Compeerism solves international trade and is more equitable for the global south—it’s the only way to break capital’s hold

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Contending With the Limits of Our Natural World.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 130-134. /LJS

Even with significant inter-commons and state-centred initiatives to boost the pursuit of a DG-FL model, we cannot ignore the reality that inherent limitations to the localization ideal persist, as they do with the other material economies explored thus far. Climate realities, in particular, are difficult to overcome as there are always limits to what can be grown in any given region. Yet it is hard to imagine that the Minority World would be willing to give up on bananas, cocoa, or coffee; or, for that matter, for the Majority World to forgo its acquired taste for northern grains. It follows that some continuation of the pursuit of natural comparative advantage in agriculture, with the aim to trade, even at significant distances, is likely. The same predicament, it should be noted, pertains to non-renewable resources and even, to some extent, manufactured goods (where economies of scale are adopted), for which the following discussion is equally relevant. While trade is economically rational and has the potential to establish significant win-win relationships, it is a process that nevertheless also complicates the localization ideal in the DG-ML/DG-FL models and brings to light numerous additional challenges for the compeerist. In addressing these, we will limit ourselves to a compeerist vantage point from within the Minority World. We can here distinguish between export- and importbased issues. Turning first to export, the primary producer’s relationship with the community immediately becomes more difficult as the benefits, for instance by exporting the land’s harvest or mineral wealth, do not necessarily trickle down to the local community. In other words, it is not a symbiotic relationship in the way it is when the primary producer, like the local farmer, services local demand. In a trade-based scenario, then, a commons-oriented governance arrangement would, ideally, entail a community say in the decision to produce for export, where consent could be linked to a number of conditions, like sharing in any earned revenue. On the most basic level, efforts could be made to establish farms that, as with manufacturing cooperatives, adopted governance procedures where decision making was significantly democratized to include meaningful input from workers and the stakeholder community. To further concretize such relations, an additional step could be to amend property rights to where ‘ownership’ was actually made conditional. This could mean, for instance, that the use and profit from a piece of land was tied to legally binding usufruct requirements, like the adoption of commons-based governance protocols that ensured a certain level of community empowerment. Yet, seeing that such a far-reaching democratization of the land would require a significant, compeerist-aligned societal and political transformation, immediate goals would likely focus on more limited policy aims. This would include, as outlined in the previous section, pursuing the support of locally oriented, cooperative production arrangements, while holding non-cooperative ones to account when it comes to the most pressing interests of the community, for example by imposing redistributive taxes and establishing regulations around issues of labour and the environment. We will, however, revisit what an alternative property regime could look like in a fully developed compeerist society in Chapter 10. Turning then to the import side of trade we are confronted with distant production systems, both with renewable and non-renewable resources, that are generally managed by actors far removed from one’s locality. As such, it is not difficult to step away from any sense of implication or responsibility for what happens there. Compeerism nonetheless recognizes that many of the hurdles to a more just and sustainable future are geographically complex, entailing what Doreen Massey (1996) termed ‘power geometries’, which describe how any particular locale is intricately entwined with many distant ones via uneven power relations. Critically, this relationality between places does not only pertain to the present, for instance how purchasing distant commodities ends up supporting the economic, political, and environmental processes involved in their production; it also includes past unequal relations and interactions that are largely responsible for how and why these processes have been adopted. These power geometries thus also clearly come into play on the export side, with issues pertaining to how any specific export arrangement with a distant place, and the price dynamics involved, have come to be established. In this sense, compeerism’s understanding of trade inevitably gives way to questions related to the complex power geometries involved, or, in other words, it becomes an issue of international relations and the global world order more broadly. As such, we are confronted with the question of compeerism’s trans-local and ultimately global outlook, especially with regard to Minority–Majority World relations. It is a topic that deserves some fleshing out. We can begin by establishing that compeerism considers the power geometries of greatest concern to be those that link the Minority World to the most dire forms of economic and political stagnation/dysfunction in ex-colonial, Majority World societies in the south. This is why the term ‘postcolonial’ is helpful, as it points to how these societies have been, and still are, fundamentally impacted by a global political-economic (and cultural) arrangement that favours the wealthy Minority World in the north. It is a condition that is well documented and presented within a range of critical theoretical ‘schools’ dealing with the issue of ‘development’, from the earlier, economically focused ‘world systems theory’ and ‘dependency theory’ to the more recent and culturally centred work on postcoloniality. Minority World compeerists in the north, then, who find themselves looking south to trading partners in the Majority World, see variegated but often deeply contested economies, particularly in the primary sector. In agriculture this plays out as an ongoing struggle over land use, that is, whether to prioritize productivity and export crops in a bid to modernize and access valuable foreign currency, or whether the land should remain, or be reverted to, small-holder plots focused on broad subsistence capabilities and basic food security. As with the Majority World’s efforts to benefit from their mining sector, however, neither of the noted land use options offers a path for bringing about real prosperity as long as the involved societies remain fundamentally hobbled by their historically rooted, economically compromised position in the world. Given this underlying context, some in the Minority World have pursued interventions that would allow Majority World societies at least a partial exit from their constrictions, especially when it comes to trade. An initial model can be found in the Fairtrade movement, which aims to guarantee a minimum price for key cash crops to participating farmers, thus creating greater economic stability for these communities. The use of certifications and labelling is again important here. It should nonetheless be noted that Fairtrade and other similar initiatives are still reflective of postcolonial relationships and a capital-dominant economy. More specifically, Fairtrade arrangements are largely shaped by for-profit companies committed to maintaining an unequal division of labour, where production of mostly non-lucrative raw materials is left to the Majority World while profitable added value is claimed by the Minority World in the north. In light of these shortcomings, a more far-reaching framework and strategy worth noting here is that of ‘cosmo-localism’ promoted by some P2P theorists. Similar to the DG-ML model, the cosmo-local idea focuses on the global digital commons as a means to localized empowerment and development, yet now with a particular focus on the Majority World. As such, it represents a type of commons-based, and digitally mediated technology transfer intended to bolster not just the traditional primary sector, but also manufacturing and services. In this sense, the aim is more far reaching than Fairtrade as the actual subservient trading position of the Majority World is being addressed. One of the first attempted enactments of the cosmo-localism model was the Free Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) project launched by Michel Bauwens via the P2P Foundation in 2013. The FLOK project, in quasi-coordination with the Ecuadoran government, was aimed at rethinking the country’s economy along digitally enabled, peer production lines as a way to remove it from its still heavy dependence on colonial-style extraction (Commons Transition, 2014). As Bauwens later acknowledged, however, significant power interests linked to the existing extractive economy were still entrenched in the government, thus fundamentally limiting the project’s potential (Bauwens and Gerhardt, 2020). Consequentially, Bauwens ultimately concluded that it was not, in fact, possible to ‘hack a country’ with the intent of bringing about a new, commons-based economy, without the concomitant ‘political will’ and ‘social basis’ for such a transition (P2PF Wiki, 2021, np). While this is certainly a valid insight, compeerism nonetheless sees the challenges involved here as being more deeply rooted. To begin, despite some bright spots, the digital commons/commoning on which the cosmo-local idea hinges is still too limited in its capabilities to offer a viable path out of the chronic disadvantages the Majority World faces. This is because the general intellect that is to be captured and shared in the digital commons has not yet been adequately liberated, primarily due to capital’s continued command over the apparatus of capture. Furthermore, as we have seen, even with a vibrant and rich digital commons, there still needs to be a material foundation with which to access and make use of this digital value, and here much of the Majority World is in woefully short supply, especially when it comes to domestically owned assets. As such, the Majority World remains stuck in its efforts to break free from its postcolonial disadvantages, unable to escape its dependence on foreign, capital-sourced investments, which remain primarily focused on exploiting and extracting distant labour and resources. Of utmost importance in all of this, however, is that global capital’s predatory arrangement with the Majority World continues to be abetted by the most powerful Minority World states. The reason for this synergy, furthermore, ultimately lies in a deeply embedded ‘us versus them’, winlose rationality that can be traced back to these states’ colonial histories. In applying this rationality to their respective postcolonial, geopolitical/ geoeconomic gazes, these states see a natural alliance between themselves and the globally active capital that is headquartered within their borders. Consequently, these states continue to do this capital’s bidding when it comes to their outward looking strategies, with very little effort made to actually reform the global order in a more equitable direction. In sum, then, there truly is no hacktivist, back-door path to rapid economic and human development in postcolonial societies. This does not mean that bolstering the global digital commons or supporting local commoning efforts within the Majority World are futile. With time, they can still play an important role in helping these societies achieve greater wellbeing and resilience. Arguably, however, the most direct route to improve the outlook of the Majority World would be by fundamentally breaking the capital-state nexus in the Minority World, especially as it pertains to foreign relations. Only in this way could the problematic power geometries linking the Minority and Majority World, and their concomitant trade relations, be redressed and equalized.