Michel Bauwens
Watch the livestreamBauwens opens through Kojin Karatani, who reframes history not by modes of production but by modes of exchange. Mode A is commoning and gifting (give a brick, get a house), the tribal system. Mode B is the state, protection paid for in taxes. Mode C is the market. Mode D is the permanent attempt to recreate mode A at a higher level of complexity, the thread he traces across every era.
Before capitalism the commons were not marginal or anti-feudal, they were part of how societies worked. The medieval peasant held a plot, worked the lord's land, and shared common land. Even conquering Ottomans sent dervish communities and guilds to reorganize captured land. The English 'beating the bounds' procession reconfirmed the commons each year, central to a village's identity.
Then something unprecedented: a political economy that declared the commons unproductive and bad. Feudal property was never purely individual, it was held by a lineage on behalf of duties. Pure private property changed that. 'I can make more money with sheep than with men,' so the men were driven off. From the 16th century the enclosures ran at massive scale, and the state was set up to replace the commons.
Bauwens' core historical claim: the commons ebbs and flows. When market and state function well, the commons weakens, people feel less need to band together. In dark ages, when market and state collapse, common institutions become hegemonic. The monasteries kept farmers, craftsmen and intellectuals in one body, returned all surplus to the collective, and so out-grew everyone, reseeding civilization.
Past collapses were regional: Rome fell, Byzantium lasted another thousand years, so extraction never threatened the whole planet. Now Bauwens sees a serial exhaustion of everything at planetary scale, a system that structurally favours extraction over regeneration since the Neolithic. His wager is that a third information barrier, internet and AI, finally lets us coordinate commons at global scale, as writing and print once expanded coordination before.
The transition's shape is cosmo-local: locally rooted, feet in the mud doing permaculture, while learning, funding and designs flow from a global commons. What is light (knowledge, design) is global, what is heavy (production) is local. His image is an archipelago of regenerative villages, connected by open designs, distributed manufacturing and web3 ledgers that could tie money to thermodynamic and biological reality. The refrain: you do not have to wait.
Bauwens closes on the monastery as model, spaces disciplined and serious enough to preserve knowledge and produce surplus through the unraveling, then seed what comes after. Politics of the old conflict, he argues, is not where the solution lies, communities implementing their future now are. He calls for a politics of paradise, positive rather than merely defensive, and names the Valley of the Commons itself as a place to build it.