The Partner State Thesis, and how it is faring in France
A state for the commons, doesn’t it even make sense?
We start with a contextual quote:
Viktor Glushkov on the Two Historical Information Barriers
"In Vitaly Moev’s book-interview “The Reins of Power”, Viktor Glushkov proposed the idea that humanity in its history has passed through two “information barriers”, as he called them using the language of cybernetics. Two thresholds, two management crises. The first arose in the context of the decomposition of the clan economy and was resolved with the emergence, on the one hand, of monetary-commercial relations and, on the other, of a hierarchical management system, in which the superior manager directs the subordinates, and these the executors.
Starting in the 1930s, according to Glushkov, it becomes clear that the second “information barrier” is coming, when neither hierarchy in management nor commodity-money relations help anymore. The cause of such a crisis is the inability, even with the participation of many actors, to cover all the problems of economic management. Viktor Glushkov said that according to his calculations from the 1930s, solving the management problems of the Soviet economy required some 1014 mathematical operations per year. At the time of the interview, in the mid-1970s, already about 1016 operations. If we assume that one person without the help of machinery can perform on average 1 million operations a year, then it turns out that about 10 billion people are needed to maintain a well-run economy. Next, we will present the words of Victor Glushkov himself:
From now on, only ‘machineless’ management efforts are not enough. Humanity managed to overcome the first information barrier or threshold because it invented monetary-commercial relations and the pyramidal management structure. The invention that will allow us to cross the second threshold is computer technology.
A historical turn in the famous spiral of development takes place. When an automated state management system appears, we will easily grasp the entire economy at a single glance. In the new historical stage, with new technology, in the next turn of the dialectical spiral, we are as if “floating” over that point of the dialectical spiral below which, separated from us by millennia, was the period when the subsistence economy of man was easy to see with the naked eye."
- Vasiliy Pikhorovic, paraphrasing Viktor Glushkov
Some context for the interview below:
This week, we present a guest post by Sébastien Shulz, a French commons activist who was interviewed by R. Zachariou for the magazine Ouishare. He is a founding member of the French pro-commons advocacy group, La Société des Communs.
The french article appeared here:
https://www.ouishare.net/article/transformer-letat-par-les-communs
Before republishing this translated version, a few words of intro to perhaps better understand the importance of this topic.
Broadly stated, five thousand years ago, the world essentially shifted from kinship-based tribal arrangements, where the gift economy and communal shareholding were the primary means of exchange value, to the civilizational model, dominated by markets and states. But the earlier models always persisted in the form of local commons. Commons were and are ways to manage local resources, by local communities, for the long term preservation of essential provisioning systems, and as studied by Elinor Ostrom, who won the Economics Nobel Prize in 2009, these were ‘polycentric institutions’, i.e. not governed through market pricing and its private property, nor by hierarchical or democratic command by the state, and its public property. Commons interfaced with markets, for example, the Senegambia fishermen would organize fishing rights as a commons, but would still sell their fish on the market, and with states, which regulated their territories. In pre-capitalist societies, commons were an important but subordinated part of the social order, though under market capitalism, their existence was severely restricted and their influence combated. We have developed a hypothesis, the Pulsation of the Commons, which states that, under ascending phases of societal and civilizational growth, commons tend to decline, as the market-state provides for the core populations, while, in descending phases, the commons re-emerge as a necessary counterforce.
Under capitalist globalization, and today, under a global meta-crisis, the commons are re-emerging. We have argued that today, because of the capacities for digital self-organizing, these commons must be, and are, cosmo-local in nature, combining a renewed local control, with global cooperation of knowledge, and shared global protocols.
We also argue that we have reached a point in human history, where the commons need to be the central institution, because commons preserve resources, protect local communities and the web of life, and because markets and states are by their very nature, ‘extractive’, and their drives towards growth and expansion, do not naturally on their own conform to planetary boundaries.
In this context, the relation between state forms and commons forms are a crucial issue, especially in the period of re-emergence of the commons. In this context, Tommaso Fattori was the first, as far as we know, to develop the concept of the Partner State. But myself and the P2P Foundation collective made it a central part of our conception and strategy for social change.
A partner state is a state form which ‘enables and empowers personal and social autonomy’, which is therefore friendly and supportive of commons-centric organizing by its population. The first systemic implementation of this vision and practice was the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons, which spread to 250 Italian cities and mobilized over one million Italian citizens to improve their neighborhoods and cities, with the support of the city administration and its partners, under a ‘Quintuple Helix’ form of governance, in which the city along with the commercial, non-profit and research sector, coordinate their support.
We have written a report,
Mutualizing Urban Provisioning Systems, which reviews partner state policies, in the context of a tenfold increase of urban commoning in ten years, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Mutualizing_Urban_Provisioning_Systems
As well as a
Commons Transition Plan for the City of Ghent in Belgium, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Commons_Transition_Plan_for_the_City_of_Ghent
But also a similar transition plan at the nation-state level, for the government of Ecuador, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Commons_Transition_Plan_(FLOK_version)
But France has a particularly vibrant ecosystem of policy makers and activists, involved in pushing forward experiments in partner state collaborations, of which the interviewed activist has been a primary expert. He is interviewed here by a translocal group that acts in favor of collaborative economies, called Ouishare.
For more documentation on the key concepts, please refer to:
The Partner State, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Partner_State
Commons-based Policy-making, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Commons_Policy
P2P and Commons-based State approaches, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_State_Approaches
Here begins the translated interview, the questions are in bold:
Is associating State and commons a paradox?
Excellent question. A priori, we can think that this association between State and commons would be a paradox for at least four reasons.
Firstly, if we look at the side of political theory, the modern State was constructed as a guarantor of the general interest, particularly in France, while the commons mainly respond to the interests of the community which takes care of and uses them. .
Secondly, if we take the point of view of political economy, the State is a historical actor in the development of the capitalist economy which has been predatory of the commons. In his writings, Marx shows how the new bourgeois class that emerged in England at the end of the Middle Ages played a central role in the phenomenon of enclosures, that is to say the privatization of land and forests whose use was until then shared, to put them at the service of lucrative productive activities, in particular the breeding of sheep whose wool was intended for the emerging textile industry.
In addition to being a central phenomenon for landed capitalism, enclosure led to a rural exodus, creating a "reserve army" of workers in English cities to fuel the development of industrial capitalism. In the same perspective, academics have considered that States, in particular the United States, played a central role in the appearance of digital capitalism at the turn of the 1980s when they extended intellectual property rights over software. then the cultural content which until then circulated freely on the Internet. By analogy, the jurist James Boyle called this phenomenon the "second enclosure movement" . Whether the state has always favored the capitalist economy rather than the economy of the commons comes down to the classic debate among Marxists between Miliband and Poulantzas: is the state inherently a proponent of capitalism (as Miliband argued) or well it is, but in a conjunctural way (as Poulantzas maintained), because the balance of power leans today in favor of the capitalists, but could, in another conjuncture, be opposed to them .
Third, from the point of view of the sociology of the state, modern bureaucracies were formed by establishing particular modes of organization. According to the sociologist Max Weber, the administration built its legitimacy on the fact that it was based on rational and legal rules (for example, the recruitment of civil servants made it possible to avoid forms of nepotism, the transparency of public markets is supposed to prevent forms of favoritism). But this form of bureaucratic organization can be opposed to the logic of the commons because it is the administrations which establish and enforce the standards, which is opposed to the self-institution of rules by communities of commoners. Throughout the history of the construction of modern bureaucracy, there was resistance from commoners who considered the state bureaucracy to be a source of interference in their activities. Most traditional rules for the use and management of common areas, pastures, water resources, etc. were unraveled in favor of rules which came from administration, territorial division, respect for health or economic standards, etc.
Last paradox, this time which comes from the theory of the commons. Originally, the commons was conceptualized from a critical perspective of the state. Political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who played a central role in the conceptualization of the commons, was a researcher in the academic discipline interested in the analysis of public administration. At the start of her career, she was surprised that the communities of citizens who organized themselves to produce collective services were absent from the work of her colleagues. She therefore carried out many investigations to prove that yes, citizens could self-organize, particularly to manage shared resources, and that they were full participants in public action .
And yet, despite these four paradoxes, over the past ten years we have seen connections between the State and the commons. Public actors are taking up the notion of the commons to try to transform the administration (for example Henri Verdier, now French Digital Ambassador), and conversely, commoners are asking the State to support the commons (for example Michel Bauwens who pleads for a partner-state of the commons).
Beyond these connections, we can see that beyond the paradoxes, there are points of convergence between State and commons. If we quickly review the four points:
From the point of view of political economy, I lean towards a dynamic reading of a State structured by power relations, certainly which lean today in favor of capitalism, and again it would be necessary to clarify what type of capitalism, but part of the balance of power can be reversed in favor of the commons. For example, when Ada Colau became mayor of Barcelona in 2015, she reversed the balance of power a little by recruiting and supporting public officials in favor of the commons and by fighting against actors of digital capitalism like Airbnb.
Concerning the sociology of the State, during the 20th century we saw an evolution of bureaucracies, in particular what is called New Public Management which transformed the administration by incorporating private organization logics. Well, we can think that similarly, developments could take place by incorporating commons-based organizational logics. Some researchers speak of New Public Governance to designate new forms of networked or collaborative public organizations, it is too broad a term, but we can think of reforms of the bureaucracy inspired by the commons going in this direction.
And finally in the theory of the commons, Elinor Ostrom shows that the State must tolerate the rules of the commons for them to be sustainable. Even, in some of her writings, she explains that the State can reinforce certain rules of the commons by transforming them into legislation.
So there are paradoxes, but also convergences, between the State and the commons.
How do the commons transform the State?
First, the commons appear as new legitimate objects for public action (we call them “categories of public action”). Until then, the State was... I wouldn't say blind, but it did not take this category of social object into consideration, except to oppose it as we could see with the enclosure of software in the U.S.. Today, the commons have become objects of attention on the part of local authorities, certain ministries and administrations such as the IGN and the ADEME. This is a first transformation.
Despite the paradoxes, over the past ten years we have seen connections between the State and the commons.
Then, and this is what I studied in my thesis, the commons become an instrument of administrative reform. I will take an example to illustrate it. Decidim is an online citizen participation platform which was set up in 2016 by Barcelona City Hall, with the idea of also making it an instrument to “commonize” administrative practices. Instead of privatizing or keeping Decidim as public property, the software code and associated accounts (Twitter, etc.) were transferred to the Decidim Association which brings together the entire community of developers and users. The town hall had still invested a few million, and the fact of transferring the property to a community was quite new. To finance the association, instead of going through a public-private partnership, they tried to invent a public-common partnership. In the framework agreement which establishes this partnership, it is stipulated that the strategic choices for software development must be made by following the decisions of the Association and not by following the decisions of the town hall. Which is not without its problem: what to do if the community does not want to develop the software according to the needs of the town hall which also finances it? So they had to transform administrative practices, they set up a monitoring committee to allow the administration to keep an eye on the strategic choices of the software, but at the same time this committee does not have much decision-making power, to leave the greatest autonomy to the Association.
When we dig deeper, we see that the commons transform administrative practices at the margins.
If I take a more forward-looking point of view, I think the state could have three roles for, and be transformed in three ways by, the commons.
The State could:
Protect the commons rather than the actors of commercial capitalism. In my association the Society of the Commons, we defend an ordo-communalist state. Rather than the State guaranteeing the free and undistorted market as ordo-liberalism wants, the State could guarantee the free and self-organized commons.
Typically, in Sainte-Soline, the State defends the commercial appropriation of water rather than its pooling...
- Support the commons. This can involve subsidies, legislation or even ambitious public policies.
- Contribute to the commons. For example via public-commons partnerships or via the contribution of public agents to the commons. IGN agents could thus have the mission of contributing to OpenStreetMap.
But isn't there a risk of state disengagement?
Yes, it's a real risk and you have to be wary. This is what happened with the Big Society policy desired by David Cameron in the United Kingdom in 2010. He wanted to stimulate civil society initiatives, it was a lot of fine speeches, but in reality, he took advantage of the participatory rhetoric to disengage the State and reduce public spending in favor of the market.
I think that the State must guarantee the general interest (one among others) by organizing itself through a principle of subsidiarity. If the commons, or organized citizens, manage to respond to a social need by producing a service of general interest, so much the better, but otherwise the State must be there to guarantee that the service is provided. It is difficult to put in place, because public actors will have to be very responsive to movements in society, it is gymnastics to which they are not accustomed, but in my opinion it will be necessary to guarantee public services or of general interest to citizens while allowing their greater involvement.
Defining the contributory logic and how it links it to equality in public services?
Contributory logic is what we also call peer-to-peer or sometimes also crowdsourcing. It is deployed in projects where everyone can theoretically contribute to produce and enrich the resource, like Wikipedia or peer-to-peer file sharing. From a political philosophy point of view, some theorists even consider that the Internet has enabled the advent of a contributory society.
With networks, we are all contributors: Facebook would have no value if people did not contribute by sharing articles, photos, comments, etc. The same goes for the entire collaborative economy: without contributors, Airbnb or Blablacar would have no use value and therefore no exchange value. We are therefore in a contributory society, certainly, but with strong inequalities: on digital platforms the exchange value is captured by private shareholders, in the commons the use value is redistributed to the community, but certain contributions are not are valued by no one, like those of certain women, who contribute to care activities but without any monetary or symbolic recognition.
There are also inequalities in those who contribute...
In the digital world there are completely legitimate feminist and post-colonial critiques which denounce that the contributors are mainly men, white, European and urban. This is reflected on Wikipedia by a greater presence of pages dedicated to European men than to African women, for example.
There are certain areas where equality for all in public services should be guaranteed by the State.
The tensions between contributory logics and the logic of equality in public services?
I will take the example of the BAN, which is a database that brings together addresses and their geographic coordinates. Several administrations had one such as INSEE, Bercy, IGN (National Institute of Geography), La Poste (which has been privatized in the meantime), but it was not unified. At the same time, Google Maps was starting to rise. But no administration moved to create a single base. It was therefore the OpenStreetMap France community which started the project. And then its president was recruited by the Interministerial Digital Directorate to set up a unified database which would be managed and produced in a contributory manner like a commons. The former CEO of the IGN saw a limit in this mode of operation: “the contributor in the city is great, because there are plenty of contributors in dense areas, but what to do with the 97% of the territory where there will be fewer contributors? » This is where a public-common partnership makes sense: in town, the IGN supports the OSM community, and where it is absent, IGN agents will be needed to collect and process the data.
What is central is to maintain equality in public service, and if possible take advantage of contributory logic. This question arises about education. Should schools be common, self-managed by local residents and parents? In my opinion, this would risk reinforcing inequalities because education will be better in certain neighborhoods where parents have more cultural capital (which is already the case, but these territorial inequalities would be reinforced). There are certain areas where equality for all in public services should be guaranteed by the State. However, once we have said that, we can very well think of original modes of public-common partnership. For example, there could be shared vegetable gardens in playgrounds, managed together by students, parents and neighbors. As for knowing which areas should fall under the public, the common, the private, or a hybridization, this will have to be collective and democratic decisions, it cannot be done theoretically.
Do general interest and commons-based interest necessarily come together?
As we have seen, not necessarily. Historian Alice Ingold has worked on the evolution of water management following the French Revolution. It shows how certain water sources were managed in a sustainable manner by local communities who opened or closed their access, who excluded those who did not respect the rules, etc. But with the French Revolution, and in particular the Le Chapelier law of 1791, there was a desire to eliminate these intermediary bodies and to recover the management of these resources by public administrations in the name of a pretension of universality. This water used locally could be useful for an industry in another region. We see here a tension between a "more general" interest supposed to be carried by the State and the interest of local communities .
Another example, housing cooperatives which represent a model of shared ownership of housing (not very developed in France but much more in Switzerland, Austria or Northern Europe). There may be housing cooperatives, which would collectively decide to accept new members based on their ethnic origins. We see that the interest of the commons is very far from the general interest, and the State could have the role of saying that there is a limit to the self-governance of the commons of housing, for example on the discriminatory rules that they could put in place.
We advocate an alliance between a multiplicity of commons (natural, urban, digital, etc.), an ethical market (which does not encroach on the commons), and a partner state (which supports the commons while regulating the market and while being guarantor of the general interest).
What is the role of public agents in common projects?
This requires a reconfiguration of their role. Agents have resources specific to the administration: proximity to political power, capacity for action (budgets, premises, etc.) and symbolic legitimacy granted to their words. They can put these resources at the service of the commons. But with the risk of doing too much, taking up too much space, and disrupting their governance. For the moment, it is a balancing act because there are not yet really established doctrines and rules. But I think that they will appear over time, to establish relationships between public and common actors, as we saw in the case of Decidim which created a precedent within Barcelona City Hall.
This transformation will also require reviewing the training of public officials, as recommended by Elinor Ostrom. We must move away from the logic of “the civil servant works”, a phrase that I have often heard during my investigations. Public officials must be trained to listen, dialogue and collaborate with communities of citizens. They must also be trained to have greater creativity and legal agility. Partnerships with the commons will involve varied and heterogeneous agreements that will have to be invented.
Do the commons really participate in the empowerment of citizens?
On the one hand, yes. The commons allows citizens to participate in projects of collective interest and therefore to have more power to act and make decisions. I am a member of the cooperative supermarket La Louve, in the 18th arrondissement in Paris. We can decide to add products to the shelves, we can have collective discussions in the General Assembly on budgetary choices, HR or even on the margin rate. I am also a member of Enercoop for electricity, Crédit Coopératif for my bank. I don't actively participate in the governance of these structures, but I theoretically could if I wanted to.
But on the other hand, the commons does not give power to all citizens. The La Louve supermarket is anchored in the popular 18th district but mainly frequented by “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians) from the 19th district. The team is trying to put things in place to attract more disadvantaged populations but without much success so far. Wikipedia has also been criticized, rightly, from a feminist and decolonial perspective: white men are over-represented among contributors, and consequently in articles. More broadly, it takes time, resources and certain skills unevenly distributed in society to contribute to the commons. Inclusivity is a major commons value, so we must tackle it.
It can also include citizens in political decisions...
The commons have the virtue of acculturating and training citizens to be part of collective projects with democratic governance. They are thus confronted with contradictory debates in general assembly, they learn to argue their position, to have their say, to negotiate and to make concessions... Being part of a common, but this is also the case of associations and cooperatives, it politicizes people. There is numerous work in political science which shows the correlation between associative investment and political participation 6 .
Within our collective Society of Commons, we recommend training students in digital commons, which would allow them not only to be active and not passive users of digital technology (even if some already have very creative uses), but also to learn to cooperate or make collective decisions. If I take the example of shared vegetable gardens in schoolyards, the students would learn to manage this shared green space together, to debate, etc. Civic education would benefit from education in the commons.
Can the commons be a response to current environmental and social issues?
Absolutely, they already are. From an ecological point of view, Ostrom has clearly shown that under certain conditions the management of natural resources in common is more sustainable than by the public or private sector. We can clearly see that this will be increasingly important, particularly for water resources. This is also the case in health: experts believe that we will face other health crises. A lot of public money has been poured into Covid-19 vaccines and we find ourselves with a large part of them being under patent. It is no longer possible to operate like this. We must draw inspiration from the model of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DnDI) which brings together a set of actors such as the Ministry of Malaysia, the Pasteur Institute and Médecin sans frontières, but also industries like Sanofi, to develop drugs for markets with little or no profitability. The drug formulas are transferred to drug producers for very low and affordable prices by local populations in a logic of social and health justice. To date, more than twenty drugs have been jointly developed and distributed to several hundred million patients around the world, for example to fight malaria.
But at the same time, the commons are not a solution to everything. Market allocation of resources can be effective in some areas. Benoît Borritz, who works on money and the commons, gives the example of financing restaurants in a street. The local government, or even neighborhood residents, may try to decide that there will be an Italian restaurant, a Japanese restaurant, and a Mexican restaurant. But if we have to decide everything like that, we risk having very bureaucratic lives. We can also let restaurateurs establish themselves freely, and those who meet a demand stay, the others close, the logic of the market can prove quite effective here.
Like Michel Bauwens, we advocate an alliance between a multiplicity of commons (natural, urban, digital, etc.), an ethical market (which does not encroach on the commons), and a partner state (which supports the commons while regulating the market and guaranteeing the general interest). In this society of the commons, I think it is important to maintain a political layer. I can be part of all the commons that affect me: my supermarket, my children's school, my cooperative business, but it remains very horizontal, I would not discuss the major political orientations with the whole of society, or I think it’s central. There will be tensions between the local democratic legitimacy of the commons and the national democratic legitimacy of the State, but this seems healthy to me in a living democracy.
A final word?
If we look at the broader state of society, we see that individuals are very distrustful of the state, but they remain very committed to public service. They are also suspicious of the market, as demonstrated by the conspiratorial reactions to the pharmaceutical industries against Covid-19. In my opinion, we must move away from binary solutions of more or less state or more or less market. We must succeed in creating a new democratic horizon, which we call common, which re-anchors economic, social and environmental issues in society, and where people consider that politics is closer to them.
The commons are a huge source of hope. I was in Sainte-Soline a few months ago, the members of the Confédération Paysanne wore a t-shirt where we could read “Water is a common, let's defend it, let's share it”. When the second largest agricultural union politically demands the commons, we sense that something is moving. Our mission is to make this discourse intelligible and desirable, to disseminate it so that citizens, elected officials, entrepreneurs, students can appropriate it. I often hear people say “the commons are complicated, we don’t know what they are”. In fact, there are commons everywhere: mutual solidarity societies, cooperative banks, shared gardens, Wikipedia, local currencies, citizen energy cooperatives, even the dishes in a shared apartment (I often give the example to my students)! It is a shared resource, around which we collectively set rules, so that we can all use it. People know the commons without necessarily knowing that they are called that. But of course there are debates about the society they draw. It's like democracy. We know very well that it is the power of the people. Afterwards, there are debates on the form that democracy should take: does it involve a separation of powers, representation or direct participation of citizens, independence of the media, a citizen-initiated referendum?
Now, we have to translate this into a political project, and that is the work of associations, parties, unions. We must build together the society of the commons that we desire. With our Collective we are organizing an event to move in this direction: mark February 2 and 3, 2024 in your calendars, more information to come!
I really wonder that any of the above is based on substantial anthropological/archeological evidence or understanding therof...I just finished reading David Graeber's works on debt and bs jobs and history and it makes me extremely suspicious of this article's statements...
I think the best summary is from Daniel Bitton, he's listed amongst the critics I've excerpted here, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Dawn_of_Everything
His own original site has an in-depth treatment.