MICHEL BAUWENS: VISIONARY, ACTIVIST, INTELLECTUAL
Michel Bauwens is known as the theorist and organizer of the Peer-to-Peer movement whose goal is to usher in a new economy in which private ownership is replaced by the Commons and knowledge is open. In the late 2010s, I did a series of interviews with Michel that have not been published. The following is the article I wrote as the introduction.
There is much to admire about Michel Bauwens: the brilliance of his mind and the depth and breadth of his ideas, his great energy and persistence in pursuing his goals, his ability to explain not just his concepts and vision but where they come from, and his willingness to face the challenges of founding and then leading a social movement. Encountering him brings intellectual excitement and a sense of discovery as he speaks articulately and without preparation on whatever subject arises with much insight.
Michel is a public intellectual, activist, and visionary who warns that for the human species to survive the challenge of ecological collapse, a new global system must be established based on a postcapitalist economy. In providing the contours of this new system, there are echoes of Marx. Just as Marx realized that British factories were the harbinger of a new capitalist form of society, Michel has observed the present-day seeds of capitalism’s successor, a socioeconomic form in which production is peer-based, property relations are organized around the Commons, and resources are used in a sustainable manner.
Michel’s interpretations of his life and thought give us some valuable keys to unlocking the secret of an individual’s ability to make history as well as be shaped by it. Having experienced very hard times as a child, Michel uses William James’s notion of “twice born” to account for how such early suffering was a catalyst for his unconventional and highly productive life. According to James, the people who have created original religions and philosophies such as Michel suffered greatly but having overcome their afflictions, they were “reborn” at a higher level of integration than those who grew up happy and lived within the approved parameters of their society. To this explanation, Michel adds Erich Neumann’s concept of centroversion. Neumann believes that in the first phase of life, the focus is on adapting to the outside world. But there comes a time when a person like Michel decides that instead of reacting to others, the world will adapt to him. That is the second phase.
There were sometimes harrowing events and complex processes that were stages on his way to balance and equanimity. For example, he spent time in a sex commune that lifted much of his sexual and emotional repression. He also underwent therapy designed for drug addicts that put him under the most extreme conditions: blindfolded among 30 people for three days without sleep which led to hallucinations. Sampling many forms of somatic and humanistic therapies, he gained confidence and became self-determining rather than reactive. After such intense experiences, he felt the need to address the existential questions of life, finding in spirituality a more mature form of inner exploration than psychology could provide.
At the age of 42, after a successful career in business as a corporate Internet consultant and the founder of start-ups, he had a severe breakdown when everything in his life turned to dust at the same time. His recovery, followed by a second marriage and move to Thailand, was the time of his “rebirth” as he began to implement his vision of a new economic structure by building up the peer-to-peer network. Over a period of about 20 years, Michel was able to transform himself from a shy, introverted, weak, insecure, passive-aggressive, conflict-avoiding, beta male to a charismatic leader and visionary.
Looking back over his life, Michel sees his development from revolutionary activist to seeker of inner transformation and then to leader of a social movement as parallel to the historical changes occurring in the West over the same period. He precisely and persuasively fits his own journey into that of the larger society. As the neoliberal social contract took root in the 1980s, the welfare state was rolled back and the working-class was sacrificed. In return, the capitalist class was willing to expand rights for women, racial minorities, and eventually gay people while youth were given greater cultural freedom.
Such political shifts reflected a turning inward to identity issues after the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But Michel holds that this social contract is clearly unworkable at present due to rising inequality, environmental threats, and a loss of meaning; therefore, a new compact must be brought into being in which economic relations are more horizontal than hierarchical and the Commons rather than capital ultimately becomes the source of ownership and property. In other words, the time is ripe for renewed social engagement, even though Marxism no longer serves as the central oppositional narrative.
Michel’s understanding of the historical and cultural character of the West provides the floor for his strategies to promote a new global system. He outlines the history of child abuse and how it is only recently that a truly collaborative culture could come into existence in the West. His account of the development of Christianity is that it started as a proletarian movement, was later institutionalized and lost its prophetic qualities, and then productivity was invented by the monks in medieval times.
But he doesn’t restrict his historical and cultural exploration to the West inasmuch as he also comes to terms with the character of Eastern societies. His attempt to grasp the differences between East and West has had a profound impact on his own outlook and the choices he has made in his life. In this respect, Keith Chandler’s Beyond Civilization played an outsized part. According to Chandler, chaos is viewed as negative in the West and the role of God is to create order from chaos. Since people are so indebted to this supreme being, they must live in accordance with divine rules and assist in the work of creation by making the world more ordered, that is, more just.
In the East, the world of order is the world of illusion. The ideal is to remove the self from the world and to go beyond the self by not identifying with emotions or thoughts. This move away from an ordered and diverse world leads to nirvana where unity or emptiness alone exists. What Michel takes away from Chandler’s portrait is that only the West has placed an emphasis on social transformation.
Although Michel has lived in Thailand for much of the past twenty years and for a few years studied and practiced Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, Daoism, and Zen, he came to resolutely affirm his commitment to Western Enlightenment values of human emancipation and rational critique. After his mental crash, he realized that only social engagement would restore his energy, vitality, and zest for life. This realization accelerated his journey to P2P, since he could reconcile himself with his own Western heritage.
The catalyst for Michel’s creation and nurturing of the P2P movement was the breakdown, his ordeal by fire, which led him to get serious about finding his life’s purpose. Yet, he could never have become a leader who acts upon rather than is acted upon by his surroundings without emotional maturity, the fruit of his long psychological and spiritual quests. This emotional intelligence likewise has enabled him to function as the P2P arbiter so that this rather diffuse network can move forward.
Another explanation for Michel’s leadership qualities is his abundant experience in many different life worlds. He was a member of a revolutionary organization (Marxist) and a government organization (USIA), a creator of start-ups, a player in large and small businesses, a student of technology and technological change, and a seeker of wisdom through radical therapies and both Eastern and Western spirituality. Once he got to the heart of each path, he critiqued it, absorbed what was of value, and moved on. His experience of corporate work conditions, hierarchy, and how economic value is created enabled him to become clearer as to the requirements of a new type of economy.
But it took more than personal qualities to get his show rolling. Michel had to efficiently and effectively gather, process and spread information so P2P is a product of his thorough and systematic approach to knowledge-building plus the methodology of vision logic that he gained from Ken Wilber. Using vision logic, he takes the current perspectives and organizes them into a system. By assembling the main viewpoints on a particular issue, he shines greater light on the subject while adding to our knowledge. Vision logic is accompanied by a commitment to pluralism. He examines information sources in order to understand them rather than ignores the ideas with which he disagrees. By making the results of his knowledge-building enterprise available on the Internet, he has been able to attract collaborators as well as clients. It must be added, though, that success did not come easily, and there were many difficulties, financial and otherwise, that he had to face during the early days of his P2P activities.
To explain the reasons for the positive response in Europe to P2P, he narrates the career of the European left from its origins at the time of the French revolution to the present day. After the failure of the May 1968 movement and the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, the European left was in disarray. There was pessimism in the air and left-wing intellectuals influenced by postmodernism spoke of the impossibility of grand narratives, retreated from politics, and took residence in the universities. In this climate of defeat, Michel offered a new story that could inspire people and motivate them to act politically. The left with its promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity has been renewed in the P2P movement and other movements of a similar self-organizing character across the social order that confront our ecological and economic challenges.
Besides the interpretations of his life and times, his intellectual journey, and his creation and development of P2P, what captures our attention is Michel’s far-reaching analysis and provocative conclusions about the present civilizational crisis. He is clear about the type of economic transformation that would make human survival possible. And his organization has recently issued The Thermodynamics of Peer Production and P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival to supply guidance and examples of how to integrate planetary limits into managerial systems. But his vision is somber, since he thinks the institutions of a new global system will only prevail after a very harsh transition period in which most but not all members of the human race will perish. His goal is to set up Commons-based peer production and other effective participatory institutions that can be utilized to mitigate the social chaos and then provide the economic foundation of the new global system that will emerge after the transitional period of chaos.
Identification of the engines of social change is a crucial and vexing issue for strategists like Michel who are plotting the transition from the present global system to its postcapitalist successor. How has a new social order come into existence in the past? What has been the role of economic factors such as social relations of production? What has been the role of ideas? Michel adopts Wilber’s integral framework which allows him to sidestep the issue of whether ideas or economics plays the decisive role in historical development. In Michel’s integral view, it is ideas that influence technology, and technology in turn influences culture, and culture then influences subjectivity. His claim is that ideas are a vital factor in bringing about social change as part of the feedback loop with the material world. Therefore, he is conscious of the need to coordinate intellectual creativity with practical efforts on the ground that alter material conditions.
Nevertheless, in Michel’s account of P2P’s trajectory, inner transformation does not play an important role, even though psychological exploration and spiritual seeking have been central to his own personal maturity as thinker and activist. There is no explicit mention of this inner dimension and no provision for promoting personal development within the movement. Yet, I find it noteworthy that there are many spiritually oriented thinkers, especially in the United States, who are also radical critics of our global civilization. Their preferred way to address the current crisis is through transformations of consciousness and such critics have often been identified with the New Age movement. Michel censures this spiritual standpoint for its extreme individualism and failure to rationally critique corporate capitalism. As a result, it bolsters a neoliberal order in which spirituality is treated as one more commodity.
Michel’s political standpoint can also be located within postwar European thought and contrasted with political positions more common in the United States. He has a working class background and considers class as the main source of oppression. But many on the left in the United States put their energies into combating racial and gender oppression. They do not highlight class struggle nor do they condemn identity politics for its excesses. Michel criticizes these proponents of identity politics for the divisions on the left that have weakened opposition to the status quo.
What are the distinctive accomplishments of Western civilization that can be bequeathed to the world that endures after the chaos transition period? Michel identifies himself with the Western Enlightenment and its emphasis on technological advance and progressive politics as twin sources of human emancipation. These two streams come together when Internet technology facilitates more democratic communication that supports the progressive ideals of freedom, equality, and community.
An attractive feature of Michel’s thought is his groping toward ways of integrating the insights of both Enlightenment and romantic critics of our present civilization. The young Marx had already moved toward such an integration by adopting the romantic critique of industrial capitalism in his theory of worker alienation, combining it with an appreciation of technological progress and an insistence on radical social transformation. Similarly, Michel proposes a new economy utilizing electronic technology that facilitates more democratic communication and provides meaningful work. And his championing of decentralized relations of production as well as non-alienated labor is reminiscent of the romantics who celebrated medieval craftsmanship while idealizing pre-capitalist social relations.
It needs to be made clear that the significance of Michel’s highly pragmatic ideas on political economy can only be assessed by consulting his academic writings. It is enough to say here that his theory of “open cooperativism” is a major effort to incorporate the strengths of both capitalist and socialist economics while skirting their pitfalls. For example, by recognizing the need for complex interdependence, that is, for both individual autonomy and community, his approach avoids the excesses of both laissez-faire capitalism and bureaucratic socialism.
In relation to the current status of peer production and Commons-type initiatives, Michel finds two major examples of the maturity of the Commons. The first is the self-organizing social movements like Occupy, the students who have come after Greta Thunberg, and Extinction Rebellion. The second is the urban Commons of cities like Ghent, Belgium. Both of these examples offer much food for thought on the potential of peer production and the Commons.
Michel’s contributions to the world of thought can be noted. The first is that he provides a sophisticated critique of the ideological position that race and gender are the major sources of oppression and shows the destructive consequences of current identity politics. In so doing, he supplies excellent reasons for rejecting postmodernist approaches that lead to greater social fragmentation. In addition, he uncovers the deleterious social consequences of reigning philosophies of inner transformation. His accomplishment in these cases is to point out the excesses and distortions of which many postmodern thinkers, advocates of identity politics, and spiritual practitioners have been guilty. But whether or not he shows sufficient appreciation of the ways in which they actually help us to make our way is open to question.
The second type of contribution is that Michel takes us beyond some sterile arguments between the two poles of a binary opposition. He demonstrates that there is a viable third way beyond individualistic capitalism and collectivistic socialism, that of peer production. His distinction between left and right orientations concerning the circle of sympathy also enables us to get past the long-standing opposition between conservatives in the tradition of Edmund Burke and progressive thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition. Simply put, conservatives care deeply about their local communities but not so much for those outside it; progressives extend their sympathies to humanity but are less attuned to those closest to them. We need to care about both.
Michel characterizes himself as an integrative thinker in the manner of Wilber, Gebser, Sorokin, and Aurobindo, but unlike Wilber who has aspired to a theory of everything, his own province is more modest, since he restricts himself to the techno-economic sphere. Nonetheless, he has an impressive grasp of the myriad ways in which this one sphere is related to various aspects of the social order. Because he has spent much of his life active in politics, business, and social movements, he has not elaborated his ideas to the extent of the great integrative thinkers. But he tells us that the next stage of his life may involve concentrated intellectual work. So his productivity in this realm may still take a large step forward, even though he has already formulated his central concept of Commons-based peer production as well as his historical theory of seed forms.
Michel is one of a small number of intellectuals and activists who has given transparency to his own Western heritage at the moment its very survival is at stake. He has identified the flaws in the Western project: the attempt to achieve transcendence through technology and through the limitless growth of capitalism that destroys our life-supporting environment. On the constructive side, Michel’s vision assists in the design of a new techno-economic sphere that would facilitate sustainable development, greater community, a more peaceful world, and genuine equality.
