Looking at the evolution of our world through the lens of coordination systems

On the occasion of the Chinese translation of our book, ‘Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto’.

This is the text of the foreword I wrote for the publication of the Chinese translation of our book, ‘Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto’. With thanks to Uncommons and the 706 group for this translation!

The book you are about to read, just recently translated into Chinese, was written some years ago, the bulk of it was written in a kind of ‘Walden 3’ context, in a forest dwelling in the region of Madison, Wisconsin, with the support of the now deceased American sociologist Erik Olin Wright, who authored many books about ‘Real Utopias’, i.e. alternatives that exist within a mainstream normative society, but nevertheless function well enough to hint at new possibilities to organize future societies. It was supplemented by authors living in northern Greece, researchers specializing in the emerging ‘phygital’ realities, i.e. at the intersection of the physical world and the digital ‘virtual’ world .

It is not a book that is narrowly limited to a particular time period however, since it is based on an understanding of what Fernand Braudel called the ‘longue duree’, and others may call macro-history.

Here is why the long durations of history are important:

Joshua Goldstein:

"Structure refers to the deeper forces of social change and conjuncture to the actual course of history. One can look at long-term change (structure), medium-term change (conjuncture), or very rapid change, "the shortest being the easiest to detect" .

Wallerstein's view of long cycles resonates with "structural history." He sees cyclical patterns as a "central part" of "long-term, large-scale social reality." "To seize this reality, we need data over wider space and longer time, and we have to search first of all for the continuities."

"This "structural history," pioneered by Braudel, emphasizes the systemic level of analysis, especially the level of the world as a whole, and examines the traces of long-term forces of change in society. Those who study history, Braudel argues, help society to develop and refine its collective self-temporalization—how we see our society in time. "World time" is Braudel's term for time "experienced on a world scale," which governs certain realities and excludes others. For Braudel, structural history means not only a new time scale but a change in focus, from the political to the economic/social/cultural aspects of history. His interpretations tend toward "geohistory" in which politics is "secondary to other historical ensembles of action" and the emphasis is on "a space ecologically articulated rather than on a nation politically expressed" (Kinser 1981:103). While shifting the focus away from the state and "politics," Braudel (1984:19) also steers clear of the approach in which economics drives all other aspects of society (economism): It would be a mistake to imagine that the order of the world-economy governed the whole of society. . . . An economy never exists in isolation. Its territory and expansion are also occupied by other spheres of activity—culture, society, politics — which are constantly reacting with the economy. Reality is a totality, the "set of sets," in which each set (economics, politics, culture, society) "extends beyond its own area" (Braudel 1984:45)."

(http://www.joshuagoldstein.com/jgcyc13.pdf)

The main author of the book immersed himself in ‘transition studies’ for a few years, i.e. looking at the dynamics of civilizational change, i.e. bifurcations in the evolution of particular civilizations, towards substantially different models and value systems, often the result of going through intermediary ‘dark ages’.

Here as a reminder, is what William Irwin Thompson said about ‘Dark Ages’ and how important they are, because these are actually the periods in which human consciousness changes its form:

“A dark age is characteristic of the transition from one structure of consciousness to another.

Before agriculture, there was a loss of culture in the Mesolithic; gone was the high culture of Paleolithic Lascaux, but not yet come was the high culture of the Neolithic. So in the Exocene weather change, with its 300-foot rise of the seacoast level there was an Atlantean inundation that engulfed the old glacial world. Agricultural society stabilized itself from 9500 to 4500 B.C.E., and then came the Kurgan invasions and the destruction of the undefended agricultural villages of the great goddess. So before civilization, there was a second dark age transition. By 2500 B.C.E., civilization had stabilized itself in the new forms to be found along the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, Indus, and Yangtze rivers. Then before Western civilization, there is the Aegean dark age of 1400 to 800 B.C.E., which expresses the shift from Gebser mythical to mental epoch. Before Western European civilization, there was the dark age of 476 to 800 C.E. And now, before the shift to the integral, we seem to be experiencing our own dark age in which our civilization is disintegrating.”

In such transition periods, and potential ‘dark ages’, old institutions and paradigms gradually cease functioning, and the people who voluntarily or forcibly have to exit these mainstream institutions and realities, find themselves experimenting with new seed forms that can feed and house them, make them thrive, but also give them meaning and relational happiness. The seed forms that matter today, in the opinion of the authors, are not the seed forms that once created what we now know as ‘capitalism’, say for example double entry book accounting, the printing press, or ‘Purgatory’ (an ideological hack to allow making money with money, a previously frowned upon practice) but the seed forms that emerge through distributed networks, i.e. through peer to peer self-organizing of productive communities, using the new capacities of digital networks and their online sharing of knowledge.

You will see insights from the emerging commons-based forms of cooperation such as free software, shared knowledge and open designs, but also of ‘commons-centric citizen-driven urban commons projects, which have grown more than tenfold after the huge systemic crisis of the world economy in 2008. Our hypothesis is that it is important to analyze and understand what citizens are doing to reorganize their life and economics, to see what experiments fail or succeed, to be able to see new social forms that indicate future possibilities.

Note our usage of the concept of the commons, as a key to understanding the insights in this book.

World history should not just be seen as a long series of tensions between market and state forms, or of ongoing competitions between states and firms, or even as a struggle between capitalism and socialism, nor even of their hybridization. Rather it should be seen as an interaction between three institutions: market institutions and practices, state institutions and practices, but crucially, commons-based institutions and practices. While market and state are essentially institutions that are geared towards the extraction of value in a competitive environment, and have been historically prone to the overuse of their local resource base; in contrast, the commons is a perennial counter-institution, managed through local communities, that have been focused on the preservation of local resources, through mutualization and self-governance. This book posits, and explains and documents these trends throughout human history. Thus, our historical thesis is that of a ‘Pulsation of the Commons’, i.e. a cyclic succession of periods in which states and markets dominate, and the commons recede; and periods in which markets and states recede, and the commons returns to the fore, as a way for local communities to insure their survival in more challenging times.

Once you see human evolution through the eyes of the commons, it is not just history that changes, but your present reality, since you can now find solutions that optimize the relation between three institutions, and not just two! What about public-commons partnerships for example, i.e. the ‘Commonification of Public Services’ instead of merely public-private partnerships. What about ‘partner state’ based policies, which seek to augment the autonomy of individuals and collectives in a territory, promoting their wider cooperation in a bioregional context ?

Here are two passages to illuminate the concept of the Partner State:

Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis:

We introduce the concept of the Partner State Approach (PSA), in which the state becomes a 'partner state' and enables autonomous social production. The PSA could be considered a cluster of policies and ideas whose fundamental mission is to empower direct social-value creation, and to focus on the protection of the Commons sphere as well as on the promotion of sustainable models of entrepreneurship and participatory politics...While people continue to enrich and expand the Commons, building an alternative political economy within the capitalist one, by adopting a PSA the state becomes an arbiter, retreating from the binary state/privatization dilemma to the triarchical choice of an optimal mix amongst government regulation, private-market freedom and autonomous civil-society projects. Thus, the role of the state evolves from the post-World War II welfare-state model, which could arguably be considered a historical compromise between social movements for human emancipation and capitalist interests, to the partner state one, which embraces win-win sustainable models for both civil society and market.

Tommaso Fattori adds an important precision:

"Bauwens points out that, to avoid the risk that the concept of partner state be confused with plans to dismantle the welfare state, along the “big society” model: “the peer production of common value requires civic wealth and strong civic institutions. In other words, the partner state concept transcends and includes the best of the welfare state, such as the social solidarity mechanisms, strong educational systems and a vibrant and publicly supported cultural life. What the British Tories did was to use the Big Society rhetoric to attempt to further weaken the remnants of social solidarity, and throw people to fend for themselves. This was not enabling and empowering; it was its opposite.”

(Bauwens M., The Partner State & Ethical Economy, July 2012)

I don’t believe it requires an extraordinary act of imagination or lucidity, to recognize that our present epoch and world society is subject to such extraordinary transitional changes, in fact they are accelerating on multiple fronts; and so, as the book documents, we see an extraordinary resurgence of commons and commoning.

Yet, something fundamental has changed, that makes our transition very different: we have now acquired a tremendous capacity for trans-local self-organization, which has never existed before at such a scale. If human civilization is essentially a geographic arrangement, between the surplus of the land and the cities that it enables, then surely, the creation of a new layer of trans-local, and ‘civic’ (not just business or state cooperation) cooperation, based on digital technologies, is not trivial. This means that in this particular transition process, the commons will be essentially ‘cosmo-local’, and that such cosmo-localism is potentially creating a new world order. With cosmo-local we mean a dynamic that combines local re-localization of material production, based on a de-risking of supply chains, coupled with trans-local cooperation through digital networks. Or simply: ‘what is heavy is local, and what is light is global and shared’.

Access to global commons becomes a key for rapid innovation in open networks. The future institution is neither the corporation nor the older forms of the nation-state, but ‘organized networks with commons’. This form has already created new governance forms such as DAO’s, ‘distributed autonomous organizations’, which are a meta-containers that can collectively coordinate both market, state, voluntary, but also the great innovation of peer production, i.e. ‘permissionless contributions’.

A meta-container is a, in the words of David Ronfeldt, a ‘quadriformist’ form of governance, which ‘transcends and includes’ the previous three forms, tribes, institutions and markets, under the hegemony of the fourth, ‘networks’, now hyper-charged with a new form of technology. Just as state institutions had to wait for writing, and markets for printing, so networks needed the digital form before they could become hegemonic:

“Societies have relied across the ages on four cardinal forms of organization: kinship-oriented tribes, hierarchical institutions, competitive markets, and collaborative networks. These forms have co-existed since people first began to assemble into societies — there was always someone doing some activity using one or more of those basic forms. But each has emerged and taken hold as a major form of organization, governance, and evolution in a different historical era. Tribes were first millennia ago (with civil society becoming its modern manifestation); institutions developed millennia later (e.g., states, armies); then centuries later came market systems for growing our economies — hence modern societies with their three major realms. “If that were the end of the story, our prospects for evolving still more complex societies would be nearing an evolutionary cul-de-sac (“the end of history”). Notice, however, that the network form is only now coming into its own, starting a few decades ago. Network forms have been around, in use, for millennia. But they have lacked the right kind of information and communications technology to enable them to take hold and spread. Each preceding form emerged, in turn, because an enabling information technology revolution occurred at the time — i.e., speech and storytelling for tribes, writing and printing for institutions, telegraphy and telephony for markets. The ongoing digital information technology revolution is finally energizing the network form, enabling it to compete with the other forms and address problems they aren’t good at resolving.”

We have created open ecosystems of translocal cooperation, in which contributors can adapt their behaviors and work to what they can see is needed in the network. Market dynamics and capital enhance the permissionless contributions of many agents in a social-economic network, which can engage in smart contracts with collective bodies just as well. Such ‘transcending and including’ dynamics are the hallmarks of a higher integrative capacity of complex networks, and an antidote to the potential regression into dark age simplifications.

Since the writing of the book, in 2018, these trends have strengthened and accelerated. Bitcoin, the first socially sovereign scalable digital currency, has consolidated and grown in value, along with other cryptocurrencies through which 3.5 trillion dollars of financial value are floating. But whereas the older free software model wasn’t able to easily finance its own collective infrastructure, the blockchain, or ‘crypto’ based economy has largely solved this issue. Through crowdfunding on a global scale, which allows these communities to go beyond banks and venture capital, which previously had a stranglehold on investment, they are now able to fund their own ‘public goods’, i.e. their own commons. Typically, on-chain projects will tax themselves, and send these taxes to common funding pools such as Gitcoin, which then in turn funds the collective infrastructures that the whole ecosystem needs. Self-taxation by networks outside of the state function, that is definitely not a trivial innovation. An enduring ‘collective action’ problem has been solved in these contexts. The state form, nor the multinational enterprise form, whose latest incarnation is Blackrock, may no longer be a vital necessity to scale ‘cosmo-locally’! Note that I am not predicting the demise of these older forms, only a relative loss in hegemony vis a vis ‘organized networks with commons’.

But also don’t forget the tremendous historical importance of the blockchain itself: for the first time in human history, we have a universal ledger, (not just particular private ledgers), i.e. a global open accounting system, which can see its own impacts and externalities. Previously, we could say that accounting had a pretty ‘narcissistic’ function: for corporations, to check their profits and losses, with zero view of their impact on the ecosystem, and for states, to look out for their national wealth, without responsibility for the wellbeing of the wider planet. Today, we have a planetary ledger which can at any moment check your ‘ecological state’, we can see and fund contributions, not just commodified labor; and we see the thermodynamic flows of matter and energy. Every transaction is now in 3D, it shows how you are related to the ecosystem in which you are participating. Positive and negative social and ecological impacts can now be accounted for. This is nothing less than a true thermo-dynamic revolution, affecting the implicit social contract between humanity and the interdependent web of life of which it is a part. It becomes possible to manage ‘global thresholds and allocations’, and avoid costly resource wars.

The urban commons, originally confined to mutualizing consumption, i.e. for example the collective purchasing of organic food from a group of farmers, bypassing intermediaries, are increasingly becoming a productive force, and moving towards ‘mutualizing production’. Sixty percent of renewable energy in Germany has been produced by village-based energy cooperatives, for example. But the bulk of the cosmo-local reorganization of productive assets still remains to be done: it becomes imperative to link up the local regenerative projects, which have difficulties to scale and be financed properly, to the global coordination capacities developed by Web3 communities, i.e. essentially,

• the capacity to organize and fund global knowledge commons for technical and scientific cooperation, i.e. any innovation anywhere becomes an innovation everywhere

• The development of protocols of cooperation for trans-local coordination, such as smart contracts, universal ledgers, etc.., i.e. a radical lowering of coordination and transaction costs

• The financing of the local by the translocal, and the creation of the translocal through the cooperation of many locals.

So this book invites you to look at the evolution of our world through the lens of coordination systems. Our suggestion is that the market-state coordination system (which exists in various polarities dominated by state or market and has dominated human societies for five millenia), is being supplemented by a peer-driven, commons-centric cosmo-local coordination system whereby local regenerative forms of production are coupled to commons-based digital systems.

Since globally, the nation-state format has lost much of its capacity to regulate transnational market forces, it starts making sense to see global commons as the regulatory institution for both market and state, not abolishing them, but making sure they don’t overshoot the natural limits of our planet. Remember, we have argued this in a earlier contribution, i.e. ‘A global history of regulation’.

Bear in mind that thanks to DeepSeek and other forms of open source AI, these productive communities can now use advanced forms of intelligence, without obligatory dependence on large private companies. We literally invite you to imagine a post-civilizational phase of human history, in which geographic civilizational systems find an optimal form of co-existence, with the new trans-local forms of productive cooperation.

Of course, I am not suggesting that this transition will be smooth, even inevitable, and cosmo-local citizens will have to navigate an increasingly disordered world, with huge fluctuations in its systems. Resilience will become more important than optimization and pure efficiency. And we have to ask: who will be the allies of the commoners. But whatever our answers to these political questions, if we do not strengthen our own capacities, we cannot be taken seriously by the powers that be.

So imagine the following, if you are today, already a local regenerative actor, trying to produce meaningful wealth within an ecological and social balance ?

First of all, you will have to rely on bioregional solidarity, the horizontal plane of solidarity, i.e. you are cooperating with all other actors concerned with your bioregion. But you also are connected vertically, i.e. cosmo-locally, with all those that are doing the same thing elsewhere in the world, sharing knowledge commons, cooperation and funding capacity.

Collectively, local actors enable themselves to collectively create global infrastructure, co-owning it, while at the same time, it attracts ‘slow capital’ to grow in resilience and scope. Imagine an entangled web of mutual ownership, at different levels of scale, but entirely compatible with regenerative goals. If you find such a goal attractive, this book will let you think more lucidly about how we get from here to there.

So to conclude, what does it mean to look at human history, ‘through the lens of coordination systems’ ?

It means that governing society means choosing a coordination system, and that each coordination system creates a different way to create and distribute the surplus, determining the nature of its social structure, and particularly, its ruling and managerial class. One can read history, like Michael Hudson, as a long struggle between the two overarching models of East Eurasia, based on a model of harmony and led by kings and emperors relying on a intellectual managerial class, i.e. a state-centric model now renewed in the neo-sovereignist civilization state models put forward by Russia and China, or they can be managed by a private class, in a conflict-recognizing societal model, such as in the market-driven West. Seen in this light, the first world war was a war between the imperial model and the nation-state model, won by the latter, but the second world war was about determining what coordination model was appropriate for a nation-state: democratic capitalism, fascism, or Soviet state-centricity. We are now once again witnessing a competition between the market-centric West and the state-centric model of the West, reflected internally in the West as a tension between globalist neoliberals and nationalist populists. What we propose if of course a Third Way: a patient building, from the ground up, of cosmo-localized alliances of social power, which can first of all balance the powers of the state and market institutions, but eventually, grow the Commons as a cosmo-local and global regulatory set of institutions.

For more information:

• Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto is available as free e-book & low-cost paperback at: https://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/books/10.16997/book33.

• Chinese translation available at:

https://706community.notion.site/P2P-ba75f63483354685a1998adc6389d67b