The Value Exchange podcast out now!
We had the most wonderful opportunity to spend some time in conversation with Michel Bauwens, Founder and Vision Co-ordinator of the Peer to Peer Foundation and author of P2P, A Commons Manifesto. We covered SO much but in reality probably only scratching the surface of his research. The headlines are that we are facing a time of descent as a society, but there are solutions, alternative economics and planetary accounting that we must adopt. Embrace our stewardship of the Commons and most importantly of all, Keep the Faith, take action and there is light at the end of the tunnel. Something beautiful can blossom if we take care of it. Some great stories from Michel which can inspire us to do the job we need to do “We are the mediating agents to create more green and awareness in the universe”
For more information on Michel Bauwens visit:
Website: https://p2pfoundation.net/
Introduction to Commons Economics: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Introduction_to_Commons_Economics
WATCH/LISTEN/READ NOW
Youtube video – Episode 9 – Michel Bauwens – We are the Gardeners of the Planet and we have a role to play(click to watch)
Podcast – Episode 9 – Michel Bauwens – We are the Gardeners of the Planet and we have a role to play (click to listen)
Transcript – scroll to see text below
TRANSCRIPT – Episode 9 – Michel Bauwens – We are the gardeners of the planet and we have a role to play
00:00:09:27 – 00:00:37:26
Rob Pye
Welcome to this edition of the Value Exchange. I’m here with my co-host, Annabelle Lambert, as always. And our special guest today is a gentleman who I respect tremendously. I’ve known for years and years called Michel Bauwens, and Michel and I have sort of crossed paths. He is originally from Belgium. He now lives in Thailand. He’s worked all over the world.
00:00:38:09 – 00:01:36:12
Rob Pye
He’s written books, he’s authored many fantastic articles, one of which spurred me to kind of get him back here on the show today in exploring the theme of the Commons. We’ve recently, in a previous episode just interviewed Guy Standing, who’s just written a fantastic novel, not novel, book called The Blue Commons, and really continuing that theme of the commons. Michel, many, many years ago founded a website called the P2P Foundation, the Peer to Peer Foundation, which has a wiki site called P2P Foundation Dot Net and is really a repository of knowledge that Michelle has been building up over the years about what the world might look like in a peer to peer context.
00:01:36:12 – 00:01:47:16
Rob Pye
Now with that really bad introduction, I’m just going to ask Michel to give us a little thumbnail using his words because I’ll never do justice of who he is.
00:01:47:16 – 00:01:53:24
Michel Bauwens
So I’ll briefly introduce myself then. So I’m Belgian. I’m I’m unfortunately getting 65.
00:01:54:18 – 00:01:56:21
Michel Bauwens
Which, you know, is…
00:01:57:03 – 00:02:24:09
Michel Bauwens
Starting to count. I, I moved here 20 years ago in Thailand, but I’ve travelled all over the world, basically also giving workshops around the two themes that I work with, Peer to Peer and the Commons. And I think I best explain more, you know, to my ideas than than saying more about myself. But, you know, I’ve been in business, I’ve been in government.
00:02:24:09 – 00:02:46:27
Michel Bauwens
I had a very rich and experienced professional life. And 20 years ago I was 46. I think, maybe a bit later, I basically asked myself the question, I was working for a big telco and, you know, in my part of the solution or am I part of the problem? And I thought I’m not part of the solution here.
00:02:46:27 – 00:03:14:03
Michel Bauwens
This is not moving in the right direction. You know, all the the health indicators of the planet are red. But also the social indicators. You know, this was like the beginning of the mid nineties when things were getting hot again with the globalization movements and, you know, the Zapatistas in Mexico, but also with things psychologically the way people were experiencing business was getting very unhealthy.
00:03:15:10 – 00:03:41:25
Michel Bauwens
I felt that the stress levels were very, very, very high and like it wasn’t going in the right direction. And the temporal vision of where we were going as a company was shrinking all the time. And, you know, it’s like three months was the furthest we could even think of. Everything else was like speculation, you know, didn’t want to get involved in that anyway, so.
00:03:43:00 – 00:03:46:29
Michel Bauwens
So let me explain to you what Peer to Peer is and what the Commons is and how they are related.
00:03:47:18 – 00:04:20:26
Rob Pye
But before before we do that, just you’ve just spurred a different question because that’s the way these things go. And so Annabelle and I were working together in EY in the late nineties, again 20 years, before we get into “why the P2P Foundation?” I think maybe if I’m how old am I, sixty- , Fifty-seven, which you know, is old probably for my brain to be a little tiny bit addled.
00:04:21:06 – 00:04:54:17
Rob Pye
But in the time in the last 20 something years I think that the, and this is your reflections on this, I’ll give my reflection, Annabelle’s reflection just instantly. Number one, I wasn’t as confident of speaking truth to power as I was 20 years ago as a director in EY. Like you with the telco, this is not really the way it should be developing.
00:04:54:17 – 00:05:27:29
Rob Pye
And and although the indicators perhaps macroeconomically, climate change, social welfare, social are not going in the right direction, you know, arguably they’re going in the wrong direction, I feel that society’s consciousness, you know, Greta Thunberg, you know, this sort of the mental health as a you know, even talking about mental health, all of it, you know, the collective consciousness of people has been raised up beyond recognition.
00:05:27:29 – 00:05:45:09
Rob Pye
So in any change, you know, you need to be able to talk and externalise and then act. So I think we’re still going in the wrong way. But I do think in the 20 years we’ve been pushing this, so Annabelle have you got any quick 20 year? And then Michel.
00:05:45:24 – 00:06:08:21
Annabelle Lambert
Said, No, no, except my own, you know, So I would, you know, on my value exchange journey, which is like not finished my own transition to this, you know, utopia, which I’ll never reach, but I know that. So that’s fine. So every iteration is I feel I feel that very point. I always consider myself, you know, I grew up in the eighties in the UK.
00:06:08:21 – 00:06:35:07
Annabelle Lambert
You know, Thatcher was a big part of my life when I was a teenager and I felt those requirements, you know, what was being asked of everybody at that time to to, you know, be yourself, go out there, you can do it. Everybody can achieve this. No, no barriers, all this stuff. And so I think when I first, you know, worked with Rob and first I have the thoughts of well, actually, I’m this is about me and what I can do and how I can position myself.
00:06:35:18 – 00:07:02:21
Annabelle Lambert
And I feel at that point that was about me. That was quite selfish. I was from that selfish generation of people and now I’m like 24 years on, I feel I’ve moved like 180 degrees in my life. And I feel the world, you know, I’m seeing in my bubble now, in my bubble, which is my bubble, you know, I create it, that people are calling on business, you know, to act differently, be more social.
00:07:03:20 – 00:07:17:16
Annabelle Lambert
And of course, business is nothing more than just people doing something together, you know? So. So yeah, I feel we’re moving. The world is moved a tiny little bit in that time, are my observations.
00:07:18:05 – 00:07:20:27
Rob Pye
Michel, 20 years in a sentence, what have you seen in 20 years?
00:07:21:07 – 00:07:24:09
Michel Bauwens
I’m I’m a bit less optimistic than I used to be.
00:07:25:21 – 00:07:28:02
Michel Bauwens
No!!!
00:07:28:19 – 00:07:52:18
Michel Bauwens
You know, I don’t disagree what you said about, you know, growing awareness. But I do think we live in a time of disintegration. And so I would say this like two waves and one wave is definitely going down, which is like the mainstream, you know, institutional wave, which is losing the legitimacy. You know, people don’t trust elections, they don’t trust the journalists.
00:07:53:01 – 00:08:22:22
Michel Bauwens
So it’s definitely something like the you know, the glue that holds our society together is fragmenting. And I think that’s a serious, serious problem. But the fragmentation, this is a good nose of fragmentation is always a condition for new ordering. Right. So, you know, when the the rain falls from the cloud before it becomes a crystal, snow crystal, it actually has to disintegrate and then reorganise itself.
00:08:23:16 – 00:08:45:12
Michel Bauwens
So it just it’s a matter of how you look at it. But I do think we are in the descending wave of civilizational decline and what what matters at that time is to look at the seed forms which present a new logic that is struggling to to be born but is not born yet. And therefore we live, as Gramsci’s said, in a time of monsters.
00:08:45:23 – 00:09:08:28
Michel Bauwens
So I think we do live in a time of monsters. I think, you know, there’s a lot of toxicity around, especially on social media. It’s very hard to have the kind of calm discussions that I would have even five years ago. So I kind of a bit lost my hope in a smooth transition. I’m much more also because I’ve been I’ve been studying history and macro history.
00:09:09:11 – 00:09:24:00
Michel Bauwens
I’m much more aware of how difficult this previous transitions actually where so that before you get to the other place, you know, you really have to go to the bottom. And and so, you know is that optimistic?
00:09:24:18 – 00:10:05:05
Rob Pye
Can I interrupt one more time? Because because I think the you know, we as humans, I made this point in that tiny little blog that I made. You know, it could be black, could be white. You know, it’s like whatever you say or think, somebody would think the opposite of that. But that from my perspective, what you’ve said is not necessarily negative in that if you’re in a transition society, then, you know, something has to go in order for something to come now and unless we and I promise we’re going to get on to peer to peer and the commons in just one second.
00:10:05:18 – 00:10:33:27
Rob Pye
But but in terms of what is going to decline in terms of to make way for something new, if all we think of is decline, we might think of anarchy as an end game. And I don’t mean violence, so I mean anarchy in an intellectual sense of don’t harm anyone and don’t have any institutions, have no structures, governmental, you know, NGO, charity or whatever.
00:10:34:02 – 00:10:58:04
Rob Pye
So in the purist sense of anarchism as an ideology, some people might say we have, you know, Western democracies, you know, global capital, liberal liberalism, neo liberalism and and actually the only thing out of this crisis is, is going to be nothing AKA anarchism
00:10:58:06 – 00:11:01:15
Michel Bauwens
Well, this is this is not what I believe.
00:11:01:15 – 00:11:06:15
Rob Pye
And so I’m now going to give you what the peer to peer foundation, and what might come next?
00:11:06:20 – 00:11:34:17
Michel Bauwens
Yeah I and I think it’s it’s it’s an important answer to what you’re asking. So let me first explain what peer to peer is. So I think there’s something fundamentally new in our in our history, and that is the capacity for non territorial coordination. It’s something that started first maybe in the seventies, with a capacity for big multinationals to reorganize their supply chain on a global scale.
00:11:34:17 – 00:12:05:06
Michel Bauwens
And that gave us neoliberalism basically a, you know, a globalization of of production and consumption. But then in 93, with the Web, the democratization of the networks, what we get is something that has never happened before, which is that a small group dynamics, the small group coordination capacity that people had in a village where they could trust each other becomes scaled up.
00:12:05:06 – 00:12:25:03
Michel Bauwens
So, for example, you you look at Linux, which is an open source, you know, operating system that is program that’s free software. So it’s free to share. All the code can be shared by everyone. It’s 20,000 people. I’m not sure about the number, but you know, let’s just take that. But you then look at how it’s done. It’s groups of four people.
00:12:25:22 – 00:12:53:25
Michel Bauwens
And so groups of four people are able to globally coordinate their activity. And so this is fundamentally new, because if you look at civilization, what is civilization? Civilization is the way to organize production based on the territorial difference of city and country. You know, the farmers produce the food and then the cities produce the symbolic, the art, the culture.
00:12:53:25 – 00:13:02:22
Michel Bauwens
The technical knowledge. It gets a bit more complicated with but it’s that’s basically the physical geographical model. And so what we are doing…
00:13:02:22 – 00:13:26:03
Rob Pye
So let’s just let’s pause, let’s pause there. Yeah. So Annabelle is not a geek, so I want to just be a bit careful about Linux on GitHub. So non territorial coordination. So here I am in Surrey, you are in Thailand, You know, we’re using Internet to actually, you know, you don’t have to fly over here.
00:13:26:03 – 00:13:40:08
Rob Pye
We don’t need to sit in the room. We don’t need to live and breathe and eat in the same way. Coordinating a conversation for a particular purpose. There’s three of us. So, you know, groups, four. Annabelle any come back on that, because I’m going to slow Michel down.
00:13:40:08 – 00:14:08:25
Michel Bauwens
So they’re basically, you know, in the last 400 years, there’s been like a competition between two ways of organizing our society, which is the state and the market and, you know, the state is about either democratic or authoritarian planning and decision making where, you know, whatever the process is to arrive at a decision, one decision is made, a hierarchy kicks into effect to carry out whatever was decided.
00:14:09:19 – 00:14:39:09
Michel Bauwens
And on the other hand, the idea of prices to coordinate market activities in a more decentralized fashion. And, you know, in reality they’re mixed together like a big multinational is a mix of markets and actually hierarchy, etc., etc.. But this was, you know, where the world was. And so you have a 400 year struggle. You know, what’s Karl Polanyi calls liblab either free the market from society or re-embed the market into society.
00:14:39:09 – 00:15:01:04
Michel Bauwens
You know, the the left and the right basically in economic terms. And I would say now we are inventing a third mode of coordination, which I called Stigmergy. I didn’t invent the word, which is coordination through a mutual signaling. So if you go to Linux or Wikipedia, you know, whatever the other qualities and critiques you can have on these systems.
00:15:01:04 – 00:15:24:14
Michel Bauwens
But the basic fact is that I can go on Wikipedia or I can go on Linux and see directly what needs to be done. I don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. I can say I’m going to write an article because it’s not in there yet or I’m going to propose rectification because I think they’re wrong, right? And you can do that with a bug.
00:15:25:00 – 00:15:50:00
Michel Bauwens
I mean, a software bug. And and that’s new, you know that the capacity to the thousands of people, all of the world have to create something an infrastructure together that has that’s going to be completely related to the physical world because the digital is the mediation, you know, between knowledge and actually the actual carrying out of something that is that is really in you.
00:15:50:00 – 00:16:13:15
Michel Bauwens
I mean, it only exists in in a village where you could talk to each other and mediate, you know, because you know everybody you trust everybody. As soon as we scaled up to civilization, we introduced centralization and hierarchy, Right? And so I consider this peer to peer thing, not just a detail, but something that is completely rearranging the decks.
00:16:14:03 – 00:16:45:14
Michel Bauwens
And I would argue, okay, this may be a bit controversial, but I’ll say it anyway, that you can look at history as a struggle between coordination systems because each coordination system has its elite right? So Michael Hudson would say in his book called The Decline of Western Civilization, which is a the title is a whole program. It says, okay, we had Eurasian continents, you know, with the imperial forms within that group, which is the father of the nation.
00:16:45:20 – 00:17:07:24
Michel Bauwens
And he will take care of everybody. And it’s the harmony based model. And the market is kept small and the people are protected from the predations of the market. So they have jubilees, clean slate legislation. So that is very limited. You know, you can we cannot be enslaved to that in these types of societies in the long term.
00:17:07:24 – 00:17:36:09
Michel Bauwens
And then in the in the West we had the Greeks invented, basically the creditor class came to power and that created revolution, which is Athenian democracy. So in the West we have a market based, antagonistic, antagonism based society with democracy in the market. And, you know, you can look at World War One and say, well, actually what we see there is that the Imperium was eliminated, right?
00:17:36:20 – 00:18:04:19
Michel Bauwens
The Ottomans and the Austro Hapsburg Empires were destroyed. World War Two was a competition between three methodologies to manage industrial society, the fascists, the communists and parliamentary democracy. And Ukraine, I would say, is the you know, is the Eurasian state sovereignist, states centric vision of the world versus the Western vision of the world. And the global South is positioning themselves in that struggle.
00:18:04:24 – 00:18:37:03
Michel Bauwens
Right. And but both have a problem. Both are based on a rivalry for scarce resources. Whether you do it through market competition or it with trade rivalry, you end up with potential war because we are entering a descending phase of civilization. We are in overshoot, right? So we entering in a descending phase with less resources available and so either we can fight for it or we can make agreements around it.
00:18:37:20 – 00:18:40:15
Michel Bauwens
And so I argue for the third modality.
00:18:41:27 – 00:18:53:21
Rob Pye
So before we get onto that, so let’s just hold that thought because this is going to be a lot for people. So if I if I summarize it and Annabelle please
00:18:54:14 – 00:18:54:28
Annabelle Lambert
I’ll join in.
00:18:55:13 – 00:19:20:15
Rob Pye
Now, we’ve got we’ve got two competing ways to organize society. One is market economics, which is essentially, you know, this goods and services. Like economists say, if it doesn’t have a price, it has no value. So air no value, no price, no value. So natural resource is no value. And on the other hand, you’ve got a state based system.
00:19:20:15 – 00:19:44:09
Rob Pye
However you organize it, whether it’s parliamentary democracy, whether it’s authoritarian or whatever, which is sort of based on this paternalistic state model. And then you’ve got this sort of interplay in terms of how by how you optimize resources. You said that with the Internet technology, there’s now a new way to organise, co-ordinate activites.
00:19:44:24 – 00:20:12:21
Michel Bauwens
Exactly, so let me interject a like a side argument that will make that very clear. So I consider Marxist states to be extractive institutions so they create a surplus to growth or conquest or higher productivity, and they always function in cycles. So if you look at history and this is very well documented, this is not controversial like Secular Cycles from Peter Turchin is a good example.
00:20:12:21 – 00:20:36:24
Michel Bauwens
If you want to document yourself on that. You know there are these A and B cycles in the economy and society where, you know, in the A phase, everything goes well and you become more productive and you get more land than you, you know, you, you get this dynamism, but then you overshoot, you use too many resources, you have too many people, and then you enter into the descending phase.
00:20:36:24 – 00:21:01:02
Michel Bauwens
Right? And so here’s my theory Market and states dominate in the in the ascending phase, but the commons where historically the preservative and regenerating institution that heal societies when it was in the B phase. And you know let me give you an example and it’s a bit far away. It’s Japan in the 16th century and it’s a fascinating story.
00:21:01:02 – 00:21:25:13
Michel Bauwens
So, you know, the Japan had overused its wood, which was the primary source of that type of economy, you know, before industrialization. And so chaos was ensuing and all these warlords were fighting each other in a 100 year civil war. During the civil war, there was a Buddhist church called Pure Land Buddhism that emerged and that controlled one third of the land as a commons.
00:21:27:01 – 00:21:53:12
Michel Bauwens
And they protected the land with very severe rules. You know, farmers that would overuse the wood would would be punished. So this is typically, you know, called Commons Governance, right? And farmers bear arms. So when the Shogun eventually won the war, he destroyed the Buddhist church, but he nationalised the commons as an Imperial Commons. He disarmed the farmers.
00:21:54:00 – 00:22:21:06
Michel Bauwens
And then he did a little bit like in Versailles, you know, Louis XIV, he made the the nobles come to Kyoto and basically impoverish themselves, you know, in this competition between noble families. But for 250 years using these commons. Right and the protection of the lands under the auspices of the Emperor, Japan lived for two and a half centuries in balance with its environment, with a stable population.
00:22:22:04 – 00:22:48:11
Michel Bauwens
Right. So this is exceptional. Usually it’s it’s more up and down. But Japan shows you that using the commons in a strategic way, you can protect a country in the long term. Let me give you another example, because I think examples speak to the imagination. This is Europe 975 the first European revolution, the 10th century, the Vikings, the Saracens and the Avars, you know, invade Europe.
00:22:48:11 – 00:23:20:18
Michel Bauwens
It’s a mess. All the Barons make their castles the, you know, they rape the woman, they steal the gold from the churches is a very bad situation. 975 The Benedictines from Cluny with the Virgin Mary in front and the farmers in the back start demonstrating against the sins of the feudal lords and say, you know, you can’t rape a woman, you can steal the gold, and it ends up with a compromise with three rules, Make love, not war.
00:23:21:11 – 00:23:58:01
Michel Bauwens
So the feudals promise to marry each others children rather than fighting. Primogeniture, the eldest son gets everything, so there’s no more fragmentation of the land and the commoners lose the right to hunt for meat in the land, which will paradoxically drive them to produce more grain to feed themselves. But in that period what you get is the farmers start making contracts with each other and they start creating commons on a massive scale in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Guild starts coming up.
00:23:59:11 – 00:24:27:05
Michel Bauwens
And, you know, that’s like in 70 years times, thousands of guilds everywhere, right? So this is a self-organizing of the artisans, the new cities, right? It’s this commons and these guilds that creates the basis for three centuries of high growth in Europe. So you see the paradox a ascending line which weakens the commons and in descending line which requires a commons.
00:24:27:05 – 00:24:56:28
Michel Bauwens
And so here’s where capitalism comes in. It destroys the commons completely. And so instead of having this normal cycle, it serially exhausts the whole world until we now have global exhaustion. Until now it was regional exhaustion. And then, you know, some other empire could take over. Now we have global exhaustion. So here’s my argument. In order to solve this, we need to restore the commons, but not just at the local level, but at a global level.
00:24:58:06 – 00:25:28:10
Michel Bauwens
And so we need next to the international state system and the transnational financial system. We need what I call Magistery of the Commons, inter-local, trans-local, transnational, civic, productive systems that can protect resources in their communities at a global scale. That I call it Cosmo Localism. And so now you put peer to peer in the commons together, and then that’s the main argument.
00:25:28:10 – 00:25:53:21
Michel Bauwens
So we are not able to relocalise, our, you know, production closer to human need because we need to. And by the way, this is already happening, right? We have a de globalization since 2008 and now we have a bifurcation of the Chinese and the American system. And technologies are split in two, the supply chains are being split in two and the financial system is being split in two.
00:25:53:29 – 00:26:19:04
Michel Bauwens
And that’s been accelerated with the Ukraine conflict. So we have like a bi-globalisation going on and a continentalisation. You know because Europe for example, has understood very well that it cannot be totally dependent on Chinese medicine and masks and the stuff we need to do our ourselves again. Right. Okay. So this is going on.
00:26:20:02 – 00:26:56:08
Michel Bauwens
And so Cosmo Localism says, okay, let’s organize real localized production, you know, to the degree that it’s realistic and possible, but let’s maintain this global cooperative level on stigmery, right? So permaculture, I have my feet in the mud, I’m connected to my neighbours and creating food for everyone. But I’m learning in the whole world and we moving from economies of scale to economies of scope, and we’re moving from a commodity based economy to a contribution based economy.
00:26:56:16 – 00:26:59:11
Michel Bauwens
And I probably need to explain that, but I’ll give you a.
00:26:59:11 – 00:27:00:12
Rob Pye
Time, but I think.
00:27:00:12 – 00:27:00:26
Michel Bauwens
I’ll give you a.
00:27:01:03 – 00:27:06:03
Rob Pye
I think. Right. So I’m going to call a big buzzword time out.
00:27:07:10 – 00:27:08:00
Michel Bauwens
Right. Okay.
00:27:08:10 – 00:27:46:16
Rob Pye
So I think some things to go back on. I’m pick slowly because, and Annabelle you’re going to have to help me because my brain’s all over the place. It’s got a lot of concepts there. One is we’ve got how to organize a society, you know, through hierarchy statemenship. One is the global economics. And then we’ve introduced this concept of extraction and you know what we’re doing to the world in this particularly unique cycle.
00:27:46:16 – 00:28:03:09
Rob Pye
There’s nothing left, you know, kind of, you are sort of saying, so if we unpicked the different things that you said there. So the last thing was we need to regenerate the commons and you sort of,
00:28:03:09 – 00:28:04:09
Michel Bauwens
Yeah.
00:28:04:09 – 00:28:29:28
Rob Pye
You’ve indicated some means and mechanism that this new thing we’ve discovered, which is sort of we can coordinate anywhere in the world right, But yet we need to be local. So that’s how, how do we regenerate is one thing and another thing is we kind of need a new form of economics, right? You know, so back to the paper that if anyone hasn’t read it, I’m looking at it on another screen
00:28:30:08 – 00:28:55:11
Rob Pye
It’s called Introduction to Commons Economics and you need to spend some time with this paper. There’s a lot in there. You know, this is this is one I wrote a blog about. And then another thing is actually how we might moderate these organizing systems for society. So, Annabelle, is that is that what you heard from Michel just now? Yeah.
00:28:55:11 – 00:28:56:07
Annabelle Lambert
Yeah. No, no.
00:28:56:18 – 00:28:59:04
Rob Pye
Does it need clarification for you. That’s.
00:28:59:28 – 00:29:24:14
Annabelle Lambert
No, I’m not seeking any clarification, but. But I feel, you know, I feel part of the problem is the requirement for black and white all the time. And I just don’t think the answer is this or this. I think there’s a there’s there’s something in between that we need to find and reach. And maybe that’s just during transition that I’m feeling that there is, you know, a requirement because I feel people are demanding of, well, what’s the answer?
00:29:24:14 – 00:29:50:27
Annabelle Lambert
And of course, I don’t think we fully know. We’ll know what the answer is till we got there. And then when we got there, it’ll be wrong and there’ll be unintended consequences. And we’ll go on the cycle again. You know, that’s that’s, that’s what will happen. But yes, so I’m I’m, I’m clear. I feel on what Michel has said and I’m quite excited about economies of scope because I’m feeling the need for mindset change.
00:29:51:01 – 00:29:54:25
Rob Pye
So unpick one of those axes on the triangle.
00:29:55:02 – 00:29:56:06
Michel Bauwens
Yeah. So let me start with regeneration.
00:29:56:07 – 00:29:57:06
Rob Pye
Just simple terms. Simple.
00:29:57:18 – 00:30:26:25
Michel Bauwens
So you know, so, you know, I’m not a scientist in any like STEM sense, but I did look into thermodynamics, right? So basically the idea that, you know, we in order to produce for human beings, we, we take, you know, matter and energy, which is actually limited. Right? Most people don’t know that we get energy from the sun.
00:30:27:04 – 00:30:33:00
Michel Bauwens
We don’t get new matter like we have a really fixed amount of matter. And so once you use the matter.
00:30:33:00 – 00:30:37:15
Rob Pye
By that you mean oil or gold or minerals
00:30:37:29 – 00:31:04:15
Michel Bauwens
All the 100 and something, 130 whatever, the Mendeleev table of of elements right, they are in limited supply. The energy that’s different we get a lot of energy that we’re not using yet and in terms of matter. And so what we’re doing when we produce for human beings, you know we we take this relatively disorganized matter and reshape it into way that’s useful for us.
00:31:05:16 – 00:31:06:27
Rob Pye
Into a car or a watch or a computer.
00:31:06:29 – 00:31:25:06
Michel Bauwens
Exactly. But the thing is that we can’t put it back in the same way, right? So the thing is that we we are wasting not recycling and we are basically degrading our reserves to a degree that is not sustainable.
00:31:26:07 – 00:31:29:03
Rob Pye
And so planting a tree doesn’t give us oil.
00:31:29:24 – 00:31:49:17
Michel Bauwens
That’s a very good example because it’s taken a million years to make oil out of a tree, out of the ground, but then we take the oil out of the ground, we send it to China, we make it into plastic. in 15 seconds, we use up our coffee cup, right? So you go from 1 million years to 15 seconds.
00:31:49:24 – 00:32:16:13
Michel Bauwens
We cannot compensate for that at the current rate and so on. So there’s different aspects to the one of one of the aspects is very easy to understand is that if we we actually use three times more modern energy to transport and to make. So you take your cup, they’ll use a show that’s actually a quarter of production and three quarter of traveling around the world, right?
00:32:17:03 – 00:32:42:26
Michel Bauwens
That’s not good. And so by relocalizing, we can save a substantial amount of, you know, thermodynamic resources. That’s one. The second thing is mutualization. Mutualization means, okay, we can all have a car and a car is useful. So because it’s point to points and public transport doesn’t do that. Well, the news is we cannot all have a car, let alone three cars.
00:32:43:01 – 00:33:03:25
Michel Bauwens
There’s just not enough in the world to give the whole world the same living standard as we have achieved. So, for example, you take a neighborhood in the city of Ghent, which I studied and is called the Gage, which is a word play, but it’s you know, it’s it’s a car association or a car co-op. There are two models. It’s not Uber.
00:33:04:20 – 00:33:27:27
Michel Bauwens
Uber is a competitive model which forces the drivers to drive around to get the clients and they end up spending more energy rather than less. So Uber is a catastrophe for the environment. But the car sharing agreements done by neighbours, so, you know, the average car is only used 5%. So if you have a stock of 10%, you have double what you need.
00:33:28:17 – 00:33:55:12
Michel Bauwens
And so then they do some calculations so for 500 people you need, you know, I don’t know, 30 cars, right. You can have the same amount of usage of the car and you only use 30 cars. So you have saved for every shared car you have saved, you have saved, sorry, 9 to 13 private cars. So that’s that’s the magic of mutualization, smart mutualization.
00:33:55:22 – 00:34:38:17
Michel Bauwens
Now, imagine you combine localization and mutualization, right? Then the third issue is what I call Economies of Scope. The problem with IP, is that everybody keeps their intellectual property for themselves and that actually slows down learning. And there’s a very good example, Britain was the leading industrial country at the end of the 19th century and then it introduced IP and it’s it’s growth slowed dramatically and you know, it went from publishing like 200,000 books to 20,000 books a year or something like that, Right.
00:34:38:25 – 00:35:08:08
Michel Bauwens
The Germans didn’t do it, and the Germans completely overtook the UK at the end of the 19th century because they didn’t have IP. Another good example is 3D printing. Lots of innovation in the beginning, then it got patented and for 25 years you don’t hear about it because there’s no incentive to improve. The patents lapsed like ten years ago, and you have an explosion of innovation in 3D printing, right?
00:35:08:17 – 00:35:34:27
Michel Bauwens
So innovation I’m not saying I’m totally against the patents, but they work for about five years. Let’s have five five year patents. So we compensate, you know, the research of the pioneers and I have nothing against that. But the longer we keep it, especially because it actually only protects the monopoly, the more we slow down innovation, right? In economies of scope, that means doing more with less.
00:35:34:27 – 00:36:05:14
Michel Bauwens
So if you have a knowledge commons, so you have your your cosmo-local production organization, local production, but then you collaborate in a knowledge commons. In other words, you share your knowledge, technical, scientific knowledge. Any innovation that is done anywhere in the network becomes available anywhere else in the network, right? That’s very powerful. And nobody knows this, but that’s what the Chinese did.
00:36:05:18 – 00:36:13:15
Michel Bauwens
You know, if you look at Shenzen, I mean, they didn’t have, you know, legally open source. But actually these people in Shenzen, they shared.
00:36:13:15 – 00:36:14:19
Rob Pye
Everything just.
00:36:14:25 – 00:36:37:04
Michel Bauwens
Always got Shanxi. It was a method. And if you’re part of this, it was like an ethnic thing. But if you’re part of this ethnic group that lived in this region and you would install yourself with a factory, there, they would just give you everything, right? And that’s how China, you know, did it. They used open source, you know, not legal open source, but practical open source,
00:36:37:19 – 00:37:03:07
Michel Bauwens
To supercharge their innovation. Then the last thing I want to say, which is also, you know, something that is interesting to know, we live in a debt based society and. Everything you buy today is 48% debt, so you know, or not to do anything in this Western world, you know, all these people have taken out bank loans.
00:37:03:07 – 00:37:37:25
Michel Bauwens
It has a positive interest. So you need to pay more back than you. So you need to grow. And all of that is incorporated accumulated in the price of everything. Right? So you take all these arguments together and we have an extremely dysfunctional economy nowadays that is not efficient, that is in overshoot, that is no longer innovating. And so when you say, you know, like I’m not saying we have to change everything, but we do have to change fundamental things, there is a transformation that needs to happen. Now….
00:37:37:25 – 00:38:19:10
Michel Bauwens
How does that happen? And I looked at history and I believe it happens through seed forms. So when the old system is, you know, is no longer working well, it stagnates, it’s fragmentation, it creates polarization, but it also creates an exodus. And these are all the people start thinking either because they’re, you know, advanced and they’re just pioneers, like, I think you you guys are right or they have no choice and they start reinventing things on a new basis using new rules because they know the old rules are no longer working for them.
00:38:19:10 – 00:38:34:28
Michel Bauwens
So, for example, you know, in the 11th century they invented purgatory. You know what do I know about purgatory, why was it so interesting? Because it allows Christians to lend money and not go to hell.
00:38:34:28 – 00:38:36:25
Annabelle Lambert
It served their purpose.
00:38:37:13 – 00:38:38:17
Michel Bauwens
Then the merchant…
00:38:39:06 – 00:39:11:02
Michel Bauwens
Christian class which didn’t exist before. Then you have double entry book accounting, then you have the printing press. So all these are like seed forms that would eventually create capitalism in the heart of feudalism, right? And we only have capitalism because we had capitalists first. So here’s what I’m saying. We need commoners reinventing production and consumption and everything in order to have a more common centric world.
00:39:11:02 – 00:39:45:28
Michel Bauwens
And so I see that the market in the state doesn’t don’t have to be abolished. I think they’re necessary, but they have to operate within guidelines that have to be set by a stronger institution. And that used to be the Imperium. And now I think it needs to be these trans-local, civic oriented commons institutions that have enough power to discipline the market and the state so that they don’t overshoot and go to war in order to capture ever more scarce resources.
00:39:46:12 – 00:39:52:07
Michel Bauwens
All right. That’s kind of sorry for the complications. That’s okay. But you see different arguments that fit with.
00:39:52:07 – 00:40:32:06
Rob Pye
Yeah. Yeah. Because I think the what we’re now getting into and again, we should invite viewers, listeners to to spend some time with Michel’s Commons economic paper is how we might move towards new systems of exchange that have you know Michel mentioned it almost too quickly to pick up, but the idea of money as debt and the debt in the system that might cause the only behaviours that we know to be growth related.
00:40:32:06 – 00:41:06:00
Rob Pye
So this system cannot work unless you pour more and more and more into the money side of it because the money is is has to be debt fueled. That leads to a mindset of growth is the answer. I don’t know what your problem is, and we know that that’s not working very well. And some group of people and they are talking about degrowth as a strategy and by that they don’t mean that everything must shrink.
00:41:07:03 – 00:41:25:14
Rob Pye
They mean that some things must shrink in order for other things to blossom and flourish. And that might be well-being, that might be local production, that might be this new breed of people that you’ve referred to, Michel, as commoners, but can you.
00:41:26:01 – 00:41:28:11
Michel Bauwens
Sorry, No, I just want to go on.
00:41:28:11 – 00:41:29:25
Rob Pye
I want another question. I want to.
00:41:30:01 – 00:41:30:07
Michel Bauwens
Go.
00:41:30:08 – 00:41:56:23
Rob Pye
You try and hold your thought because your brain is about a million times bigger than mine, but I’m looking for now practical examples of commons economics where without a something regressive for humanity, we might see progressive. Yes, please.
00:41:57:24 – 00:42:22:04
Michel Bauwens
So let me first give like historical examples which I think are fascinating myself, so I’ll just briefly give them in the first century A.D., you know, the Cathargo, you know, Hannibal comes and invades Italy and across the Alps with his elephants and he destroys the countryside. And it’s and so all the farmers flee to the cities and become the urban proletariat of Rome.
00:42:23:22 – 00:42:48:27
Michel Bauwens
And so the countryside is replaced by these big domains with slaves and, you know, producing orange and and olive and olives and stuff and wine and stuff. All right. Okay. When in the fifth century, Rome loses its empire, Italy has no food because it came from Egypt. So then you have the Benedictines that create, you know, the Benedictine rules.
00:42:48:27 – 00:43:09:18
Michel Bauwens
And they basically, in 50 years restore agriculture in Italy. And this is the senses of the same in the 11th century in the whole of Europe, you know, and they’re viral because, you know, like in the Cistercian days, when you’re 48, you have to split in two. And then they go like a bee swarm for a new land and they start over.
00:43:10:19 – 00:43:37:12
Michel Bauwens
Okay, So these were extremely efficient machineries, but here was a thing. They were collective, right? So that means that every surplus that they created and they did create a lot of surplus was always reinvested in the collective infrastructure. But the industry was not privatized. It was not like a rich person. No, no. It was the the fraternity, the congregation.
00:43:37:12 – 00:43:54:15
Michel Bauwens
Right. Nevertheless, around these temples would be created vibrant markets, and then the cities would aggregate around. Right. So it actually shows that the commons can have a absolutely vital role, even from markets.
00:43:54:15 – 00:44:08:02
Rob Pye
Yes, a recycling effect. And again, yesterday with Guy about some examples of, you know, capitalism meets the commons. Yes, to recycle, you know, Capital value into the natural resources.
00:44:08:15 – 00:44:36:27
Michel Bauwens
Yeah, I will talk about the ideal relation between the commons and markets. So let me let me first finish the example. So this is an example from France. It’s called Terre de Liens, Earth of Connections. It’s a community land trust. So basically what they do is they buy land, which is too expensive nowadays for young farmers to buy, so they collect capital by land and then make ecological contract with organic farmers.
00:44:36:27 – 00:45:07:10
Michel Bauwens
All right. And they’ve they’ve already have a economic effect on Normandy/ Bretagne, and so the land doesn’t belong to the farmers, the farmers rent. But he has like a lifelong guarantee, and he can even inherit his is his sons or daughters, but he cannot sell it on the market. And so that means that the land is effectively a commons, right?
00:45:07:19 – 00:45:40:11
Michel Bauwens
But the farmer works for the market, he produces these vegetables and he sells on the market. That’s up to him. So you see how the commons creates like a like a, you know, an infrastructure that actually allows the market, but the generative market that makes healthy food. On top of that. they’ve calculated, and this is fantastic, that they save the French states and it’s depollution agencies €350 million a year and that was in 2016.
00:45:41:20 – 00:46:02:12
Michel Bauwens
Right? So this is amazing. It produces healthy foods, it allows farmers to farm, it creates an economy in the region, and it saves a lot of money to the government. Right. So this is a win win win. And this is a common centric form of agriculture. So that’s one example.
00:46:03:15 – 00:46:03:20
Rob Pye
Nice
00:46:04:19 – 00:46:10:12
Annabelle Lambert
Michel can I just, sorry, could you just say again, how did that come about? Why did that happen? What did somebody do?
00:46:10:13 – 00:46:11:03
Michel Bauwens
Well, because.
00:46:11:17 – 00:46:12:19
Rob Pye
Did they buy the land?
00:46:12:26 – 00:46:13:18
Michel Bauwens
Because the
00:46:14:04 – 00:46:14:27
Michel Bauwens
Reason why.
00:46:14:28 – 00:46:38:20
Michel Bauwens
The average farmer in the west is like 56 years old. And a lot of times the children see how hard the life is and they don’t want to take over. And there’s actually a big problem now, you know, it’s BlackRock and Saudi Arabia are actually buying land in in France and probably in England as well. So there’s a huge, you know, commodification of land.
00:46:39:04 – 00:47:09:10
Michel Bauwens
But if you want to do like healthy organic agriculture, you can’t afford to buy the land in the first place. Right. And this creates a systemic crisis. And so that’s a solution to that. So if the individual cannot buy it, let’s collect capital from different sources, you know, make it stronger and then gradually buy more and more land that we can rent out to the farmers so they can afford it.
00:47:10:02 – 00:47:17:09
Michel Bauwens
But they also have security, you know, but they have to follow the the ecological contract. So this, you know, it’s to enable organic food.
00:47:17:17 – 00:47:51:04
Rob Pye
It’s such a, is such an inspiring example. And so you talked about the rising of these new, you know, commoners to find the way and before the the the meeting Michel said to Annabelle and I, I hear the UK is not doing very well and of course our systemic crisis in the UK is is not just Ukraine, coronavirus,
00:47:51:04 – 00:48:05:05
Rob Pye
You know, we’ve also, bless us, got Brexit as well in the UK, but out of that you know, in the shelves, in the supermarket, in the papers at the moment we’re seeing shortages of tomatoes and cucumbers.
00:48:05:05 – 00:48:07:18
Michel Bauwens
Yet, you know, you got these.
00:48:07:21 – 00:48:49:19
Rob Pye
These things suddenly are not not there and one of the things of coming out of the EU was an EU policy called the Common Agricultural Policy, which is a subsidy and lots of people talked about France and yadayada, is which actually had an enormous macroeconomic effect on the economics of industrial farming, such that if you took the profits of all of the farmers in the UK away, the whole profit, it would actually equal the subsidy that was paid from the agricultural policy from the EU.
00:48:49:24 – 00:48:52:23
Rob Pye
So in other words, there’s no economics driving this one?
00:48:52:23 – 00:48:57:06
Michel Bauwens
No, because most farmers in France, you know, this is a have a negative income.
00:48:58:24 – 00:48:59:18
Rob Pye
Exactly.
00:48:59:24 – 00:49:03:13
Michel Bauwens
They wouldn’t have the subsidies. They would lose money.
00:49:03:13 – 00:49:03:25
Rob Pye
Yes.
00:49:04:03 – 00:49:38:16
Michel Bauwens
It keeps industrial agriculture artificially alive, subsidizing cheap food for the workers, which then keeps salaries low? You know, it’s it’s a well thought out system that was designed, you know, for for the consumer society of 68 that followed 68 and that’s no longer working right And so paradoxically, the difficulties that you’re facing in the UK should also actually motivate people to say, well, why don’t we make a collective agreement with a group of farmers?
00:49:39:07 – 00:49:52:14
Michel Bauwens
Right? And we so this is called what’s it called, not Community Land Trust, It’s called okay, I’m forgetting how it’s called now, but it’s community purchasing, maybe it’s called?
00:49:54:00 – 00:49:55:06
Rob Pye
Yeah, yeah. And I know what you mean.
00:49:55:06 – 00:50:18:22
Michel Bauwens
You create a solidarity agreement between a group of consumers, a group of producers, and you have your guaranteed food provisioning as a percentage of the production and farmer has a as a fixed income in return. Right. And so this is growing by ten fold in ten years. So still only two or 3% of the economy.
00:50:20:01 – 00:50:48:04
Michel Bauwens
But it’s a sign that things are changing, right? So you either look at the mainstream system, which is going badly, or you can say, well, actually I can look at the seed forms and see what what future they are preparing. And that can generate a positive feeling, right? Because that’s very important. We we, we as human beings, we need meaning and we need to be able to project ourselves in the future.
00:50:48:04 – 00:50:49:00
Michel Bauwens
You know, this is a lesson.
00:50:49:07 – 00:50:49:24
Rob Pye
So the…
00:50:49:24 – 00:50:50:00
Michel Bauwens
Go ahead.
00:50:50:20 – 00:51:38:08
Rob Pye
There is an exciting opportunity out of the malaise of the United Kingdom at the moment, believe it or not. And that’s why I’m optimistic, that the, one, if not the largest land owner in the UK is an organization called the National Trust. And it actually is a trust that is holding land on behalf of the people. Because, again, if you look at the history of the trust, it was, you know, a number of noble, very wealthy dignitaries who actually left the land in trust for the people, for the benefit of the people, for the commoners.
00:51:38:23 – 00:52:13:19
Rob Pye
The largest tenant farmer organization in the UK is the National Trust. National Trust and looking for new business models for their tenant farmers. And so they have a they have a role, their objects, if you like, of their charity, is to hold this land for the benefit of the people. So as well as a beautiful walk in the park, they are also the largest land owner of tenant farmers and they’re quite, you know, not quite sure of how they might have their business model for the benefit of sustainable farming in future.
00:52:13:19 – 00:52:43:06
Michel Bauwens
They should look into Terre de Liens as an example of, you know, something that’s going quite well. And in Holland there is also an organization called HerenBoeren.nl now, which is lord farmers dot nl. And they’re, you know they’re not there yet, but that’s their plan, they want to buy 64,000 hectares of land as a consumer co-op And so they will do the same, except this is not a trust system.
00:52:43:06 – 00:53:15:08
Michel Bauwens
It would be a co-op system where the land would be owned by the consumers and they would then rent out the land to a farmer who would produce organic foods for these consumers. So there’s not one model and it depends on the you know, the local culture and legislation and all kinds of things that may adapt it. But that’s the basic principle, you know, is to take it out of the market, to protect it, and then to use regenerative regenerative healing practices to bring it back.
00:53:15:15 – 00:54:01:29
Michel Bauwens
And, you know, as you are on a descending side, that’s because you have harmed the land and overuse. Right. So you then you need to enter into this healing modality. Right. And I think that’s what is starting I mean, starting in the seventies, to be honest. And, you know, you can find amazing material on YouTube, for example, Kristen Dixon, fair companies dot com where you know, she’s documenting extraordinary successes of people who have left the land in the seventies and now have thriving eco villages and permaculture you know not at the scale that we want to but it’s so basically at this stage of history what we need to build are receptacles.
00:54:02:28 – 00:54:25:25
Michel Bauwens
Yeah. So as the mainstream system works less and less and you know, like in Rome, the people had to leave the city, you know. Rome went from 1 million to 80,000 people in like, I don’t know how many years I should verify it, But, you know, in a fairly short time, maybe a hundred years or something. Right. Where did these people go?
00:54:25:25 – 00:54:32:04
Michel Bauwens
Well, they went to settle either around the warlord, which could protect them and you might not say that’s very nice, but.
00:54:34:01 – 00:54:34:24
Michel Bauwens
It was better that being a
00:54:34:24 – 00:54:36:05
Michel Bauwens
Slave, because they had
00:54:36:11 – 00:54:37:29
Annabelle Lambert
It was an alternative. Yeah.
00:54:38:12 – 00:55:01:21
Michel Bauwens
The church. And, you know, they had their cultural life or they went around the temples, you know, the, the abbeys which were considered to be better than than the warlords. They, you know, there was there were all kinds of sayings in the Middle Ages, you know, showing the popular feeling that it was really good to be around these abbeys because you were treated better and, you know, because why?
00:55:01:21 – 00:55:26:09
Michel Bauwens
Because the abbeys were receptacles who had shown how to do it. And then, you know, you can then virally replicate something that is shown to be working. And it’s a way of scaling in a non centralized way by emulating a set of protocols. Right. So I call this a Protocol Co-operative. So let’s say you want to do Fair bnb instead of Airbnb.
00:55:26:18 – 00:55:58:15
Michel Bauwens
As you probably know, Airbnb has a lot of, you know, gentrification effects and things that you know, are negative for the city, right? So Fairbnb is an existing alternative that exists in Italy, but instead of, instead of having every city doing its own Fairbnb you could say, well, we do it cosmo-locally, yes, we have a local co-op, but we share our knowledge and our legal and technical protocols at a trans city level, right?
00:55:59:01 – 00:56:25:23
Michel Bauwens
And so that’s the cosmo-local aspect. You have both. And that Cosmo Cosmo aspect gives you power vis a vis capital and governments. If you stay only local, I think you cannot survive, right? So you shouldn’t be completely romantic about it. We have to think about there are people who want to destroy us, right? And if we don’t do it well, then they’ll buy our land and then make it into another agri farm.
00:56:27:04 – 00:56:52:08
Michel Bauwens
So, you know, we need to protect the commons and we need to create a surplus. And so this was called by Cara Quigley, another macro historian. He calls it an instrument of expansion. If we are to egalitarian, if we diffuse everything that we produce, we condemns ourselves to be marginal. So we have to produce a surplus that allows you to grow, right?
00:56:52:14 – 00:57:24:25
Michel Bauwens
And so the Commons need to be strong and to be growing. I need to show that there are viable alternative vis a vis the state and market alternative. Now I want to explain to you something, which is how do these different logics work together? So in the 17th century, you know, before capitalism fully emerged, the logic was, you know, farmers would farm and then they would produce and then they would give half of it to the Lords and the Lords would, you know, organize festivals and give to the church.
00:57:24:25 – 00:57:43:24
Michel Bauwens
And, and everything was valuable as use value. All right. Once mercantilism and capitalism merged, only production of a commodity was valuable. If you didn’t make something scarce, it wasn’t valuable. So a woman’s
00:57:43:24 – 00:57:44:03
Michel Bauwens
Work.
00:57:45:02 – 00:58:06:23
Michel Bauwens
In the Middle Ages was valuable because, you know, the whole family worked in a team on the farm and they didn’t make a difference. Once the woman stays at home, she’s not producing any value for the system, right. And only the value that makes the product that can be sold in the market. So that’s that’s what we call commodity value.
00:58:07:17 – 00:58:41:03
Michel Bauwens
Now, what is contributive value? So look at Linux or Wikipedia, everybody who contributes to that collective good contributes value, and it’s called contributary value. Now, this value is not recognized by the market, but what you can do is you and I know it sounds complicated, but you can declare some form of value sovereignity. You can say, What do we produce here together has value because we say so we decide that all contributors have value in our system.
00:58:42:14 – 00:59:10:03
Michel Bauwens
And then you have market income and you say, Well, we’ll divide the market income in such a way that that all contributors feel they are rewarded fairly. Right? So that’s called contributory value accounting, which at this stage has to work together with the market because that’s where the recognized value is realized, right? So we are in a transition, but here’s what we could imagine.
00:59:10:03 – 00:59:34:16
Michel Bauwens
And I call this public ledgers. So imagine you want to decarbonize or any other public priority. All right. So you create a public ledger where every citizen individually or collectively can say, this is what we did here is our biochar, so many kilos, it has been verified and you get certified that you did this biochar. This is your contribution.
00:59:36:00 – 01:00:05:18
Michel Bauwens
Your contribution gets tokenized but has no value yet. But then because of the subsidies of the state, which consists of the public priority and because the companies that recognize the benefits they get from it and can say, Well, I saved 60 million a year from you, thanks to you, so I’ll give you 20 million back. Right? So that’s amazing because then you have a direct valuation of a contribution.
01:00:06:04 – 01:00:25:02
Michel Bauwens
Now we need to go to the commodity so you make something, you sell it , you tax it and then you redistribute it. There’s no direct recognition of the contribution value and I think that’s where we have to be going. You have to recognize the contribution and its negative shadow called impact.
01:00:25:02 – 01:00:29:29
Rob Pye
And I know that Annabelle knows, I’m sure, where I’m going to go next with this.
01:00:29:29 – 01:00:33:10
Annabelle Lambert
Twitching with blockchain oozing out of his ears I see. (laughter)
01:00:36:10 – 01:00:40:16
Rob Pye
We almost had to pay you and I’m just conscious of the time, but then I.
01:00:40:16 – 01:00:42:05
Michel Bauwens
Go ahead. I’m good.
01:00:42:26 – 01:01:16:07
Rob Pye
Oh, a wonderfully optimistic image of where the potential is and the role of technology. So for for over ten years, Ethos ran its own system, which Michel you’re aware of called Ethos coins. And we know that people were very to subscribe to earning a coin which had no market exchange value, no nothing other than the value…
01:01:16:07 – 01:01:46:07
Rob Pye
that we recognized amongst ourselves to mint an Ethos coin. It wasn’t a public blockchain. We didn’t, you know, ten, 12, 15 years ago didn’t have that. And that that was good. We know that people wanted to adopt that. Our problem, as you describe there is the cooperatives, commons actually need to have surplus. You know they need to be able to produce to be able to distribute.
01:01:47:08 – 01:02:19:05
Rob Pye
We’ve we’ve recently launched a value exchange on a public blockchain. It’s called the Hive, whose governance is a delegated proof of stake, which actually rewards participants for participating in this social blockchain. And so what we’re doing is putting a value exchange on a public blockchain, which actually is a record, if you like, of I’m a mother, this is what I do.
01:02:19:13 – 01:02:52:14
Rob Pye
And because the governance of that blockchain is delegated to the participants and there’s a group who voted to actually do the governance of the blockchain and to confirm transactions and do all of the, the technical stuff, the, the use of a public blockchain in terms of commons and social value has almost infinite potential beyond taking what we do today, like social media, like giving it to, but actually to take commons governance and put it on a platform.
01:02:52:14 – 01:03:14:29
Michel Bauwens
can I make a very generic argument, which I think it’s an important argument? So, you know, there was this old critique of the left that, you know, there was fictitious capital, right. And fictitious capital is because you take any company nowadays and you look at its people and its buildings and this is like 20% of its value on the stock exchange.
01:03:14:29 – 01:03:41:27
Michel Bauwens
So the argument was this is all fictitious capital. I’m saying, no, no, no, this, this was unrecognized contributory capital which has been captured by the stock exchange. It’s all the contributions that that make extra value that are actually accounted a very bad way. And so that’s what you need to that’s I think what we can capture. You know recapture it.
01:03:43:10 – 01:04:21:10
Rob Pye
in fact, what Warren Warren Buffett was attributed by Guy Standing in his book that, you know, most of his wealth he would attribute to the social contributions of everyone out there in the world, not his genius at arbitrage or investing in value that actually the value was created by society. It’s just that he captured it and and he and I haven’t actually got the quote but I was told.
01:04:21:10 – 01:04:28:08
Michel Bauwens
He’s the same guy who said, you know we we do have a class struggle and we won. He actually said that as…
01:04:28:08 – 01:04:32:06
Michel Bauwens
Well. You know so.
01:04:32:20 – 01:04:41:11
Rob Pye
So I’m just conscious that I knew as soon as we started talking it could potentially go on for days and nights.
01:04:42:00 – 01:04:42:10
Michel Bauwens
We could nighttime once
01:04:42:26 – 01:04:42:29
Rob Pye
We’ve.
01:04:43:08 – 01:04:45:25
Michel Bauwens
I would be game for it. You know, it’s just like.
01:04:47:10 – 01:04:47:21
Michel Bauwens
We’re like.
01:04:47:21 – 01:04:49:13
Michel Bauwens
A 24 hour and you have.
01:04:49:20 – 01:04:50:23
Annabelle Lambert
An all nighter.
01:04:50:26 – 01:04:51:05
Michel Bauwens
Yeah.
01:04:51:21 – 01:04:57:23
Michel Bauwens
When one guest is tired you get another one. And so just make sure.
01:04:57:23 – 01:05:02:03
Rob Pye
And if we do it live, I think we could push people in and out using this platform.
01:05:02:03 – 01:05:06:00
Annabelle Lambert
Yes, we could have an overlap, yeah.
01:05:06:00 – 01:05:10:17
Rob Pye
Do it live and get in the Guinness Book of Records. Yeah, I’m. I’m there.
01:05:11:00 – 01:05:12:24
Michel Bauwens
I’m game
01:05:13:01 – 01:05:14:02
Michel Bauwens
I could probably talk for two days
01:05:18:00 – 01:05:18:19
Rob Pye
Michel is there….
01:05:18:19 – 01:05:20:16
Annabelle Lambert
Might be quite a fun thing to do, actually.
01:05:20:19 – 01:05:22:13
Michel Bauwens
Yeah.
01:05:22:13 – 01:05:39:18
Rob Pye
Is there, is there anything that we really, really must…. I feel that I’m going to treasure this interview that we’ve had with you. It’s always a privilege. It’s always hugely enjoyable. Any Oh, by the ways, is that you just want to make sure that we record?
01:05:39:18 – 01:05:45:13
Michel Bauwens
Let me think. I think we covered, you know, really a lot of the basics.
01:05:45:13 – 01:05:55:10
Rob Pye
Basic, basics that’s so worrying, so worrying when you say, look, we’re, we’re covering for me, this is a masterclass and yeah, yeah, it’s, I can’t.
01:05:57:00 – 01:05:58:16
Annabelle Lambert
Imagine how I’m feeling.
01:05:59:12 – 01:06:47:05
Michel Bauwens
So let me maybe just review a bit of what we did in our work and so that people who are more interested can eventually delve into it, right? So we basically started by looking at open source for about ten years. And so that’s basically I think our book is called Networked Society, which is good on that. Then we looked at Urban Commons and I looked at the City of Ghent and we have a report about mutualizing Urban provision systems, which is about, you know, taking every provision system in a city and systematically mutualizing it to to achieve and listen to this to achieve a factor 20 reduction in thermo dynamic usage.
01:06:47:14 – 01:07:16:09
Michel Bauwens
It can be done when we know we have examples, for example, a German city that uses electric vans and cargo bikes and only uses 5% of the energy for the same amount of commercial transport. So this is like a systematic way to bring down our weight as humanity while keeping the complexity of the services right. Maybe it will have to go less for some, but there’s a lot of things we can keep.
01:07:16:19 – 01:08:00:10
Michel Bauwens
You know, like long live good health. If we reorganize things in a smarter way using more mutualization. Okay. Then we looked at and I know this sounds not very sexy, but I think it’s very important it’s Accounting systems. Peer to peer accounting for planetary survival. So I described that these types of communities, which we call peer production communities, have invented three new forms of post capitalist accounting, Contributory Accounting, which we discussed. Flow Accounting, very important, because now we have narcissistic blind accounting.
01:08:00:19 – 01:08:43:17
Michel Bauwens
We can’t see the ecosystem only if our company goes up or down. In ecosystems accounting, like REA, resources, events, agents. There’s no double entry, but every transaction has a resource, an event and an agent and so everything is in 3D And this allows you to build coordinated ecosystems, not just companies, right? So then you can suddenly say, okay, this is the fish sector and you can have a smart cryptocurrency like a fish coin which determines the volume of fish that can be fish without destroying the reproduction of the fish.
01:08:44:11 – 01:09:18:15
Michel Bauwens
Right. Okay. And then the third one is called Thermodynamic Flow accounting, which is the direct ability to see matter and energy to flow into your accounting system. I should briefly mentioned that two Chinese provinces already experimenting with this, and then we have projects like r 30. org, which is called global thresholds and allocations. So you calculate the amount of resources that we have, how much is in fine every year, what’s the reusability of the resource?
01:09:19:04 – 01:09:53:14
Michel Bauwens
And you calculate negative pivots and you know that you can go under that. Otherwise you get bad things happening and so suddenly you have a way that everybody in the whole world can actually say, well, this is these are our thresholds, right? We have to stay within that planetary boundary. So I’m not saying these are all fully ready, but what I’m saying is that people are doing this, experimenting this, developing this and that some of them are already use in particular, you know, limited context to actually show that they do work.
01:09:54:08 – 01:10:25:06
Michel Bauwens
Okay. So let me see. I think I’ve probably covered everything. So my dream now, my dream now and I haven’t found funding for this. Maybe you can help me. Who knows? If somebody’s listening to me here, I would like to make a study of the history of markets, the history of planning and stigmergy, and say, okay, today the best possible integration for a sustainable economy would be the mix, the following mix of planning, markets and stigmatizing.
01:10:27:02 – 01:11:01:16
Michel Bauwens
And I think we can arrive at some ideas of how the world system can actually regulate itself, because I don’t know if you know this framing and I’ll I’ll finish with this. Right. We had an immature biosphere that wasn’t able to protect itself, and then these bacteria started making oxygen. And then a few other things happened and suddenly we had a self-regulating Gaia by the Earth’s ecosystem, which is a collaboration of fungi and insects and and trees and somehow keep the world in a balance.
01:11:01:16 – 01:11:26:12
Michel Bauwens
Like when this goes wrong, they do more of this. So this is called a mature biosphere. Now we have an immature technosphere which destroys the biosphere. And this is the challenge that we have to go through now. We have to build a mature techno sphere. And if we if we succeed in doing that, humanity can live on for millions of years.
01:11:27:17 – 01:11:54:15
Michel Bauwens
But I think we have to keep the faith, this is important. I think the big danger today and I think you agree with me on this, you know, when we are in ascending phase, people will tend to see only the catastrophe, the collapse, developtation, de-growth. But the world is not just entropy. The world is extropy and we are the mediating agents to create more green and awareness in the universe, Right?
01:11:54:22 – 01:12:18:15
Michel Bauwens
So now we have to go through this like funnel and it’s going to be a lot of suffering and adaptation. But I think on the other side there’s something beautiful and I think it’s important because, you know, Viktor Frankl said that the only people who survived in the concentration camps, not because they’re right, because they’re able to project themselves, were the communists and the Catholics right.
01:12:18:15 – 01:12:49:24
Michel Bauwens
Those who didn’t have that, the horror that they saw everyday, they just wanted to die. But if you if you were able to project yourself and say, after this, there will be something, then you have the force to continue. And so the more difficult that situation becomes, the more important to cultivate not a blind optimism, but like a metaphysical conviction that we are meant for more than this and that we we are not a cancer to the earth.
01:12:50:08 – 01:12:56:00
Michel Bauwens
We are the gardeners of the of the planets. And we we have a role to play. I think that’s a beautiful end.
01:12:56:08 – 01:12:57:09
Rob Pye
Wow.
01:12:57:09 – 01:12:58:20
Annabelle Lambert
Yeah, that’s a beautiful end.
01:12:59:06 – 01:13:11:01
Rob Pye
Beautiful end and there’s almost not a day goes past where somebody doesn’t mention Viktor Frankl, right. for those who’ve not heard of him. He wrote a book. He was a psychologist in Nazi concentration.
01:13:11:01 – 01:13:15:05
Michel Bauwens
Yeah, I read it in my twenties. I was, you know, very important during that time. Yeah.
01:13:15:10 – 01:13:28:17
Rob Pye
And wrote a book called “In Search of Meaning.” And it was about if you’ve got that inner sense of meaning and purpose, then everything will be all right. What a wonderful note michel. .
01:13:28:17 – 01:13:33:11
Michel Bauwens
We are meaning making beings, that’s really what we are. We are nothing else. We are. We construct meaning.
01:13:33:11 – 01:13:39:02
Rob Pye
Let’s. Let’s go and make some meaning. Yeah, Michel. Until the next time.
01:13:39:08 – 01:13:41:11
Michel Bauwens
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much
