Is Trump the unwitting historical agent of Cosmolocal Accelerationism ?

Can we turn tragedy into opportunity ?

Part One: The meaning of Liberation Day

The Russian revolutionary leader Lenin is often quoted saying:

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."

While what he actually said was:

“Sometimes ten years pass without a single day worth remembering, and then come days in which ten years are embodied." ("Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, 1920)

It may be important to recall the situation in which he thought this: when he was going back to Russia, in a train protected by the German Reich, he was not just a minority in the Bolshevik Party, which was opposed to taking power, while the then really existing worker’s councils, openly stated they did not have the capacity to run the country (See the book, Lenin in the Train, for these details). And yet we know he eventually took power, and changed the course of human history. He was of course not the first one, we can think of Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon as similar willful figures which appeared at the right time in history to make a difference.

It’s too early to say whether Trump is made from the same cloth and destined to be such a world changer, but definitely, the tariff proclamations of Liberation Day come close in their import.

What we witnessed was the definite burial of neoliberal globalization, and a world based on the free flows of trade, paradoxically the very world order which the American supremacy after the victory of WWII had inaugurated. Trump’s attempt seems to follow from the rationale that tariffs will make importing products to the American market so expensive, that it will motivate many industrialists to resettle in the U.S. Seeing the country like a transactional entity, based on the capacity to express coercive power, his policies make sense. The continuation of the neoliberal order was untenable, and this is a last ditch attempt to rejig the position of the U.S. as a strong, if not the strongest nation-state, in a post-neoliberal and post-imperial order. While its failure is likely, it will nevertheless do an enormous amount of damage to many other countries in the world, who will now have to choose between adapting to U.S. demands, or joining the alternative attempt of a globalized trade based on the BRICS alliance. The success of that alternative is equally uncertain.

It might be useful to see this disruption in the very long term, and for this, I draw on the ideas of Michael Hudson, for example as expressed in The Destiny of Civilization.

When the post-axial civilizational form emerged (i.e. after the establishment of the ‘higher religions’ which attempted to regulate the brute power of dominant conquerors), it was originally based on a ‘harmony’ model of social relations, in which non-military orders, such as the Mandarins in China, or the Church in medieval Europe, kept both the merchants and the warriors in check, for example through regular debt cancellations (Jubilees and Clean Slate legislations). This system was dominant on the eastern Eurasian side of the mega-continent. But Classical Greece marked the exception: the rentier-based property class, i.e. the oligarchy, took control of the state, but was swiftly met with a counter-revolution, which created the democratic Polis, and later, in its Roman form, the Tribunate, and finally in its medieval form of the many assemblies and associations which marked European medieval life, up to the parliamentary forms of democracy marking the advent of industrial modernity. This has marked the western side of Eurasia: antagonism and conflict, moderated by social compromise; oligarchy moderated by democracy, and the absence of a higher order arbitrage, such as an Emperor with a ‘Mandate from Heaven’. European kings always had to deal with the Estates and their assemblies.

To this day, we see a revival of this great polarity, with the Russia-Chinese stress on neo-sovereignism and the post-Westphalian ‘civilization state’ model, the leading axis of the BRICS alliance. In this model, the state comes back as the arbitrage mechanism for maintaining social harmony. In the West, the Davos model dreamed of a global system of multi-stakeholder governed domains, led by finance, with weakened nation-states and domesticated NGOs creating a ‘rule-based order’. Note the total absence of popular sovereignty in that latter model.

And the disappearance of popular power is of course exactly what has led to the national-populist challenge in the heart of the Western countries, both in the US and Europe, as the new model first stagnated and undermined the living standards of the working class, which stagnated since the 1970s, and now joined by the declining middle classes, whose descent has accelerated since the COVID years. We have reached the stage, in which the old neoliberal elite can only maintain power by reneging on democratic rights and tightly controlling speech online. If they stay democratic, they lose power to the populists, it’s that simple. We should also note that there is a natural ‘sympathy’ between neo-sovereignism of the Russia-China and BRICS type, and the national-populist desire to restore the older and stronger versions of the nation-state.

There are many reasons to doubt that both these alternative socio-political and economic paradigms can deliver on their promises. For the American people, the longer-term promise of re-industrialization will be challenged by the shorter-term reality of accelerating higher prices. Remember, if the welfare state paradigm of sharing productivity gains with the national working class was overturned more or less successfully by the conservative and neoliberal counter-revolutions of the 1980s (Thatcher and Reagan), it is essentially because the de-industrialization was compensated by cheap products through cheap labor in the Global South, and cheap services by importing that same labor through mass immigration. The stagnation of wages was compensated in part through debt and the credit economy, and in the other part through this great cheapening of consumption. It is also doubtful that the American rentier class will play ball and invest in re-industrialization. So there are very big chances that internally, the working and middle classes in the US will be impoverished further, leading to deep social unrest and dislocation. While the global trade wars and retaliation, and military risk, are to be taken into account as further agents of chaos.

So we should expect a period of great swings, great political, economic, and social risk, not to speak of the continuation and intensification of the ongoing culture wars.

Now, how is this related to Cosmo-Localism ?

To briefly recall, I will explain more in Part II, Cosmo-Localism proposes a relocalization of material production, so a move away from a lot of world trade, coupled with a global cooperation through ‘organized networks with commons’, i.e. ‘everything that is heavy is local, everything that is light is global and shared’.

Indeed, what was the greatest weakness and difficulty for envisioning that transformation ? Basically the cheapness of most industrial and consumption goods. Now mind you that the cosmo-local form of localization was never merely based on the romantic idea of ‘back to the land’, but rather to a high-tech synthesis of distributed manufacturing and global digital commons of knowledge, cooperation protocols, and distributed trans-local capital flows. Nevertheless, it was one of the difficulties to see how this model could replace cheap imported goods, at least in the short term.

But what if most of these goods become more expensive? Furthermore, in a context of global demographic implosion, where labor may become equally expensive!

(I leave open the question of how automation and AI will affect these trends, but I do not believe in full automation. I believe in the need for a lot of labor in the future, especially in the context of aging populations and the need for regenerative healing of the damage to the planet.)

That, my friends, is why I believe that Trump might indeed be an ‘accelerationist’ for the cosmo-local opportunities.

The very disruption that he responds to and intensifies, and the unlikely realization of these goals, are strengthening the need for cosmo-local alternatives.

Yes, the BRICS alliance and its state-centric para-global trade is an alternative to Trump’s protectionism, but it has its own difficulties, and so in a context of disruption of global trade, it will force a lot of local populations to rethink where their basic survival goods come from. It is from this logic that I believe the pressure for a cosmo-local transformation will increase and accelerate in the coming two decades.

Bear in mind that synergies between cosmo-localism and state-centric developmental strategies are altogether possible, and I have developed a theorization of this synergy through our work on the Partner-State model and Public-Commons cooperation models.

So what do we mean with Cosmo-Localism? I.e. in more detail.

This is our longish part two. It’s a formal explanation of the logic of the Cosmo-Local alternative, interpreted as the possibility of a alternative way to organize human civilization at this particular stage of the history of civilization.

Part Two: Explaining the logic of the Cosmo-Local alternative

(This is a formal introduction to the topic).

Cosmo-localism is an approach that aims to combine resilient and regenerative forms of localized production,, with access to a globally shared knowledge commons, trans-local protocols of cooperation, and access to forms of capital that are compatible with commons-oriented approaches to local production. Each of the three elements of this definition is an important characteristic.

It is sometimes summarized with the adage:

· What is heavy should be local, and what is light should be global and shared.

(In this context, we refer to ‘appropriate’ forms of localization, it should not be interpreted as an ‘absolute’ injunction. At the P2P Foundation, we talk about the ‘subsidiarity of material production’, i.e the lowest most appropriate level is the right level for organizing its most important aspects.)

Why is this a desirable goal ?

- The current global system of production and trade, is reported to use two thirds of its resource use for transport, not for making. This creates a profound ‘ecological’, i.e. biophysical and thermodynamic, rationale for relocalizing production

- The current system of production is based on mass production, and requires the constant creation of new desires and needs, which need to be created through advertising, and require massive forms of potentially unnecessary material production. Cosmo-local production suggests a move towards ‘production on demand’.

- The current system is ‘closed source’ (i.e. innovations are protected by intellectual property), and is largely carried out by competitive agents that do not share innovations for very long time periods; the required competitiveness of these agents incentivizes behaviors that externalize costs to the public and the state institutions

- There is also a ‘temporal’ element to this analysis: we are no longer in a period of non-problematic and high-growth globalization, but in a chaotic transition with many climate, ecological and geopolitical tensions, which requires de-risking supply chains with appropriate haste.

Advantages of the model

A cosmo-local approach has obvious advantages in this context:

- Relocalizing production saves a sizeable amount of matter and energy

- Production on demand can eliminate the huge impetus to create artificial needs and desires

- If we add open source knowledge, this means that any innovation anywhere in the common network, is instantly available to every node in the network

- In addition, adding mutualizing forms of governance and ownership, can also have extraordinary effects on the amount of needed energy and materials. For example, in the context of shared transport, one shared car can replace 9 to 13 private cars, without any loss of mobility. A ‘factor 20’ movement can be imagined which aims to reduce energy usage by 95%, coupled with significant savings in the use of materials. This movement is already active in various European cities.

The current techno-logical conditions make such a shift eminently imaginable, and technically feasible, although there are still huge social and political obstacles in the way of such a shift.

On the positive side of the ledger:

· Open source technology, now responsible for 80% of all used software, in the form of free software, shared knowledge, and open designs, creates the capacity to share knowledge and experience over networks, rapid collective learning, and accelerated innovation

· Web3 and crypto have created the capacity to fund shared infrastructures in open eco-systems, through processes such as public goods funding; other advances in funding make it possible to move towards bioregional regenerative funding ecosystems

· Maker technology, including advances in 3D printing, make it possible to move towards distributed manufacturing, using a ‘on demand’ logic of production

· Advances in regenerative practices, such as the circular economy, biomimicry, biodegradable materials, make more sustainable production realistic. This includes new paradigms of productive organization, such as the ‘mycelium’ paradigm which has a certain popularity in the Web3 movement.

· The blockchain, as a universal ledger, creates a vast capacity for translocal coordination, and creates a new model of ‘organized networks based on common infrastructure’. This is a new form of post-corporate organization that functions as a meta-container that can integrate market transactions, contracts and cooperation with public authorities, and a vast amount of permissionless contributions.

· A culture of translocal cooperation and mutual learning has been created, with technologically savvy digital nomads potentially being the catalyst for translocal production alliances, while at the same time, local regenerative production and consumption initiatives are exploding at the local level. With the concept of ‘catalyst', I do not necessarily mean they are the founders and creators, but that they can play vital roles as connectors and facilitators between the various locales.

· Millions of people have turned to mutualized, regenerative and resilient local production and consumption practices, in all domains of production.

The actors involved

It may be be useful to distinguish the ‘players’ that we see involved in such a transformation:

· The localist initiators; these are the locally rooted people who express their concern with local supply chains and take local initiatives to remedy the problems that they are seeing, or acting out value choices

· The nomadic elements. Elsewhere, I have distinguished between two potential kinds of ‘nomadic’ players:

o The ‘Nowheres’: these are nomads that are seeking the best options amongst locales, bound to their own agendas only, and arbitraging between nation-states and places. This may be seen as an unsustainable exit strategy, and carries certain dangers. One of them is the perception of parasitical or exploitative activity. A certain ‘rootlessness’ may be attached to this form of human identity.

o The Everywheres are on the contrary nomadic elements that are willing to be of service to cosmo-local productive economic alliances, seeding various locales with the trans-local experience, both of other locales they may have visited, but also of the network itself.

o It is possible to imagine the interplay in the form of two different complementary guilds; While the ‘bioregional’ and local guilds consists of the players who focus on their local geographic role, as part of a local productive economy; the translocal guilds organizes the nomadic members of the network.

· The third important players are the providers of ‘capital for the commons’. In the new cosmo-local paradigm, one can distinguish different ‘economic players’ as well:

o The ‘open source’ contributors, are all those that contribute, in one way or another, to the shared knowledge necessary for the productive project to succeed

o The entrepreneurs, or as we would like to call them, the ‘entredonneurs’. These are all those that add value to the open source common base, and create ‘value for the market’. However, they are all co-dependent on the common pool. This is why the moniker of ‘entredonneur’ makes sense, as they are not merely extracting for their own benefit and profit, but realizing that their success depends on their common advantages through their networked production community.

o In that context, it is important to acknowledge that the new economic institution is not just a corporation, or even a ‘cooperative’, but an ‘organized network with commons’.

o Like the example of the DAO, this is a ‘meta-container’ that can organize at a higher level of integration, non-market (permissionless contributions), market (commodity-based value), but also public players.

o But all of these arrangements also need capital inflows, but a particular kind of capital that is compatible with the development of commons-based networks.

Cosmo-localism as a transformation of the regulatory regime

Elsewhere, we have provided a ‘global history of regulation’, which indicates the systemic characteristics that the new system must have.

The essential and simplified of regulation would be the following:

· a long period of participation of the human in the natural world, without specific protective institutions

· the organized societies of the classical civilizational period, in which the Empire or the Monarchy, or even the Trading State, would limit the power of the markets to disrupt organized society. In this model, the local protective capacity of the local commons was largely respected.

· The capital-state-nation model of the modern period, in which the state is supposed to regulate the market, and subjected to the political ebb and flow of market, state and social power blocs.

· The globalization period since the 1980s, in which transnational financial forces have surpassed the capacity of state forces to regulate them.

In this context, the cosmo-local option is not focused neither on a belief in the total self-regulation of market forces (including in the form of multistakeholder governance alliances as proposed by the WEF ideology), nor just a neo-sovereignist restoration of the inter-nation state system, but on something novel: the creation of a new type of commons-based regulatory mechanism that can operate on a global level.

Goals

In the short term, the cosmo-local option and strategy is concerned with translocally strengthening alliances of locally-oriented regenerative production.

The goal to be imagined is the following:

· On the local level we have the existence of allied local productive actors which can be organized around specific functional domains of activity (say the various provisioning systems such as food, housing, transportation, … ), or perhaps, alliances of complementary local production initiatives, which may seek transnational support and strength, but most importantly access to commons-compatible forms of translocal capital.

· On the trans-local level, we must imagine productive alliances organizing the joint knowledge commons, their protocols of cooperation, collective learning, collective management of jointly held resources.

· The local units have the capacity to invest and co-own the translocal resources of the alliances and commons they belong to; the trans-national alliances have the capacity to direct investment to the local units, and perhaps co-own some part of it. The idea here is a potential ‘entanglement’ between the local and the translocal level, which create new levels of strength and capacity for the local.

· Hence, faced with the potential hostility of nation-states that are under the influence of extractive forces of trans-national finance, the local is no longer just the local, but a local that is also cosmo-local, and can mobilize counter-power.

It is to be stressed that this Cosmo-Localism is not at the outset a monolithic political or societal project, it is not inherently antagonistic to the nation-state; the question of development of these networks and alliances can have a pragmatic character:

· In which circumstance is it best to envisage trans-local alliances that are linked to the functional domain of a particular provisioning system ?

· In which circumstance is it best to envisage a cross-functional alliance ?

Cosmo-localism is compatible with functional city alliances that bypass nation-state levels of organization (for example, say a trans-local city league of FairBnB’s), but it is also compatible with a bioregional reorganization of the physical-productive world, in which bioregionalization is facilitated by the historical and political unifying tradition of the nation-state.

What is crucial in the cosmo-local option is some form of new integration of:

· Reinforced local and functional differentialism; in contrast with the purely standardizing commercial globalization model, it must leave more room for differentialist specificity, which can be both a localist feature (bioregional identity), a trans-local cultural identity (a diasporic project), but also a functional differentiation, i.e. a value based solution for a particular provisioning system.

· Reinforced planetary care: localism on its own cannot resist globalized pressure, nor solve planetary and global thermo-dynamic issues.

The role and achievements of Web3 technologies

It is important to recap what Web3 has already brought to the table in this context:

· A capacity to globally coordinate human labor and fund it

· A universal ledger which can create open ecosystems for non-local coordination, with new accounting systems for contributory labor, 3D systems flow, and thermo-dynamic flow

· Programmable currencies which can represent various value options.

· The capacity to fund its own commons-based infrastructures, i.e. public funding, and even retroactive public funding

· Anti-oligarchic, ‘timocratic’ coordination and decision-making mechanisms, such as quadratic voting, and other new capacities to align incentives between various stakeholders. In Web3, both capital and labor, and other productive factors and forces, can be interpreted and treated as contributions to a common project.

All these techno-social trends are very much underway already.

Review of the obstacles

There are however, also serious obstacles:

· Crypto and impact funding are not finding their way to relocalized and translocal production ecosystems; and are at this stage, hardly involved in real physical production.

· Local commons and digital nomads are not well connected at the present time.

· Local commoners frequently are solely concerned with their local situation, remain small and weak, and do not scale, nor accrue sufficient social and financial power, they remain marginal options.

To put it bluntly, Web3 and the crypto economy is still largely an ‘exit’ play for financial and coding elites, practicing the arbitrage of nation-states, but without much connections to local communities and resilient production; Similarly, local communities engaged in relocalized and regenerative production are not in sync with the mutual coordination capacities developed in the crypto/web3 context.

On the one hand, we have a thriving and well-funded field of Web3 technologies, unconnected and unrelated to actual physical production; on the other hand, we have an explosion of underfunded local production.

We should also add the critique here of current funding mechanisms:

· Classic capitalist investment is habituated to profit rates that depend on the non-recognition of negative externalities, which are left for the citizens or public authorities to solve, and do not recognize many positive contributions, nor the social reproduction costs of societies

· Nonprofit funding maintains the funded in a state of dependency, and it is often politically dependent

· Web3 funding is often done by grants, through complicated processes that favour insiders from within the Web3 movement, and does not reach actual regenerative projects.

The aim of cosmo-localism as a social and political project is therefore to bring these two worlds together and to solve a number of issues that have been described above.