Civilization

We posit that the OVN model is a seed-form of future organizational structures and of the future economy.

We believe that the western civilization is in transition, very far into its phase of decline that that a new form of civilization is already taking shape within it. We see this as a process of metamorphosis.

Civilization cycles

Spengler considers civilizations to be ‘organic’ entities, which last about one thousand years, united around a common ‘spiritual’ response to the tragedy of human life, the so-called ‘prime symbol’. He divides their ‘evolution’ in a dynamic early period of 500 years which he considers as ‘Cultures’ (the spring and summer time of a civilizational entity, marked by innovation), followed by five hundred years in which they switch to the Civilization model, marked by the existence of a universal state which covers the whole civilizational area, but is no longer creative, but rather ‘replicates’ its model through militarism and commercialism (the autumn and winter period). Many macrohistorians, not just Spengler, but Toybnee, Quigley and Ibn Khaldun stress that civilization is always a mix between pacified (disarmed) sedentary and tax-paying farming and urban populations, and the nomadic barbarians that eventually capture these lands, becoming the new ruling class, until a new and more vigorous tribe from the (semi)periphery overtakes the power over the civilization. by Michel Bauwens-reference

Toynbee’s dialectic between universal state and universal church, and the role of nomadic invaders. The declining civilizational elite, which morphs from being the creative minority that created the civilization, towards a dominant minority that increasingly uses violence to maintain itself, as it loses its legitimacy as well as its capacity to care for its core populations. It thereby creates an increasingly larger ‘internal proletariat’, itself a mixture of the declassed internal populations, and the slaves and their descendants which have been imported from the conquered territories. Toynbee echoes the Spenglerian thesis that the universal state form that takes over the civilizational area after the exhaustion of its competitive and decentralized era, eventually declines in turn.

In the phase of the decline of the universal state or empire, the increasingly dissatisfied internal proletariat turns to the creation of new solidarity mechanisms through the creation of universal religions. These religions are often imported from the periphery, but spread easily because of the pacification of the Empire, finding a fertile ground because the tribal solidarities have already disappeared. At the same time, the weakening of the Empire’s defensive capabilities, and the internal depopulation, creates the conditions for new invasions by barbarian peoples, often those already previously hired as defenders of the Empire. Seeking a ‘civilizational upgrade’ themselves, in order to master the management of more complex societies, the nomadic invaders themselves, turn to the universal churches. A new synthesis is created, which may then create the basis for a new civilizational cycle. So notice here that two nomadic elements, i.e. the roaming people from the frontier, and the originally ‘trans-local’ faith communities, enter into some kind or merger of synthesis, which lays the groundwork for a new form of societal organization. by Michel Bauwens-reference

Quigley will then show us what the mechanism is for this new synthesis to take root, through institutional innovation.

Carrol Quigley’s Evolution of Civilizations, introduces the key concept of ‘instruments of expansion’, which can be applied to commons-centric institutions.

He described a seven stage theory of the histories of civilizations which he tested successfully on about a dozen different historical civilizations.

The first stage is Mixture, and that may sound strange, but the only way to break through traditional custom is a foreign invasion, which forces the two contending groups to arrive at some kind of innovative consensus, and that means the customs of both side must be creatively adapted. Thus, a new culture response model is born, which will eventually define the core value of a civilization. The recent bestseller, ‘Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy’ is an illustration of this process, as it shows how it is precisely the invading militarized aristocratic invasion which creates the conditions for philosophy to emerge, in Classical Greece.

The second stage is Gestation in which the new civilizational response is actually born, and the seed forms of the new order are emerging. For Europe, for Spengler and Toynbee, this was 998 AD or so, when the new Germanic dynasty of the Ottonians, created a new synthesis between their own Germanic tradition and their absorption of the legacy of Roman christianity, as expressed by the Catholic Church.

The third stage is Expansion. This expansion occurs when the civilization has come at a process which allows it to generate or extract wealth, and to re-invest surplus in the expansion of that very process. This is what Quigley calls an ‘instrument of expansion’ and it stops working when this process degenerates into an ‘institution’ which only cares about itself, and no longer focuses on the task it had on behalf of its civilization. Quigley gives three examples of working ‘instruments of expansion’ which worked for Western Europe, and each time degenerated. The first was feudalism, which became self-absorbed chivalry; the second was commercial capitalism, which became state-dominated mercantilism, and the third was industrial capitalism, which degenerated into monopoly capitalism. When this stage ends, it becomes stage 4, the Age of Conflict, as no new instrument of expansion is invented.

I will take the period of formation of feudalism to make a particular argument, namely that these instruments can be commons-based, and that in this particular case, they were born from the originally trans-local faith-based communities, thus creating a particularly innovative form of dual sovereignty, a mixture of locally-based feudal sovereignty, based on the logic of military power of the aristocratic class, descendents of the once invading Germanic warlords, and a trans-local sovereignty, based on the trans-local faith-based communities which had evolved into the networks of the Catholic Church. Michel Bauwens wants to show how instrumental commons-based instruments of expansion in creating the conditions for a restoration of the European continent from the devastation of the ‘Dark Age’ after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. These commons-based organizations were religious communities, which, while being instrumental for the geographic expansion of the European cultural sphere, were just as much non-territorial, since obtaining and exploiting territory was at the service of spreading and consolidating a particular spiritual worldview. It would lead to the co-existence of what was an intensely localized civilizational order, the domain-based feudalism, to a trans-national spiritual organizing force, the Catholic Church, aided by its mutualized congregations. In the fifth century, the imperial structure of the Western Roman Empire had broken down, but many political structures of Roman times persisted and were used by the new Germanic overlords[5]. However, in the 8th century, when the Muslims armies took the control of the Mediterranean, Western Europe’s collapse accelerated, the premature dream of Charlemagne’s re-unification collapsed, with the Muslims reaching Poitiers, south of Paris; the Vikings coming all the way to Normandy, and the Avars, a Turcic nomadic people, coming from the East. The response to this collapse was feudalism, a distributed system of local defense, which created a class of fighters, the knights, supported by the tribute of the now land-bound farming populations. This new structure, aided by the continental unity of the Catholic Papacy, turned the situation around, and created the potential not just for defense, but for expansion, eastwards towards the Slavic lands, and southward towards the Muslim lands of the Middle Eastern shores. This in turn served to recreate the conditions of safe commerce that would regenerate the Italian cities. Therefore, we can conclude that these mutualized processes, linked to a vital trans-local element, played a vital role in the rebirth of this new civilization in Western Europe. The reason is simple: a mutualized structure, a commons with shared infrastructures, keeps the surplus invested in the process of expansion and is not lost to private luxury expenses.

Michel Bauwens thinks of it this way:

First, the military congregations, like the Teutonic order in Eastern Europe, and the Templars for the Crusades, ‘clear the land’. Similarly, when the Cossacks learned to master the maritime defence of the large river systems on what would become Russia, allowed them to stop forever the nomadic Mongol invasions, and it is this securing of a safe space which created the new civilization that would become dominated by Russian Orthodoxy. Toynbee stresses the ‘congregational’ nature of the Cossack military.

Second came the craft-agrarian congregations. When Rome lost access to the Egyptian granaries, the Italian population starved, but the Benedictines restored agricultural production all over Italy, in a few decades, virally expanding the monastic congregations through ‘swarming’; Five centuries later, the Cistercensiers repeated this process for the whole of Western Europe, creating enough surplus to allow the resurrection of the cities, such as those of Italy, northern France, the Low Countries, and in Germany and the Baltic region. These cities were very frequently ‘free cities’ run by the guilds, the mutualized organizations of the crafts. It is only later that merchant guilds, and then individual merchant families such as the Medici, would create the system of capital, and the new instrument of expansion that was ‘commercial capitalism’. But this new instrument of expansion occurred after five hundred years of preserving and regenerative activity in the period of the dark age interregnum, and then in the commons-based ‘extractive’ phase starting in the 11th century. It is when this process of recreating an instrument of expansion fails, that Stage 4, the Age of Conflict ensues. Think of the period of contending states in China, the wars between the Greek city alliances in the Hellenic Sphere, and the wars between Italian city-states in the 14-15th century as well as the first Hundred Years War.

The answer to this crisis is Imperial Unification, Stage 5, the creation of Empires as ‘universal states’ that cover the whole of the civilizational sphere, and are usually dominated by forces that emerged from its periphery, as often, the core areas are already exhausted through their recurrent conflicts. By this time, the real civilizational creativity is already gone, argues Spengler, but there is a process of replication. Note that in the Western sphere, any unified attempt at a ‘universal empire, such as Napoleon or Hitler, failed, and the imperial phase took the form of democratic nation-states organized around the hegemonic power of the U.S.

Eventually, these Empires will decay in turn, that is Stage 6, and it will then be eventually subjected to an invasion which destroys it, Stage 7.

Trans-national communities

The Caliph, and the authority figures like the Pope, are originally not territorial administrators, but governors of trans-national faith communities. Michel Bauwens's argument includes commons-based institutions, where mutualized ‘instruments of expansion’, which emerge in periods of particular deep crisis, are instrumental in regenerating the civilizational process at crucial moments in history, and in particular during what is generally called ‘dark ages’.

by Michel Bauwens-reference

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