[-empyre-] from the personal to the political, a p2p confession

[naxsmash]

Michel, thank you, this is incredibly inspiring.

-christina

On Jul 27, 2011, at 8:10 AM, Michel Bauwens wrote:

> I'm not much of an art expert but rather the kind of person that gets excited about ideas and visions, but those ideas and visions are very much alive and present in my mind .. So I thought that I'd focus my first contribution on political aspects of our work at the p2p foundation. I will comment later more specifically about piracy and its political-cultural aspects. (well actually, after finishing this piece, it turns out I went in personal confession mode, something I have actually never done outside this forum)
> 
> I hope people won't feel to uncomfortable with the personal background, which is part of the story.
> 
> It all begin a first time about 14 years ago, when I had a 'annus horribilis' that really shook me to the core, I think we're talking about the period 1996-97. It was a year where my father died, my mother got diagnosed with Alzheimer, the love of my life broke up, I discovered some of my business associates had a criminal background and had gone off with the business funds; a movie I had been working on for three years, TechnoCalyps, got stalled because of a fight between the producer and the director, cutting off my escape from the corporate world; and I had a major row with my intellectual guru of the time, Ken Wilber (integral theory). Of course, serious health consequences also ensued. It basically totally floored me and constituted my mid-life crisis. For me this is the time when you realize your life is half over, and you realize that if you don't realize the dreams and ideals of your youth, you will die cynical and disappointed. It was now or never.
> 
> The way I saw it then, was that the major issue for me had been that I had given up on my ideals for the creation of a better world, as corny as this may sound. It seemed to me that the passionate energy involved in that desire, had been buried and was working against me, and that if I wanted to discover from the combined crisis, I had to reconnect with this source of energy. It was also the time when I became increasingly convinced that all the objective indicators of human and social life, were turning negative, and that our civilisational model was hitting a wall.
> 
> The first thing question then was really, but how do we change this overall situation as a single individual, how do we engage without actually making the situation worse.
> 
> As a youth, I had been a radical leftist, active within the rather sectarian Militant tendency, then rather well-known in the UK. But this engagement had led nowhere, was followed by the neoliberal counterrevolution of the 80s, and had personally exhausted me. Since I could not change the world, I had concluded, by the time I was 23 and after seven years of intense engagement, the only option was to change my 'self'. The problem though was that I had emotionally broken with that type of life, and with Marxism, but had not really gone through a rational process of thinking through what was wrong with it, I had rather rejected it as a whole, even ritually burning a suitcase full of my books (yes, I know, a crying shame!). Instead, I began a personal exploration that brought me in touch with, more or less in sequence, the human potential techniques, eastern spiritual practices and theories, the western esoteric traditions (been a rosicrucian, a mason, a templar, had a alchemy teacher and drew Tarot cards), ending with a 3 year period of self-study of western philosophy by the time I was 30. This may seem pretty fast, but I think I have a capacity of absorption of ideas and concepts that is probably beyond the average. My method was really participant observation, going into a movement fully and without reservation, practice the injunctions, see what it did with the bodymind and my personality structure, and when I thought I had absorbed its most important core elements, move on. By my thirties then, feeling substantially transformed, I embarked on my business career, not because of a love of the corporate world, but because I felt it was an area of cultural dynamism, in which I could 'create' something and make something of my life. That was the period then that ended with that big personal crisis.
> 
> In any case, as I decide to go back to my roots and my youthful engagement, I felt the need to study Marx again, but at the same time, I dreaded the effort of going through not only the primary texts, but also the major interpretations of where it had gone wrong. Luckily then, I stumbled upon Negri's Empire … It's not that I cannot find fault with the approach, but here it seemed to me was at least a work with a sweeping vision, a positive view of the potential for change, and that had gone through a critique of Marx …
> 
> It is after this reading experience, which took me about three months of internal struggles, that I decided to follow a basic intuition: that the isomorphism of peer to peer, which I literarally saw emerging everywhere, this great horizontalisation of human relationships through massive self-aggregation around common value and affinities, was te lever of change I had been looking for. That civil society had now become productive, and was no longer a derivative of the value creation of the corporate world, but rather the other way around, that social cooperation was becoming increasingly primary, and that the older vertical institution were living increasingly 'off' this new productivity.
> 
> I decided by the end of 2002, that I had to finally quit the corporate world, take a 90% pay cut (actually 100% at first), and try to develop this basic intuition in all its consequences. With hindsight, the great crisis of 1996-97, when all had gone wrong that could go wrong, had been a true 'born again' moment in my life, which after a period of restoration and maturation, led to the decision to create an autonomous life around a core belief and intuition. Lucky for me, I had by then met my new thai wife, a continual source of domestic happiness, and when I asked her if she'd agree with moving back to her home country, answered: don't worry, we will always have food and shelter, what else do we need … This was the final go ahead, I decided to quit my job by October 2002, taking my wife, new son, my mother with Alzheimer, to Thailand.
> 
> I took a two year sabbatical, consisting of six months of travel within Europe, six months of studying Thai history and culture at the local university and one year of full-time reading, focusing on the long haul of history and in particular the phase transition at the end of the Roman Empire .. (and finally getting to read the postmodern authors I had always missed out on). In 2005, I wrote my first manuscript on peer to peer; by 2006, I started the online ecology, gradually introducing the wiki, the blog, the social bookmarking … Somehow, though it is not at all financially sustainable, it seems to have been the good decision, and as the world continued to evolve, p2p emerged as more than a marginal effect, people were slowly attracted to the basic ideas of the p2p foundation, and I could build a community of some type, and this year, a cooperative to achieve some type of sustainable livelyhood for the precarious researchers which hover around us … At home, the experience of my thai extented family, the magical-mythical forms of consciousness overlayered with a whiff of postmodern capitalism, the 19 cats, 3 dogs, porcupine, birds and fish, the occasional visting monkey ; together with the online network, the equipotential cooperation and the lecture tours, give me a quite extraordinary relational wealth, not bad for a single child of two orphan parents … In some way, I feel like a 'political artist', not that I'm particularly creative culturally and artistically, but I have to live, from my 'creations', sell my performances, and go through the precarity that is the lot of most artists and creators ..
> 
> Anyway, what then, is the p2p foundation, it is really nothing else than the ambitious attempt to create a new vehicle for the world revolution, not the only one, but hopefully one that can be a positive factor; a pluralist organisation, that does not know the 'answers' but facilitates the ongoing dialogue around those answers, bringing very varied sorts of people together … Precisely because of my convoluted past, having touched many different ideological and lifeworlds, I can bring together on the same table, a 'zionic' social economy mormon, a conservative catholic distributist, a deep ecological permaculturist, a unrepentent marxist, a anti-capitalist 'freed market' mutualist, and many other strange manifestations of the human desire for change. Rather than looking for universal answers, we are looking for commonality of desire. But this ongoing effort is helped by the 'objective' changes in society, and by the new class realities of knowledge workers.
> 
> I cannot help but be truly convinced that “p2p” is the chaotic attractor that we need to reformulate the emancipatory vision that is appropriate for the 21stcentury. Technology is NOT the change, but it enables struggling creative minorities to find new ways to outsmart the forces that are against emancipation and that are presently literally and physically, destroying our biosphere. As the system will increasingly go in crisis mode, these struggling minorities will be joined by the desperate majorities, who turn to p2p solutions not out of any idealism, but as the necessary tool for resilience and survival. The key question then becomes, how do create a synergy between the new p2p thinking, the construction of new ways of life, and the mass mobilisations that are the inevitable result of the breaking of the social contracts on which capitalist life was based until now?
> 
> 
> -- 
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> 
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> 
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> 
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naxsmash
naxsmash at mac.com


christina mcphee

http://christinamcphee.net
http://naxsmash.net