How peer production and Web3 governance mechanisms may prefigure a Isonomic world order

Is what we are waiting for perhaps not Democracy, but Isonomia ?

Readers of this Substack may know that I am a big ‘fan’ of the ideas of Kojin Karatani, as expressed in his pivotal work, The Structure of World History. It has a central place in our P2P Foundation book: Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto. I have explained this in a video conversation.

The essential move by Karatani in this book is to move away from the Marxist understanding of ‘modes of production’ (hunter-gathering, craft-agrarian, industrial, cognitive), to ‘modes of exchange’.

Here he explains his motivation:

Kojin Karatani:

"I proposed the notion of switching “from modes of production to modes of exchange” in The Structure of World History (2010; English trans. 2014). Here, I would like to provide a simple explanation of this. Orthodox Marxist theory, using an architectural metaphor, explains the history of social forms in terms of modes of production, which form the economic base (foundation), and of the political or ideational superstructures that are determined by that base. A mode of production consists of the productive forces, which arise from the relations between humans and nature, and the relations of production, which are constituted by the relations between humans. I do not oppose the idea that the history of social forms is determined by the economic base, but in my view that base consists not of modes of production, but rather modes of exchange. What I call modes of exchange includes both relations between nature and humans and relations between humans.1 I came to see things this way as a result of various critiques that were mounted in response to problems in the Marxist view that modes of production constituted the economic base—critiques that ultimately resulted in a rejection of the idea of an economic base.

This does not amount to a rejection of Marx. At the stage of writing The German Ideology, Marx himself used the expression “productive forces and intercourse,” not “productive forces and relations of production.” The concept of intercourse (Verkehr) includes relations of production, transportation, trade, sexual intercourse and even war. In other words, it includes all the various types of “exchange” that occur among communities.Accordingly, the various forms that I call modes of exchange can be said to correspond to what Marx called intercourse. A perspective centered on modes of production (productive forces and relations of production) fails to see that the relation between people and nature is itself a form of exchange (metabolism) and as a result loses sight of the ecological awareness that was included in Marx’s use of the term."

(http://www.kojinkaratani.com/en/pdf/An_Introduction_to_Modes_of_Exchange.pdf)

In his understanding, the evolution of the human world order is best interpreted in the following way:

• Originally , Mode A predominated, which is the value exchange involved with the so-called gift economy. I should note that by doing this, in my view, he does conflate to different modes, i.e. both Equality Matching, the gift economy proper in which you have to give back the gift in some way, and Communal Sharehold, in which you contribute to a whole from which you benefit (no gift back is expected). Still, Mode A works fine, since they indeed occur together in tribal, kinship-based, hunter-gathering and horticultural societies (and as David Graeber would insist, in my early agricultural societies as well).

• Mode B occurs when there is a situation of domination, for example after conquest. After that moment the exchange is really between protection in exchange for taxation and surplus, but compensated by redistribution. This new mode creates what we call civilization, with its division between managerial and productive classes.

• Mode C occurs when the market exchange form become dominant, as under the current political economy of capitalism.

But Karatani doesn’t stop there. He introduces a Mode D. Because tribal conviviality is so necessary to human happiness, there is a continuous yearning in Mode B and C, to return to Mode A, but at a ‘higher level’. This means that most people want to return to this conviviality, but without losing all the advantages of civilizational life.

This yearning is represented by the world religions, which express the yearnings of the working masses, aided by spiritual reformers. While they never win outright, and transform towards imperial religions eventually, they can obtain civilizational effects, i.e. balancing out the most destructive proclivities of warrior classes for example. One could say that the civilizational forms that came out of the Axial Age, had such an effect.

I’d like now to refer to my own work and one of its central arguments, which is an echo of this hypothesis by Kojin Karatani: that the current technological infrastructure indeed creates the capacity to do exactly that, i.e. the scaling of gifting and commoning. With digital networks, we create the ability to create and exchange value, based on gifting labor to common projects, coordinated through social signals, based on free permissionless contributions, while at the same time, creating global knowledge commons to undergird that common work. If you are familiar with my theses, you know that I claim the following:

• We are creating a ‘fourth order sector of organizations’, which are integrative, meta-organizations: they have the capacity to coordinate both market forms, participation by public authorities, voluntary input by NGO’s, but crucially, the new form of permissionless contributions.

I have historicized this as follows:

• Open source / free software / open design has created the capacity for the mutual coordination of labor on a global scale, relatively autonomous from the full control of market and state institutions

• Crypto and Web3 has created the capacity to finance such work, and is succeeding in self-infrastructure through the self-taxation for the production of  public goods

• I also stress the provisional nature of such emerging infrastructure which has not yet full merged with physical production. This is the argument in my Substack editorial, ‘Crypto for Real’.

Now, if you are familiar with the mechanics of open source, peer production, and Web3 blockchain governance, you will notice that while there is a lot of freedom and consensus in these communities, they are most of the time, not formally democratic! So what are they doing ? One concept you might use, is that of Polycentric Governance, which was defined by Elinor Ostrom as the governance modality of the Commons. It stresses the need for the mutual alignment of the different stakeholders, and there is an excellent overview of how Blockchain communities have been applying these principles, see the report, Blockchain Technology and Polycentric Governance.

But, THERE IS A LOT MORE GOING ON, and to understand that, it is necessary to refer to a second important book by Kojin Karatani, entitled ‘Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy’.

This is a book about history, with a remarkable thesis: the origins of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are not to be sought in ancient Athens, as many believe, but in the cities of the Ionian coast, many centuries before.

Before we continue, this is the book presentation by the publisher, just to give you a first idea:

"In Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy—published originally in Japanese and now available in four languages—Kōjin Karatani questions the idealization of ancient Athens as the source of philosophy and democracy by placing the origins instead in Ionia, a set of Greek colonies located in present-day Turkey. Contrasting Athenian democracy with Ionian isonomia—a system based on non-rule and a lack of social divisions whereby equality is realized through the freedom to immigrate—Karatani shows how early Greek thinkers from Heraclitus to Pythagoras were inseparably linked to the isonomia of their Ionian origins, not democracy. He finds in isonomia a model for how an egalitarian society not driven by class antagonism might be put into practice, and resituates Socrates's work and that of his intellectual heirs as the last philosophical attempts to practice isonomia's utopic potentials. Karatani subtly interrogates the democratic commitments of Western philosophy from within and argues that the key to transcending their contradictions lies not in Athenian democracy, with its echoes of imperialism, slavery, and exclusion, but in the openness of isonomia."

(https://www.dukeupress.edu/isonomia-and-the-origins-of-philosophy)

What exactly is the argument, and why is it important ?

Greek democracy is a response to the crisis of tribal confederations that became class societies. Very specifically, the Athenian democracy was born from a revolt against debt slavery. Democracy is always a class compromise, in which the oligarchy agrees to share political power, on the condition that the inequality based on property, remains untouched. This is also the case for the medieval free cities, which were originally under the control of the Church and the monarch or local feudal lords, but needed to accept guild rule to maintain social stability. Athens and other democratic poleis happily co-existed with slavery , and needed the income from imperial expansion, to fund its redistributional policies. It is of course not different with the current western democracies that were coextensive with colonial and imperial expansion. Political equality is matched to economic inequality and inevitably, the power of money gets the upper hand on the power of the vote.

The conditions in Ionian cities were different: they were based not on tribal confederations, but on people who had left their tribal areas, and who were able to farm land around their cities. The crucial element, according to Karatani, was the ‘right to leave’; so if there was an authoritarian or oligarchic tendency, its citizens would leave for another city, and this was a powerful motivation to maintain civic consensus and broad economic equality. Karatani makes the important argument that these cities were trading and market cities, but because there was no state creating monopolies and therefore surplus profits that could be accumulated, the cities remained egalitarian for several centuries. This is interesting by itself, as the market forms are linked here to egalitarian outcomes, unlike the slave-based economies of the Attican cities on the mainland. Karatani sees the same conditions apply in the farmer communities of Iceland, refugees from the militaristic Vikings, and in the religious dissident townships of the early American Northeast. Neither of these systems lasted forever, and the Ionian cities succumbed to the Lydian and then later to the Persian empire. But they lasted several centuries, as long as democratic systems lasted. But here is my invitation, look at the ‘mobility’ condition that made Isonomia possible as a form of ‘forking’.

Indeed, let us now look back at  the very characteristics of peer production.

Peer production, the capacity of any individual contributor to permissionlessly contribute to a common project, allows precisely the same type of mobility. Hence, peer production communities, even if they are under a certain influence of corporations, always maintain a relative autonomy for their sharing cultures. If a contributor is not happy, he can fork the project. Yes, open software is to a certain degree, assimilated under capitalist logics, but without destroying the original freedom of participation.

Now let’s look at Web3, blockchain and crypto: they are still based on open source software, and on permissionless contributions; contributors can leave the projects, and fork new ones if necessary.

they generally apply polycentric governance mechanisms. DAO’s have instituted new forms of voting and funding, ‘quadratic voting and quadratic funding’, which balance out the power of funders, founders, developers and other stakeholder communities, based on contributory logics.

So it is rather clear that what peer production and blockchain projects are applying are not specifically democratic procedures, although there are some, but they are essentially, ISONOMIC PROJECTS.

In conclusion:

• Web3, despite its relation with financial and market forces, is practicing Isonomia.

If we now go back to the larger point of Kojin Karatani, and to my own convictions, then yes, we can conclude that what is happening now is a scaling up of Mode A dynamics, to a Mode D dynamic. 

Networked technologies hold the promise of a re-instantiation of the Isonomic processes of Ionia. I am not saying this is a given, despite current progress, but it is certainly a possibility.

What if we could look at crypto and Web3 as the ‘communities of faith’, an updated form of the world religions which previously attempted the realization of Mode D ? Perhaps more is needed than a mere belief in common autonomous infrastructures, perhaps we also need more substantive spiritual transformations, but still, the potential of the current evolutions should not be discounted.