, elle croit fermement au concept de participation. La participation est considérée comme l'antithèse de la représentation classique et s'il devait avoir une délégation de pouvoir elle serait plutôt sous la forme d'une démarche d'application d'une volonté déjà prise, donc non modifiable. Ici, le concept de délégation ou de représentation n'est pas seulement traduit sous forme négative vers les formes traditionnelles de la démocratie (député-fonctionnaire-professionnel) mais aussi sous la forme de la « délégation de la pensée « aux intellectuels. En effet, pour la multitude, un des pièges le plus redoutable est la « perte « d'autonomie dans les processus de construction de sa « pensée « . Il s'agit de contrôler « sa production de sens « , sa philosophie, car une des formes les plus redoutables du pouvoir en place est la stérilisation de ses expressions culturelles. Paradoxalement, si dans le passé, pour le prolétariat révolutionnaire, l'appropriation des moyens de production était un des objectifs fondamentaux, aujourd'hui pour la multitude, l'objectif fondamental est l'appropriation de « sa production de sens et de valeur « .Cet objectif se traduit par la nécessité de s'approprier des moyens de la communication sociale.

See also: Philosophie politique des Multitudes- Revu Multitudes N°9 mai/juin 2002, Exils, Paris . http://listes.samizdat.net/wws/info/multitudes-infos

[cxliv]

Extreme Democracy:

"Extreme democracy" is a political philosophy of the information era that puts people in charge of the entire political process. It suggests a deliberative process that places total confidence in the people, opening the policy-making process to many centers of power through deeply networked coalitions that can be organized around local, national and international issues. The choice of the word "extreme" reflects the lessons of the extreme programming movement in technology that has allowed small teams to make rapid progress on complex projects through concentrated projects that yield results far greater than previous labor-intensive programming practices. Extreme democracy emphasizes the importance of tools designed to break down barriers to collaboration and access to power, acknowledging that political realities can be altered by building on rapidly advancing generations of technology and that human organizations are transformed by new political expectations and practices made possible by technology. Extreme democracy is not direct democracy, which assumes all people must be involved in every decision in order for the process to be just and democratic. Direct democracy is inefficient, regardless of the tools available to voters, because it creates as many, if not more, opportunities for obstruction of social decisions as a representative democracy. Rather, we assume that every debate one feels is important will be open to participation; that governance is not the realm of specialists and that activism is a critical popular element in making a just society. Extreme democracy can exist alongside and through co-evolution with the representative systems in place today; it changes the nature of representation, as the introduction of sophisticated networked applications have reinvented the corporate decision-making process. Rather than debate how involved a citizen should be or fret over the lack of involvement among citizens of advanced democracies, the extreme democracy model focuses on the act of participation and assumes that anyone in a democracy is free to act politically. If individuals are constrained from action, they are not free, not citizens but subjects."

(http://www.extremedemocracy.com/about.html)

[cxlv]

Overview of Information Commons Developments

The construction of the Information Commons takes many forms, the most important being the automatic process of knowledge exchange and cooperative production on the internet/web itself. But there are many specialized inititiaves to construct specialized areas, such as initiatives around access to scientific journals, the creation of specialized Intellectual Property licenses to promote it, such as the General Public License and the Creative Commons License, and a massive effort to put the world's literary and scientific book production online.

The concept of Information Commons is defined by Yochai Benchler in "The Political Economy of Commons", in Upgrade, juin 2003, vol. IV, n° 3www.upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2003/3/up4-3Benkler.pdf

The Free Art License, a `Creative Commons' for the art world?, at http://antomoro.free.fr/c/lalgb.html; and at http://infos.samizdat.net/article301.html

The Book Commons, overview

The following excerpt is from an article putting the Google project in context. Google aims to digitize the massive collections of the main American academic and public libraries.

"Placing full text book material is not a new idea on the web. Many services, both free and fee-based, allow you to access books online. The longest running such service is Project Gutenberg, founded by Michael Hart in 1971, with over 13,000 books available.  I wrote about The Online Books Page forSearchDay last year. This wonderful collection has been online for more than 10 years, and currently provides searchable access to over 20,000 free full text books. The OBP is edited by John Mark Ockerbloom, a digital library planner at the University of Pennsylvania.  The Internet Archive is also digitizing books. The goal of the Million Book Project is to "create a free-to-read, searchable digital library the approximate size of the combined libraries at Carnegie Mellon University, and one much bigger than the holdings of any high school library." One publisher that offers a large portion of their new and old material available online, free, searchable, and full image is The National Academy Press. The currently offer access to more than 3000 publications. Two fee-based services include NetLibrary offers access to about 76,000 books with about 1300 new titles added each month. You can access NetLibray books through your local public or university library, often at no charge.  ebrary provides access to more than 50,000 titles (books, maps, sheet music, etc). Like NetLibrary, ebrary licenses their service to libraries and educational organizations and users can login and access via any computer with web access, in most cases for free."

More information at: The Online Books page, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ ; Netlibrary, http://legacy.netlibrary.com/about_us/company_info/index.asp; Million Book Project, http://www.archive.org/texts/collection.php?collection=millionbooks&PHPSESSID=45464c8f5c3a66d010a78ff7efe0c5c8; Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/; Open Source Books, http://www.archive.org/texts/collection.php?collection=opensource

Political Commons projects:

The Participatory Politics Foundation, building software tools for a `continuing engagement with government', at http://participatorypolitics.org/ ; Open source government projects centered around access to public information, are discussed at http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,65800,00.html?

Scienfitic Commons

The Budapest Open Access Initiative aims to guarantee access to scienfitic materials, at : http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm ; :  Global Access to Health, at www.healthgap.org/press_releases/03/: Biological Innovation for Open Society, at http://www.bios.net/daisy/bios/15 ; overview of  'Open Biology' developments, at http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,66545,00.html; the Science Commons initiative by Lawrence Lessig et al, at http://science.creativecommons.org/

"BIOS will soon launch an open-source platform that promises to free up rights to patented DNA sequences and the methods needed to manipulate biological material. Users must only follow BIOS' "rules of engagement," which are similar to those used by the open-source software community."

(http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,66289,00.html?)

A number of large companies are started to put their patents in a 'patent commons', as recently advocated by IBM:

"The IBM (IBM) move is meant to encourage other patent holders to donate their own intellectual property in order to form what the company refers to as a "patent commons," a modern twist on shared public lands set aside under traditional laws."

(http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,66237,00.html?)

[cxlvi]

Bifo, an Italian radical writer, on the private appropriation of collective knowledge:

"The attempt at coercive privatization of collective knowledge has encountered resistance everywhere. Since intellectual labour is at the center of the productive scene, the merchant no longer possesses the juridical or material means to impose the principle of private property. When immaterial goods can be reproduced at will, the private appropriation of goods make no sense. In the sphere of semiotic capital and cognitive labour, when a product is consumed instead of disappearing, it remains available, while its value increases the more its use is shared" (Bifo, in Neuro, e-newsletter)

[cxlvii]

The Free Culture student movement, an initiative of students of Lawrence Lessig:

"The (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and Creative Commons are doing really good work, but people our age don't seem to know about it," he said. "If we could show (students) how this is relevant to their lives, they would be really excited and involved in the movement."  So, Pavlosky and other Free Culture leaders are finding clever ways to illustrate the importance of copyright in their daily lives with projects like Undead Art, which challenges students to remix the cult classic Night of the Living Dead, now in the public domain, and turn it into something new -- like a zombie techno video or comic short. Participants can then mark their work with a flexible copyright license from Creative Commons so people can share the work freely and easily. These licenses allow other people to take a work and modify it however they like, as long as they don't try to make money from the new work without permission.  The students also encourage their peers to get involved with legislative issues. They created Save the iPod, a site that encourages students to write their congressional representatives to stop the Induce Act."

(http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65616,00.html? ; see also freeculture.org and the group Downhill Battle)

[cxlviii]

the Berlin Declaration on Collectively Managed Online Rights

An example of a proposed solution that defends both free culture usage and author's rights:

DRM and mass-prosecution of filesharers are not solutions acceptable to an open and equitable society.
* Primary goal of copyright lawmaking must be a balance between the rights of creators and those of the public.
* Collecting societies need to become more democratic, transparent and flexible, allowing their members to release their works under open-access, non-commercial licenses.
* With the collecting societies suitably reformed, the successful European experience with exceptions and limitations compensated by levies should be reviewed for possible application to the on-line realm.
* We urge the European Commission to consider a content flatrate to ensure compensation of rightsholders without control over users.

 

"Under the proposed system, rights holders would license their on-line rights to a collecting society for collective representation, as they already do for many off-line uses today. This on-line collecting society would oversee the measurement of transfers of protected works over the Internet and then compensate the rights holders based on the actual use of their files by end users. The funds from which the rights-holders are compensated could be raised through any of a number of sources: voluntary subscription payments by end-users or proxies for them or levies on relevant associated goods and services, such as broadband Internet connections, MP3 players and others, in addition to the levies on blank media, photo copiers, and so on which are already collected today."

(http://wizards-of-os.org/index.php?id=1699)

Other proposals for a P2P compatible Open Music model:

Any open music business proposal should adhere to the following five principles, if it wants to be viable against the free filesharing systems:

"1. Open File Sharing: users must be free to share files on their hard drives with each other.
2. Open File Formats: content must be distributed in MP3 and other formats with NO digital rights management protection.
3. Open Membership: content owners must able to freely register to receive compensation.
4. Open Payment: users must be able to access the system using either credit cards or access cards purchasable anonymously in cash from retail stores.
5. Open Competition: there must be multiple such systems which can tie into each other's file sharing databases. It must not be a monopoly through legal design."

 (http://shumans.com/articles/000033.php;  see also: http://shumans.com/p2p-business-models.pdf)

[cxlix]

Open Democracy on why patents are a bad thing

" Software programming has a relatively low financial barrier to entry. It relies on the manipulation of mathematical algorithms between one man and his machine. Progress in the sector takes place in swift but discrete steps. Each step contributes something to the art of programming: each software programme builds on the last. It is this environment - accretive, open-ended and egalitarian - that has allowed rapid progress in the software industry to enhance the utility and connectivity of the computers people use in their daily lives.  In the patent-free environment, contributions to the common pool of programming knowledge come from all corners of the world, from the amateur hacker working until 4am in his bedroom to corporations leasing the most expensive real estate in Silicon Valley. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, likens reading a piece of software code to walking around a city - the expert eye will recognise "architectural periods", little stylistic ticks that identify a piece of recycled code with a particular time, even place.  Software patents take chunks of code out of this vast pool of shared knowledge and lock them down using IP law. United States case law already shows how companies can use such patents to claim ownership of code that had previously been regarded as an open standard. The effect is not simply to appropriate and centralise a shared knowledge resource, but to make it impossible to create a new programme without infringing the patent. Where software is concerned, patents obliterate progress... In effect, corporations use software patenting to secure a monopoly and discourage the entrepreneurial activity of start-ups. The result is to freeze, not foster, innovation - the very opposite of patent law's original intention.  Moreover, as intellectual property law combines with the global shift towards a "knowledge economy", the regressive effect of such lockdowns acquires a more explicitly political dimension. The application of strong IP law is a game only the big boys, with their dedicated legal teams, can play. Knowledge, once viewed as a commons, becomes a commodity - just like land or labour in an agricultural or industrial economy - whose owners ordain themselves the new economy's ruling class."

Some leading architects of the software sector are quite explicit about this. Bill Gates set his stall out as early as 1991:

"The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose... Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."

(http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-40-2370.jsp )

Yann-Moulier Boutang, in French, on Intellectual Property Rights and the South, at http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=1931

[cl]

On the commonality of Commons-related struggles:

Philippe Aigrain in Cause Commune: " Les médias coopératifs, les logiciels libres, les publications scientifiques ouvertes et les autres biens communs réinventent la démocratie. Comment les acteurs de ces nouveaux domaines peuvent-ils faire cause commune par-delà ce qui sépare les logiciels des ressources biologiques, ou l'art des sciences ? Comment l'information peut-elle servir les biens publics sociaux de la santé, de l'éducation ou de la solidarité au lieu de contribuer à les détruire ? Quelles alliances peut-on envisager entre les sociétés et les États, gardiens irremplaçables des biens communs épuisables que sont l'eau ou l'air ? Dans cet ouvrage, Philippe Aigrain analyse les causes et les origines d'une situation paradoxale et les tensions qu'elle suscite. Il propose une politique qui remette les êtres humains aux commandes de ces transformations."

(http://grit-transversales.org/article.php3?id_article=54)

[cli]

Eric Raymond: Are P2P processes 'benevolent dictatorships'?

"Eric Raymond had the same limitations in mind when he noted that open source projects are often run as "benevolent dictatorships." They are not benevolent because the people are somehow better, but because the dictatorship is based almost exclusively on the people's ability to convince others to follow their lead. This means that coercion is almost non-existent. Hence, a dictator who is no longer benevolent and alienates his or her followers loses the ability to dictate.  The ability to coerce is limited, not only because authority is reputation-based, but also because the products that are built through a collaborative process are available to all members of the group. Resources do not accumulate with the elite. Therefore, abandoning the dictator and developing in a different direction - known as "forking" in the Open Source Software movement - is relatively easy and always a threat to the established players."

(http://news.openflows.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/23/1518208)

 

[clii]

Jacques Ranciere:

"Au « tumulte économique de la différence qui s'appelle indifféremment capital ou démocratie », il oppose la division comme pratique de toutes les « catégories » qui sont « victimes » de la
politique, qui subissent le «tort» de l'exclusion de l'égalité. Rancière définit le politique comme la rencontre litigieuse de deux processus hétérogènes. Le premier, appelé police ou gouvernement, « consiste à organiser le rassemblement des hommes en communauté et leur consentement
repose sur la distribution hiérarchique des places et des fonctions1». Le second est celui de l'égalité ou de l'émancipation qui consiste dans le jeu des «pratiques guidées par la présupposition de l'égalité de n'importe qui avec n'importe qui et par le souci de la vérifier2». La rencontre entre le processus égalitaire et la police se fait dans «le traitement d'un tort», car toute police, en distribuant les places et les fonctions, fait tort à l'égalité. Le processus d'émancipation est toujours mis en mouvement au nom d'une « catégorie» à laquelle on refuse l'égalité, «travailleurs, femmes, Noirs ou autres3». La mise en œuvre de l'égalité n'est pas pour autant la simple manifestation de ce qui est propre à la catégorie en question. L'émancipation est un processus de subjectivation qui est à la fois processus de « désidentification ou de déclassification4 », puisque la logique des sujets qui portent le conflit et veulent démontrer l'égalité est double : d'une part, ils posent la question :
Sommes-nous ou non des citoyens ? », et d'autre part ils affirment : « Nous le sommes et nous ne le sommes pas. »Au fond, il s'agit d'une variation fidèle à la conception la plus révolutionnaire de la politique et du conflit chez Marx : la classe comme dissolution de toutes les classes. La classe ouvrière en même temps qu'elle travaille à sa constitution contre la police qui fait tort à l'égalité œuvre aussi à sa propre destruction en tant que classe. Mais pourquoi la  désidentification n'a jamais abouti dans la tradition du mouvement ouvrier ?"... S'émanciper, c'est affirmer l'appartenance à un même monde, «rassemblement qui ne peut se faire que dans le combat». La démonstration de l'égalité consiste à «prouver à l'autre qu'il n'y a qu'un seul monde». Pour Rancière, le politique est la constitution d'un «lieu commun».

(http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=1266)

[cliii]

The Wisdom Game defined

"The new social game that begins to prevail in the era of informatization is the game of wisdom, in which the goal is to acquire and exercise wisdom or intellectual influence by disseminating and sharing information and knowledge. Some people call this the game of "reputation." This contrasts with old games of wealth and prestige."

(Kumon website)

[cliv]

Connectionist theories of mind and brain, at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/connectionism.html

[clv]

  Bruce Sterling on the 'coming of age' of social network analysis: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/view.html?pg=4?tw=wn_tophead_7

[clvi]

The Long Tail in Marketing:

"People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture). An analysis of the sales data and trends from these services and others like them shows that the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today's mass market. If the 20th- century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.  For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution."

(http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html)

[clvii]

the general principles of Coordination Theory

"Thomas Malone: What I mean by coordination theory is that body of theory and principles that help explain the phenomena of coordination in whatever systems they arise. Now what do I mean by coordination? We define coordination as the management of dependencies among activities. Now how do we proceed on the path of developing coordination theory? The work we've done so far says that if coordination is the managing of dependencies among activities, a very useful next step is to say: what kinds of dependencies among activities are possible? We've identified three types of dependencies that we call atomic or elementary dependency types. Our hypothesis is that all the dependencies, all the relationships in the world, can be analyzed as either combinations of or more specialized types of these three elementary types. The three are: flow, sharing, and fit. Flow occurs whenever one activity produces some resource used by another activity. Sharing occurs when a single resource is used by multiple activities. And fit occurs when multiple activities collectively produce a single resource. So those are the three topological possibilities for how two activities and one resource can be arranged. And each of them has a clear analog in the world of business or any of the other kinds of systems we talked about."

(http://www.dialogonleadership.org/Malone2001.html)

Book: Thomas Malone. Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology.

 

 

The Open Process Handbook Initiative (OPHI)

"a group of organizations and individuals dedicated to developing an on-line collection of knowledge about business processes that is freely available to the general public under an innovative form of "open source" licensing."

(http://ccs.mit.edu/ophi/index.htm)

[clviii]

The history of individualism, a series of lectures, available as audio files, of seminars at the Universite of Lyon, at http://uplyon.free.fr/

[clix]

Kenneth Gergen: a view of the relational self and bottom-up social processes

The following view stresses relationships as constitutive of social reality. On a superficial reading, this definition seems not to include the distinct existence of a social field, nor any object-centeredness, but the last paragraph shows a P2P-like understanding of social processes.

Traditional theory of the civil society is built upon an ontology of bounded units or entities - specifically "the individual," "the community," "the state," and so on. Such a theory not only creates a world of fundamental separation, but invites the use of traditional cause and effect models to comprehend relations. One is either an actor, directing the course of events, or is reduced to an effect. How can we comprehend the social world in such a way that it is not composed of entities, but constituted by processes of relationship? This is no easy task for we at once confront the implications of Wittgenstein's pronouncement that "The limits of our language are the limits of our world." Our common language of description and explanation virtually commits us to understanding the world in terms of units (nouns) that act upon each other (transitive verbs). Even the concept of relationship, as commonly understood, is based on the assumption of independent units. If and when such units act upon each other we speak of them being related. Thus, for example, we say, "A relationship developed between them," or "They no longer have a relationship." If we turn to relevant social theory, we find that perhaps the most significant candidate for relational understanding, namely systems analysis, is lodged in the view of systems as a collective array of entities linked through processes of cause and effect. Thus, systems diagrams, flow-charts, feedback loops and the like...

 

There is much to be gained by commencing our analysis with a focus on relational processes from which ontologies and ethics emerge, and from which certain actions become favored while others are forbidden. Such processes of creating and carrying out  meaning/full worlds are at all times and everywhere under way. In this sense, civil movements are always in the making. As any two or more persons negotiate about the nature of their lives, what is worth doing or not, they are establishing rudimentary grounds for civil life in their terms"

(source: Kenneth Gergen website)

[clx]

  Are the new P2P collectives 'collective individuals'or not

In the main text I express the view that the new P2P collectives differ from the collective individuals as described by Louis Dumont. He argued that 'nation' and 'corporation' transcend the individual, having their own autonomous and oppressive agenda. I argue that the new P2P collectives are different since there is no transcendence and representation, and other algorhythmic means are being found to filter value. This interpretation is challenged by my friend Remi Sussan, whose contribution I'm reprinting in extenso. I sense that we are both 'right' but am not able yet to formulate a position that honours both truths. In any case, even if P2P collectives are in themselves a form of institution,  in many ways molding the individuals who participate and setting limits on possibility, they are to be clearly differentiated from the earlier forms of institutionalization. What R. Sussan invites us to, is to remain aware and vigilant vis a vis these new types of Commons-based institutions.

Remi Sussan:

"Je ne suis pas forcément d'accord. Si l'on suit les recherches sur la  " vie artificielle  " ou  " l'émergence  " il me semble logique de penser que les  "superorganismes  " les  " entités collectives  " vont forcément émerger de l'interaction entre agents. Ces entités collectives, si elles sont assez
complexes peuvent effectivement poursuivre des agendas non reconnus par les agents qui les constituent, et même s'avérer dangereux pour eux. Je en suis pas du tout persuadé que la  " blogosphere  " ne va pas donner avec le temps, de telles entités collectives. Je suis même persuadé que, vu la façon dont les blogs tournent en  " circuits  " chacun reproduisant l'autre en fonction des goûts et opinions des auteurs, on ne tardera pas, si ce n'est déjà fait, à voir apparaître des  " voix collectives  " porteuse d'un message spécifique. A mon avis, c'est déjà ce qui s'est passé avec les pages web. Leurs connexions ont créé des  " clusters  " culturels bien définis, avec leur limites et leur conformisme propre.. En ce sens , l'émergence des  " meilleurs  " blogs pourrait être considérée de manière inverse : les  "meilleurs  " sont ceux qui expriment au mieux cette voix collective constituée par la communication de centaines de blogs analogues.

De même, il me semble que Linux en tant que tel est bel et bien un superorganisme, dont la structure et les contraintes techniques déterminent le mode de participation des membres de la communauté, et susceptible, par un mécanisme sélectif, d'approuver ou rejeter les contributions de untel ou untel. Linux est certes plus avancé qu'un Windows, mais il n'en impose pas moins un mode de pensée, il n'en constitue pas moins un système de limites. En d'autres mots, je pense que les véritables entités collectives ne se trouvent pas dans les catégorisations de l'époque moderne, mais bien dans
les sociétés holistes que Dumont décrit dans homo hierarchicus. Mais je pense que la tendance a générer ces systèmes holistes est toujours demeurée, y compris à l'époque moderne (l'individualisme étant une nouveauté en ce monde) , même s'ils ont cessé d'être reconnus. Je pense également que ces  "entités collectives  " s'avèrent d'autant plus dangereuses qu'elles passent inaperçues.

Ma position est celle des gnostiques. On ne peut éviter l'émergence des superorganismes, des  " Dieux  ", des  "archontes", mais on peut les reconnaître en tant que tels et les utiliser au mieux, en évitant leur influence létale. Le changement introduit aujourd'hui par le P2P et les nouvelles méthodes de pensée n'est pas la disparition des superorganismes en tant que tel que la capacité qui nous est offerte aujourd'hui de les penser. En effet, des catégories comme la  " nation  ", la  " corporation  " ne sont pas forcément des " individus collectifs  " : ce sont des représentations de ces individus,
représentations souvent naïves. La  " corporation  " n'est qu'un artefact qui peut ou non représenter un véritable entité collective : il peut exister plusieurs superorganismes au sein d'une même entreprise, sans pour autant qu 'il en existe une  " reconnaissance officielle  ". Par exemple, j'ai souvent
remarqué dans les entreprises des conflits existant entre les étages, chaque étage peut bien souvent être considéré comme une  " entité collective", avec ses coutumes, ses spécialités, son style, etc..

De même, la chute des pays de l'est ont montré que bon nombre de  " nations" etaient de pures fictions, tandis que des entités collectives jusque là négligées (ex les communautés religieuses, d'anciennes ethnies ) s'avéraient tout à fait réelles et actives. Je pense donc que les nouvelles pensées telle la vie artificielle, et les technologies émergentes comme le P2P nous permettent de faire accéder à la conscience de chacun l'existence de ces  " entités collectives,  " de comprendre leurs lois, leur dangers et leur limites, et de les voir tels qu'elles sont, et non imaginées sous la forme de représentations naives.. Elles ne nous libèrent pas de l'existence de ces  " individus collectifs  " qui sont là pour rester, pour le meilleur ou le pire."

[clxi]

Relationality

The following comes from a description of the concept of Panarchy, a form of governance that is strongly related to the peer to peer concept. In it, the author Paul Hartzog describes the importance of relationality in the new world views.

"The most fundamental principle of Panarchy is relationality. In contrast to the deterministic, atomistic, mechanistic ontology underlying the Industrial Era, Panarchy is characterized by network effects. Network effects are typically summed up by using the example of the fax machine. Any one fax machine is useless. The second fax machine on a network increases the value of the first. Furthermore, all future additions to a network increase the value of the existing members of that network. The underlying reason that network effects exist is that the network itself is a communicative structure. As each new member enters, the number of communicative links increases exponentially, thus creating the added value. Communicative, i.e. network, effects occur in any relational system where communication is the overriding purpose of the system -- political, judicial, social, economic, technological, et al. A second core principle is that of relational identity. In traditional atomistic/mechanistic ontologies, things are construed as having an independent existence apart from their relationships. Things have properties, and some of those properties may be relational. By contrast, the newer relational ontologies that pervade many disciplines from physics to biology, view relationships as part of what a thing is. In this light, a thing not only enters into relationships, but is in fact constituted by them. Relationships are fundamental to a thing's identity, or self. For an example consider a person's height vs. his identity as a father. His height is a property of his body, but his "fatherness" is not. "Father" is a linguistic way of describing an emergent property that is shared between two members of a communicative structure, i.e. a family."

(http://www.panarchy.com/Members/PaulBHartzog/Writings/Principles )

Here's a recent book that claims to examine the neurological bases of the changes in subjectivity: A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Daniel H. Pink. Riverhead Books, 2004

[clxii]

This example is taken from an extraordinary pioneering work written in 1918, by Mary Parker Follett, i.e. The New State, available online at at http://sunsite.utk.edu/FINS/Mary_Parker_Follett/Fins-MPF-01.html . Tom Attlee says about his book: "This 1918 classic explains the first vision of holistic democracy and has a greater density of quotable material on this subject than anything we know of."

Collective Intelligence is in the process of being enabled by the rapid growth of participatory practices being developed in the last decades, see the following Wiki gives an extended listing of Participatory Practices, at http://www.wiki-thataway.org/index.php?page=ParticipatoryPractices

[clxiii]

The Participatory Turn in Spirituality:

Ferrer argues that spirituality must be emancipated from experientialism and perennialism. For Ferrer, the best way to do this is via his concept of a "participatory turn"; that is, to not limit spirituality as merely a personal, subjective experience, but to include interaction with others and the world at large. Finally, Ferrer posits that spirituality should not be universalized. That is, one should not strive to find the common thread that can link pluralism and universalism relationally. Instead, there should be emphasis on plurality and a dialectic between universalism and pluralism."

(http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/watch/ferrer/index.cfm/xid,76105/yid,55463210)

Reading Jorge Ferrer:

Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (SUNY Press, 2002).

"Some shorter introductions can be found in the following sources:

Ferrer, J. N. (2003). Participatory Spirituality: An Introduction. Network: The Scientific and Medical Network Review 83 (Winter), 3-7.

__________. (2002). An Ocean with Many Shores. Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture & Society, 17(5), 60-64. 

__________. (2001). Towards a Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality. ReVision 24(2), 15-26.

A further elaboration and application of my participatory perspective can be found in the following articles:

Ferrer, J. N. (2003). Integral Transformative Practices: A Participatory Perspective. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 35(1), 21-42. (This article may be especially relevant for your inquiry into peer-to-peer spirituality)

Ferrer, J. N., Albareda, R. V. & Romero, M. T. (2004). Embodied Participation in the Mystery: Implications for the Individual, Interpersonal Relationships, and Society. ReVision 27(1), 10-17.

Ferrer, J. N., Romero, M. T. & Albareda, R. V. (forthcoming). The Four Seasons of Integral Education: A Participatory Proposal for the New Millennium. ReVision.

(this bibliography was provided by the author himself0

[clxiv]

J. Kripal summarises Ferrer's vision:

"Ferrer's participatory vision and its turn from subjective "experience" to processual "event" possesses some fairly radical political implications. Within it, a perennialist hierarchical monarchy (the "rule of the One" through the "great chain of Being") that locates all real truth in the feudal past (or, at the very least, in some present hierarchical culture) has been superseded by a quite radical participatory democracy in which the Real reveals itself not in the Great Man, Perfect Saint or God-King (or the Perennialist Scholar) but in radical relation and the sacred present. Consequently, the religious life is not about returning to some golden age of scripture or metaphysical absolute; it is about co-creating new revelations in the present, always, of course, in critical interaction with the past. Such a practice is dynamic, uncertain, and yet hopeful--a tikkun-like theurgical healing of the world and of God."

(http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0303/article/030352.html )

[clxv]

 - see the article at http://207.44.196.94/~wilber/ferrer.html

[clxvi]

J. Kripal on the necessity to reject the emancipatory illusions in religion and mysticism:

"Ferrer ... ultimately adopts a very positive assessment of the traditions' ethical status, suggesting in effect that the religions have been more successful in finding common moral ground than doctrinal or metaphysical agreement, and that most traditions have called for (if never faithfully or fully enacted) a transcendence of dualistic self-centeredness or narcissism. It is here that I must become suspicious.

Though Ferrer himself is refreshingly free of this particular logic (it is really more of a rhetoric), it is quite easy and quite common in the transpersonal literature to argue for the essential moral nature of mystical experience by being very careful about whom one bestows the (quite modern) title "mystic." It is an entirely circular argument, of course: One simply declares (because one believes) that mysticism is moral, then one lists from literally tens of thousands (millions?) of possible recorded cases a few, maybe a few dozen, exemplars who happen to fit one's moral standards (or better, whose historical description is sketchy enough to hide any and all evidence that would frustrate those standards), and, voilà, one has "proven" that mysticism is indeed moral. Any charismatic figure or saint that violates one's norms--and there will always be a very large, loudly screaming crowd here--one simply labels "not really a mystic" or conveniently ignores altogether. Put differently, it is the constructed category of "mysticism" itself that mutually constructs a "moral mysticism," not the historical evidence, which is always and everywhere immeasurably more ambivalent. Ferrer, as is evident in such moments as his thought experiment with the Theravada retreat, sees right through most of this. He knows perfectly well that perennialism simply does not correspond to the historical data. What he does not perhaps see so clearly is that a moral perennialism sneaks through the back door of his own conclusions. Thus, whereas he rightly rejects all talk of a "common core," he can nevertheless speak of a common "Ocean of Emancipation" that all the contemplative traditions approach from their different ontological shores."

Ferrer argues that we must realize that our goal can never be simply the recovery or reproduction of some past sense of the sacred, for "we cannot ignore that most religious traditions are still beset not only by intolerant exclusivist and absolutist tendencies, but also by patriarchy, authoritarianism, dogmatism, conservatism, transcendentalism, body-denial, sexual repression, and hierarchical institutions." Put simply, the contemplative traditions of the past have too often functioned as elaborate and sacralized techniques for dissociating consciousness.

Once again, I think this is exactly where we need to be, with a privileging of the ethical over the mystical and an insistence on human wholeness as human holiness. I would only want to further radicalize Ferrer's vision by underscoring how hermeneutical it is, that is, how it functions as a creative re-visioning and reforming of the past instead of as a simple reproduction of or fundamentalist fantasy about some nonexistent golden age. Put differently, in my view, there is no shared Ocean of Emancipation in the history of religions. Indeed, from many of our own modern perspectives, the waters of the past are barely potable, as what most of the contemplative traditions have meant by "emancipation" or "salvation" is not at all what we would like to imply by those terms today. It is, after all, frightfully easy to be emancipated from "the world" or to become one with a deity or ontological absolute and leave all the world's grossly unjust social structures and practices (racism, gender injustice, homophobia, religious bigotry, colonialism, caste, class division, environmental degradation, etc.) comfortably in place.""

(http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0303/article/030352.html)

[clxvii]

Information on the SEED Dialogues, at http://www.seedopenu.org . Similar work has been done by David Peat, a student of the astrophysicist David Bohm, in his book on 'Blackfoot Physics', at http://www.fdavidpeat.com/bibliography/bibliography.htm. See also http://www.fdavidpeat.com/bibliography/essays/black.htm

[clxviii]

David Peat on the monological gaze of the West:

"Time was abstracted from space and painting was left with the single viewpoint, a frozen world seen though a window. With the device of perspective one longer enters into to painting but views it with an objective eye. Mirroring the metaphysics of the period, nature has been projected away from us and the world is experienced as something external.The mathematical basis of perspective is called Projective Geometry. This term says it all. One no longer engages directly with an object in its natural, essential form, as something that can be explored and touched, instead it becomes a surface that must be distorted to fit the global logic of mathematical perspective. The rich individualistic inscape of the natural world had given way to a uniform perspectival grid of logic and reason. How well perspective parallels a science in which nature obeys laws that are, in some metaphysical sense, external to matter's essence. As Bacon argued, these laws are to be discovered by placing nature on the rack, another sort of grid, and tormenting her to reveal her secrets."

(http://www.fdavidpeat.com/bibliography/essays/black.htm)

[clxix]

Find background reading in this `Anthropology of Consciousness' bibliography, at http://sacaaa.org/bibliography_of_consciousness_studies.htm

The truth of animistic forms of consciousness, despite their 'anthropomorphising' of nature, may well be their intuitive grasp of 'there is consciousness all the way down'.

[clxx]

Michel Maffesioli

"Nous sommes dans une ere de hedonisme generalise, pour lequel ce sur quoi on ne peut rien, devient indifferent... Ce qui engender une certaine forme de serenite, a la base meme de nombreuses manifestations de generosite et d'entraide, car l'acceptation de ce qui est peut aller de pair avec le souci de participer a ce qui est: non pas maitriser, mais accompagner un etat de fait pour qu'il donne le meilleur de lui-meme. La realization de soi se fait dans une interaction ecologique et festive. On tend a la "propension des choses" Il n'y a pas lieu de projeter sur elles des desires, des convictions, etc.. de quelque ordre qu'ils soient, mais bien de s'accorder a leur evolution, et a la necessite qui est la leur. La encore, l'initiative n'est plus propre a l'individu isole, ou d'un ensemble forme a partir d'un contrat social, mais elle est conjointe, partage entre le monde et l'homme. Ainsi, au moralisme et a son <devoir etre>, succeed une deontologie prenant au serieux les <situations> et agissant en consequence, qui est attentive a la disposition du moment, qui s'accorde aux opportunites du moment. Il n'y a nulle indifference a un tel immanentisme, mais une conscience constante, une presence a ce qui est: le monde, les autres. C'est une co-presence a l'alterite. Cela nous oblige a considere l'insertion au groupe, non uniquement regi par la raison (comme dans la modernite) mais mu egalement par les sentiments et les affects."

(personal communication, source to be verified)

[clxxi]

Wholism and individuality, by Ted Lumley o f Goodshare.org

"Bohm cautions that this [undividedness of the whole] does not mean the universe is a giant, undifferentiated mass.  Things can be part of an undivided whole and still possess their own unique qualities.  To illustrate what he means he points to the little eddies and whirlpools that often form in a river. At a glance such eddies appear to be separate things and possess many individual characteristics such as size, rate, and the direction of rotation, et cetera.  But careful scrutiny reveals that it is impossible to determine where any given whirlpool ends and the river begins.  Thus Bohm is not suggesting that the difference between 'things' is meaningless.  He merely wants us to be aware constantly that dividing various aspects of the holomovement into 'things' is always an abstraction, a way of making those aspects stand out in our perception by our way of thinking.  In attempts to correct this, instead of calling different aspects of the holomovement' things', he prefer to call them 'relatively independent subtotalities'."

Indeed , Bohm believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamical interconnectedness of things is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and society as well.  For example, we believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole.  We believe it is possible to treat parts of the body and not be concerned with the whole.  We believe we can deal with various problems in our society, such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the problems in our society as a whole, and so on.  In his writings Bohm argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only doesn't work, but may even lead to our extinction."

(personal communication, March 2005)

[clxxii]

Recovering the cosmobiological tradition

Loren Goldner on the cosmobiological tradition of the Renaissance. See URL = http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/renaissance.html.

Here is how he explains his strategy to recover this tradition:

"Our starting-point must be the direct opposition between the body of doctrine which came to be known as `Marxism', codified in the First, Second, Third and Fourth Internationals, and the ideas of Karl Marx. After separating these two, I want look at the relation between `Marxism' and the body of ideas known as the Enlightenment, chiefly those of the French eighteenth century thinkers. Then I should turn to the earlier tradition sometimes called `Hermetic', which includes magic, astrology and alchemy. I want to show how, when modern rational science defeated this outlook, it also lost something of value: its attitudes to humanity and nature. Following the work of Magee, I would then point out the deep immersion of Hegel in that old mystical tradition, and his direct opposition to the ideas and methods of Enlightenment thinking. Finally, I should return to Marx to see how his demystification of the mystics preserved the core of their profound insights."

(http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/articles/magic.htm )

Books: 1) Loren Goldner. `Vanguard of Retrogression: Postmodern Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious Capital', (Queequeg Publications, PO Box 672355, New York, NY 10467) ; 2) Glenn Magee. `Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition'. Cornell University Press, 2001; 3) online version of a book on Marx and the future of humanity, by Cyril Smith, at http://www.cix.co.uk/~cyrilsmith/

See also : Karl Marx and the fourfold vision of William Blake, at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/articles/blake.htm

[clxxiii]

Goldner on the 'forgetting' of the cosmobiological tradition:

"The Foucaultian and Frankfurt School critics of the Enlightenment live off the impoverishment of the left by its extended romance with a one-sided appropriation of the  Enlightenment, by the left's century-long confusion of the completion of the bourgeois revolution by state civil servants with socialism,  and by the worldwide crackup of that project. The pre-Enlightenment, Renaissance-Reformation cosmobiology which passed through German idealism into Marx's species-being means even less to them than it does to figures such as Habermas.  Yet the usual critique of them is undermined by the tacit agreement across the board that "nature is boring", i.e. the realm of mechanism, as Hegel, articulating the ultimate state civil servant view, cut off from practice in nature, said. Both sides of this debate still inhabit the separation of culture and nature, Geist and Natur, which came into existence through the Enlightenment's deflation of cosmobiology. It is the rehabilitation, in suitably contemporary form, of the outlook  of Paracelsus and Kepler, not of Voltaire and Newton, which the left requires today for a (necessarily simultaneous) regeneration of nature, culture and society, out of Blake's fallen world of Urizen and what he called "single vision and Newton's sleep".

(http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/renaissance.html)

[clxxiv]

The Nature Institute on 'qualitative science'

"We develop ways of thinking and perception that integrate self-reflective and critical thought, imagination, and careful, detailed observation of the phenomena. The Nature Institute promotes a truly ecological understanding of the living world. We study the internal ecology of plants and animals, elucidating how structures and functions interrelate in forming the creature as a whole. Our interdisciplinary approach integrates anatomy, physiology, behavior, development, genetics, and evolution.  We investigate the whole organism as part of the larger web of life. By creating life history stories of plants and animals, we open up a new understanding of our fellow creatures as dynamic and integrated beings.

Through this approach, the organism teaches us about itself, revealing its characteristics and its interconnectedness with the world that sustains it. This way of doing science enhances our sense of responsibility for nature. No one who has read, for example, Craig Holdrege's paper on the sloth, thereby coming to appreciate this animal as a unique, focused expression of its entire forest habitat, will be able to tolerate the thought of losing either the sloth or its habitat. As Goethe so beautifully expresses it, all of nature's individual aspects are interconnected and interdependent: We conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect."

(http://natureinstitute.org/)

The Nature Institute on the limitations of reductionism:

"We can discover the coherence of our five reductionist propositions by recognizing in them the operation of a single gesture of the cognizing mind. The gesture itself is not pathological; rather, its singleness -- its operation in conjunction with a *suppression* of the necessary counterbalancing gesture -- is alone what renders it and its reductionist results pathological.  Reductionism, at root, is not so much a body of concepts as it is a way of exercising (and not exercising) our cognitive faculties.

The cognitive gesture I'm alluding to here is the inner act of isolating something so as to grasp it more easily and precisely and gain power overit.  We want to be able to say, "I have exactly this -- not that and not the other thing, but *this*".  The ideal of truth at work here is a yes-or-no ideal.  No ambiguity, no fuzziness, no uncertainty, no essential penetration of one thing by another, but rather precisely defined interactions between separate and precisely defined things.  We wantthings we can isolate, immobilize, nail down and hold onto.

How do we avoid ambiguity and approach nailed-down, yes-or-no certainty? Part of the answer is:  by drawing on one of our highest achievements, which is our ever finer power of distinguishing and cleaving.  Whatever looks complex and of diverse nature must be analyzed into distinct,

Simple parts with clearly spelled-out relations.  Such analysis and clarification is the function of logic, a discipline we have carried to extraordinary levels of sophistication.

Materialism, mechanism, and reductionism:  their presuppositions and tendencies are all of a piece, because they are all expressions of a single cognitive gesture.  The aim of this gesture is to lay hold of a simple, fixed, precise, unambiguous, manipulable reality divested of the inner life and qualities that might make uncomfortable demands on us. We anesthetize the world in order to possess and control it like a thing. But despite this singleness of purpose -- or, rather, because such a single-minded gesture becomes sterile without the life and movement of a counterbalancing gesture -- the presuppositions of the Reduction Complexbetray a striking incoherence.  They offer us:

** Materialism without any recognizable material.

** Mechanism that must ignore actual machines, occupying itself instead with the determinate and immaterial clarity of machine algorithms.

** Reductionism that produces ever more precise formulations about an evermore impoverished reality.

** A one-sided method of analysis that never stops to tell us about anything in its own terms, but forever diverts our attention to  something else.

** A refusal to reckon with qualities despite the fact that we have no shred of a world to talk about or understand except by grace of qualities.

** Cause wrenched apart from effect; all becoming -- that is, all active be-ing -- frozen into stasis.

** Bottom-up explanation that tries to explain a fuller reality by means of a less substantial reality, ignores the bi-directional flow of causation between all contexts, and naively takes the smallest parts

of the world-mechanism as most fundamental for explaining it.

** Finally, a denial of mind as an irreducible and fundamental aspect of the universe -- this while scientists increasingly describe the world as driven by, and consisting essentially of, little more than collections of mental abstractions -- mathematical formulae, rules,information, and algorithms.

This entire body of dogma defines the reductionist ideology, not science itself.  However, the dogma has tremendous power to distort the practice of science, a distortion evident on all sides.  At the same time, there is reason to hope that in our day the dogma will finally collapse in upon its own absurdities.  If this happens, it will not be because particular discoveries "disprove" the reductionist position, but rather because --much like during the earlier break with medieval thought -- more and more people simply find it impossible to look upon the world in the old way."

(http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/st/mqual/)

[clxxv]

Negri on the human-machine relationship:

It has been generally noted, by McLuhan and others, that technology is an extension, an exteriorization of faculties of the human body, brain and nervous system. In the current era, as we are completing this process of emulating the nervous system and brain into our networks and computers, we see a start of a new process, which is the integration of the externalized technologies back into our bodies. This is generally discussed under the theme of the cyborg. Today, matter, life and mind are in the process of being understood on the basis of a reduction to their informational basis, giving rise to nanotechnology, biotechnology and artificial intelligence. On the basis of a continued dominnce of a mechanistic and manipulative framework, the results could be seen as an extension, to an unprecedented scale, our our alienation. Negri notes in a similar fashion, that the productive machines have entered us, in particular now that the brain itself, i.e. creative innovation, is seen as the most important productive factor, and now that we have access to increasingly cheap computers and a worldwide internet network that is outside of full corporate dominance. Yet this creative work is still  generally under the command of financial capital. Negri attempts to go beyond the human-machine dichotomy, and to see the emancipatory potential in this state of affairs:

"The Multitude not only uses machines to produce, but also becomes increasingly machinic itself, as the means of production are increasingly integrated into their minds and bodies. The productive machines have been integrated into the multitude, but it has no control over them, making more vicious their alienation. This suggests that the actual subversion of the productive system into an autonomous plane could be possible in a flash, by disconnecting it from capital command"

(personal communication, from http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-3/4-3editorial.pdf)

[clxxvi]

On Participation, excerpts from Owen Barfield

"Participation is the extra-sensory relation between man and the phenomena."

The world as immediately given to us is a mixture of sense perception and thought. While the two may not be separable in our experience, we can nevertheless distinguish the two. When we do, we find that the perceptual alone gives us no coherence, no unities, no "things" at all. We could not even note a patch of red, or distinguish it from a neighboring patch of green, without aid of the concepts given by thinking. In the absence of the conceptual, we would experience (in William James' words) only "a blooming, buzzing confusion." (Poetic Diction; Saving the Appearances)

 

"The familiar world -- as opposed to the largely notional world of "particles" which the physicist aspires to describe -- is the product of a perceptual given (which is meaningless by itself) and an activity of our own, which we might call "figuration." Figuration is a largely subconscious, imaginative activity through which we participate in producing ("figuring") the phenomena of the familiar world. (A simple analogy -- but only an analogy -- is found in the way a rainbow is produced by the cooperation of sun, raindrops, and observer.) How we choose to regard the particles is one thing, but when we refer to the workaday world -- the world of "things" -- we must accept that our thinking is as much out there in the world as in our heads.  In actual fact, we find it nearly impossible to hold onto this truth. In our critical thinking as physicists or philosophers, we imagine ourselves set over against an objective world consisting of particles, in which we do not participate at all. In contrast, the phenomenal, or familiar, world is said to be riddled with our subjectivity. In our daily, uncritical thinking, on the other hand, we take for granted the solid, objective reality of the familiar world, assume an objective, lawful manifestation of its qualities such as color, sound, and solidity, and even write natural scientific treatises about the history of its phenomena -- all while ignoring the human consciousness that (by our own, critical account) determines these phenomena from the inside in a continually changing way". (Worlds Apart; Saving the Appearances)

 

"Our language and meanings today put the idea of participation almost out of reach, whereas the reality of participation (if not the idea) was simply given in earlier eras. For example, we cannot conceive of thoughts except as things in our heads, "rather like cigarettes inside a cigarette box called the brain." By contrast, during the medieval era it would have been impossible to think of mental activity, or intelligence, as the product of a physical organ. Then, as now, the prevailing view was supported by the unexamined meanings of the only words with which one could talk about the matter."

(Excerpts collated at http://www.praxagora.com/~stevet/fdnc/appa.html; More about Barfield at http://owenbarfield.com/)

[clxxvii]

Definition of a 'total social fact':

"A total social fact [fait social total] is "an activity that has implications throughout society, in the economic, legal, political, and religious spheres." (Sedgewick 2002: 95) "Diverse strands of social and psychological life are woven together through what he [Mauss] comes to call 'total social facts'. A total social fact is such that it informs and organises seemingly quite distinct practices and institutions." (Edgar 2002:157) The term was popularized by Marcel Mauss in his The Gift and coined by his student Maurice Leenhardt after Durkheim." (http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Total_social_fact )

Bibliographic sources used for the definition are 1) Sedgewick, Peter (2002). Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts, Routledge Key Guides Series. Routledge: 2) Edgar, Andrew (2002). Cultural Theory: The Key Thinkers, Routledge Key Guides Series. Routledge.

[clxxviii]

George Modelski on the temporality of change:

Someone who has studied the temporality of human civilisational change is George Modelski with his theories on 'evolutionary' politics', with some of his conclusions, that 'the rate of change is tapering off' being counter-intuitive. He foresees a period where technological change would co-exist with a stabilized social structure. His conclusions are based on combining various observable trends in one integrated interpretation:

Phase Changes and Saturation: Power Law Behavior and World Systems Evolution, Tessaleno Dvezas and George Modelski, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, V70 N9, Nov 2003

"An excellent article modeling world social organization as a multilevel, self-similar, nested power-law process, following self-organized criticality. They suggest social change involves a range of processes that range in "size" (time duration) from 250 (or rarely, longer) down to 1 (very common) human generation, with few of the long duration developmental processes (e.g., world democracy, globalization), and a very large number of single generation processes (e.g., typical cultural and legal emergences). Assuming a human generational/cultural learning time of 30 years, they describe "K-waves" of 60 years encompassing developments such as the rise of leading sectors in global economy (e.g., the emergence of automobiles, or electricity), and "long waves" of 120 years, such as the rise of world powers to a position of global leadership. All of this has been observed by other cycle scholars and seems quite reasonable. One of the more helpful insights from their model is that the time duration of developmental innovations is inversely related to their importance to the developmental process (e.g., irreversible processes that take a long time to occur are both much rarer and more necessary to advance the system as a whole). Another very interesting insight is their observation that world system change, while still upsloped, has been slowing for 1,000 years, with the inflection point at roughly 1000AD.  Using a logistic growth curve ("S curve") their model of world system emergence proposes that human social development  (the Y axis) is in a decelerating phase and is about "80% complete", and therefore that the major features of human social organization are now in place. In other words, they propose that social change is rapidly saturing, and will be significantly less dramatic and novel every year forward. A plausible scenario here: We all end up living in increasingly standardized individual empowering, fine grained, and fair social democracies, with conflict a highly regulated affair, and the only unregulated innovation occurring at the chaotic edge of human understanding and social need. The authors delineate four phases of social change for the model, beginning with the Ancient Period (3000BC to 1,000BC), then Classical Period (1,000BC to 1,000AD) then the Modern Period (1,000-3,000AD) of "world system consolidation", and a presumed Postmodern Period (3,000-5,000AD) with little social change (though we can presume much change in the technological sphere). Each 2,000 year period corresponds well to the four phases in logistic growth: initiation, acceleration, deceleration, and saturation."

(http://accelerating.org/tech_tidbits/2005/18jan05.html#socialsaturation)

[clxxix]

Jordan Pollack on the 'information feudalism' scenario:

If the cultural sphere is indeed taken over completely by commodification, the consequences would be quite negative: we will never own anything anymore, we will always be dependent on all kinds of licensing ..

"It seems to me that what we're seeing in the software area, and this is the scary part for human society, is the beginning of a kind of dispossession. People are talking about this as dispossession that only comes from piracy, like Napster and Gnutella where the rights of artists are being violated by people sharing their work. But there's another kind of dispossession, which is the inability to actually buy a product. The idea is here: you couldn't buy this piece of software, you could only licence it on a day by day, month by month, year by year basis; As this idea spreads from software to music, films, books, human civilization based on property fundamentally changes." (http://www.edge.org/documents/day/day_pollack.html)

[clxxx]

John Perry Barlow, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on the privatization of the Commons:

" I'm spending an enormous amount of my time stopping content industries from taking over the world--literally. I feel like we're in a condition where private totalitarianism is not out of the question because of the increasingly thickening matrix of channels of communication owned by the same companies that own content, that own Web properties, that own traditional media. In essence, they're in a position to own the human mind itself. The possibility of getting a dissident voice through their channels is increasingly scarce, and the use of copyright as a means of suppressing freedom of expression is becoming more and more fashionable. You've got these interlocking systems of technology and law, where merely quoting something from a copyrighted piece is enough to bring down the system on you." (http://news.com.com/2008-1082-843349.html)

[clxxxi]

Some documentation on the universal wage

One of the best resources is the Basic Income European Network which in fact now covers most parts of the world, at: http://www.bien.org

the Greens on the universal wage, with many resources at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/marxiens/politic/revenus/index.htm

Very clear explanation on the universal wage, and why it is so necessary, by Philippe Van Parijs, at http://atheles.org/editeur.php?ref_livre=&main=lyber&ref_lyber=318

[clxxxii]

About the transition of one mode of production to another, by an Oekonux.de participant:

"Venetian merchants, who had made their fortunes in the midst of feudalism by selling arms or luxury goods from Asia to European feudal seigniors, did not constitute the heart of social production. Even if they brought to the narrowness of feudal life - centered around the fief and its village church - an opening to world commerce (the courtesans of the European courts could wear robes made of Oriental products), the relations among the merchants and between them and the rest of the feudal world remained marginal, and would appear to be purely subsidiary. The production of essential, indispensable goods for the subsistence of men (agricultural goods and artisan ones, principally), was performed under feudal relations. This marginal, secondary aspect of capitalist relations in the midst of feudal society was so self-evident that even in the 18th century, the first bourgeois economists, the French Physiocrats, could, without laughing, pretend that merchants and manufacturers should not pay taxes because they do not create any true "net product": They do nothing but transport it or modify its form.

What do we want to deduce? That from their birth, in the midst of the old society, the superior relations of production, were not obligatorily born with a complete form, capable of managing the totality of social production, nor even its most vital part. The fact that, today, free software and, more generally, digitizable goods concern no more than a part, again, marginal, of social production and consumption, does not constitute any argument showing the impossibility that the economic relations that they induce will not one day become the dominant social relations.

That which has permitted capitalist relations to become dominant after centuries of existence is not only the ideological, military, and political victory of the bearers of the new capitalist values against the old feudal regime, even if they have played a determining role, but the material, concrete fact - which demonstrates daily and by methods more and more evident - that the new relations were the only ones that could permit the use of new productive forces engendered by the opening of commerce and the development of production techniques. "In the last instance," it is the economic imperative, the irreversible historical tendency to the development of labor productivity, that finishes by imposing its own law.

That which today permits one to envision the possibility that relations of production founded on the principles of free software (production with a view toward satisfying the needs of the community, sharing, cooperation, the elimination of market exchange) could become socially dominant is the fact that these relations are the most able to employ the new techniques of information and communication, and that the recourse to these techniques, their place in the social process of production, can only grow, ineluctably."

Source: Raoul Victor, Free Software and the Market Society, http://www.oekonux.org

[clxxxiii]

Paolo Virno on the new political strategy

Virno is one of the new generation of 'Italian radical thinkers' that seems to have replaced the earlier dominance of 'French thought', and he is often associated with the group of people, who are, together with Negri and Hardt, putting forward the strategy of the 'multitudes'. In this article, he argues that for the contemporary social movement, social and political aims change places. First, new social realities have to be established, after political structures will have to be adapted. The last thing to be wished for, he says, is the establishment of a hyperstate, a world government for a world people.

 

"la lutte contre le travail salarié, à la différence de celui contre la tyrannie ou contre l'indigence, n'est plus corellée à l'emphatique perspective de la « prise du pouvoir ». Précisément en vertu de ses caractères très avancés, se profile comme une transformation entièrement sociale, qui se confronte de près au pouvoir, mais sans rêver une organisation alternative de l'Etat, visant au contraire à réduire et à éteindre toute forme de dirigisme sur l'activité des femmes et des hommes et donc sur l'Etat tout court. On pourrait dire : alors que la « révolution politique » était considérée comme un préalable inévitable pour changer les rapports sociaux, maintenant, c'est ce butin à venir qui devient le passage préliminaire. La lutte peut développer son caractère destructif, seulement si elle porte haut une autre façon de vivre, de communiquer, et même de produire. En bref, seulement s'il y a autre chose à perdre que ses propres chaînes. Que se passe-t-il lorsque l'on considère la forme actuelle de l'Etat comme l'ultime possible, méritant de se corroder et de tomber en ruine, mais certainement pas d'être remplacé par un hyper Etat « de tout le peuple »

(http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=1806)

 

 

[clxxxiv]

Desertion

"Desertion brings down empires. Consider the Soviet Union, and the Eastern bloc more generally: there was no aspect of daily life that was not under strict surveillance, it was next to impossible to organize resistance, but these regimes were toppled by desertion. People left in droves, and those who stayed simply stopped working. Sloth, too, can be a good thing. It may be that the only course for altering the world lies not in revolutionary parties but in desertion."

(From: Politics without the state. Ed. By Diana George and Charles T. Mudede. Seatlle Research Institute, 2002)

The above work is described as follows:

" They focus on how the current world order works affectively, rather than just economically and ideologically or cognitively. Against "the communication of terror by a private corporate media oligopoly that functions in tandem with a state apparatus", they advocate "a universal communication" of invention, of joy, and of bodies. The goal that they envision is "gaining collective, participatory control over the imaginary processes through which our identities and desires are instituted." This means inventing new forms of sociality, imagining alternatives to global capitalism precisely at the moment when we are endlessly being told that no alternative is conceivable."
(source: Seattle Research Institute website, http://www.seattleresearchinstitute.org )

[clxxxv]

Antonio Negri on the knowledge worker:

"À  présent, on observe un autre type de fonction socia1e productive, et un autre type d'ouvrier apparaît, celui qui travaiIIe devant un ordinateur. CeIa suppose un élargissement du concept de producteur et, de plus, une réappropriation des moyens de production. Quand le cerveau devient I' outil fondamental, il n'y a plus de séparation entre moyens de production et force productive, c'est ceIa Ia potentialité révolutionnaire."

(from a communication in the Multitudes mailing list in December, 2004, from an interview in the French newspaper L'Humanite)

[clxxxvi]

lnformation about the struggle against the adoption of software patents in the EU, see at http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/fr/m/intro/index.html

The following is an educational book explaining why these issues are important:

La bataille du logiciel libre. 10 clefs pour comprendre . Thierry Noisette et Perline
La Découverte 2004

Book site located at http://www.labatailledulogiciellibre.info/; author site of Perline located at http://www.perline.org/

[clxxxvii]

On the universal wage as a form of 'rent', for what the population is bringing to society:

"Pour l'économiste écologiste Bernard Guibert il faut trouver la justification du revenu social garanti qu'il place au centre du programme social des écologistes, dans une réhabilitation du rapport de rente. Non pas une rente parasitaire mais une rente sur ses propres qualités, sociales et productives, sur son propre corps. La régulation de cette rente comme celle du développent durable est un acte de nature politique Le but de cet article est de tenter de fonder théoriquement la revendication qui est au coeur du projet de l'écologie politique, celle d'un revenu social d'existence qui soit inconditionnel, universel et de niveau suffisant pour permettre à chacun de vivre d'une manière autonome et décente. Il s'agit de transformer tout citoyen de notre pays en rentier : il faut donc rappeler ce qu'est le concept de rente, réfuter les préjugés idéologiques dont ce il est victime et en énoncer le contenu positif et même révolutionnaire comme condition de la réalisation du projet politique du développement durable."

(http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=12)

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Bibliography-Notes | Notes 2 | Notes3