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Re: [ox-en] Kleiner-Bauwens debate about Benkler, part 1



Hi Michel, Dmytri, list!

2 weeks (18 days) ago Stefan Meretz wrote:
Hi, from Michel's Blog I picked the three parts of a debate between
Dmytri Kleiner and him, Michael Bauwens, about Yochai Benklerùs
conception of Social Production. Quite interesting:-)

Thanks, StefanMz, for picking this up :-) .

Dmytri Kleiner's critique of Yochai Benkler
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=494

First I need to say that I didn't read Yochaï until now. Therefore I
can't comment on Yochaï directly.

...D. Kleiner offers a critique of Benkler's theory of commons-based
peer production being limited to the immaterial sphere. He writes:

»Yochai Benkler's conception of Social Production, where a network of
peers apply their labour to a common stock for mutual and individual
benefit, certainly resonates with age-old proposed socialist modes of
production, particularly in the libertarian socialist tendencies, where
a class-less community of workers ("peers") produce collaboratively
within a property-less ("commons-based") society. Clearly, even Marx
would agree that the ideal of Communism was commons-based peer
production.

Well, I think what Dmytri describes here is quite interesting. It
mirrors the separation of (somehow alienated) work and free time. Much
of the worker movement's vision about a society were about how to
distribute work. This is also true for the anarchists directions
though many of them distributed agricultural work rather than
industrial work.

The problem is that all these movements had work in mind - not
productive Selbstentfaltung. And in a way this is clear: The
activities necessary to operate (early) industrial machinery are not
only alienated because they are paid. They are also alienated because
they require only a very small part of the human and thus give little
room for Selbstentfaltung. This is the concept of work as pain and it
is not by chance that payment is necessary to compensate for this
pain. Also the notion of a "common stock for mutual and individual
benefit" to me sounds like this work as pain concept.

Insofar I don't think GPL society resonates well with worker
movement's ideas. To me one of the big advantages of the Oekonux
debate is to discover that with the contemporary means of production
for the first time in history productive Selbstentfaltung has the
potential to overcome this industrial work-as-pain concept on a level
of the whole society. IMHO *this* is one of the main differences
between worker movement idea(l)s and the Oekonux debate.

The novelty of Social Production as understood by Benkler
is that the property in the commons is entirely non-rivalrous property:
Intellectual property and network transferable or accessible resources.
Property with virtually no reproduction costs. There is no denying that
Benkler's wealthy network has creating astounding amounts of wealth.
The use-value of this information commons is fantastic, as evident by
the use-value of Free Software, of Wikipedia, of online communications
and social networking tools, etc. However, if commons-based
peer-production is limited exclusively to a commons made of digital
property with virtual no reproduction costs then how can the use-value
produced be translated into exchange-value?

Well, IMHO this use value is not meant to be translated into exchange
value so this question sounds a bit strange to me. Things are useful -
that's all. And personally I'd wish this could be said about every
product I buy...

Something with no
reproduction costs can have no exchange-value in a context of free
exchange. Further, unless it can be converted into exchange-value, how
can the peer producers be able to acquire the material needs for their
own subsistence?

Well, I think this is a wrong question. This question implies that
every activity useful for society as a whole ultimately needs to be
paid. That's of course wrong. *Lots* of useful activity in capitalism
is not paid (if people now think women movement they are right). I
think instead of extending exchange logic to for instance raising kids
I think we need to reverse the tendency to put everything under the
command of exchange.

But even if you accept this question the useful Free Products are also
useful for the producers of Free Products. So Free Products reduce the
need to buy also for producers therefore reducing the need for money.

The wealthy network exists within a context of a poor
planet. The root of the problem of poverty does not lay in a lack of
culture or information (though both are factors), but of direct
exploitation of the producing class by the property owning classes. The
source of poverty is not reproduction costs, but rather extracted
economic rents, forcing the producers to accept less than the full
product of their labour as their wage by denying them independent
access to the means of production.

Now this is of course pure worker movement: "Unjust" "exploitation".
Today I think this is simply not the field where capitalism can be
overcome. The argument is simply the antithesis and as such stays
fully in the exchange based society and only wants to change the
distribution. What we need is the synthesis, however.

So long as commons-based
peer-production is applied narrowly to only an information commons,
while the capitalist mode of production still dominates the production
of material wealth, owners of material property, namely land and
capital, will continue to capture the marginal wealth created as a
result of the productivity of the information commons.

That's something which puzzles lots of leftists indeed. However, if it
would be the case that the ancien regime *must not* benefit from the
new productive forces then we would have not capitalism in the first
place: The feudal lords benefitted in several ways from the beginnings
of capitalism. Nonetheless they were washed away after a while.

Whatever exchange value is derived from the information commons will
always be captured by owners of real property, which lays outside the
commons.

I don't think it makes sense to distinguish "real" or "unreal"
property. Property is always a concept based on force to maintain it.
In this regard the differences between intellectual and material
property are only marginal here.

For Social Production to have any effect on general material wealth it
has to operate within the context of a total system of goods and
services, where the physical means of production and the virtual means
of production are both available in the commons for peer production.

That's not true - if you'd agree that lowering prices is an "effect on
general material wealth": If the information which today is a
necessary pre-condition for material production is Free then those
firms who use these Free blueprints for production can lower the
prices because they don't need to invest in research and development.
Capitalist markets then guarantee that prices actually lower.

By establishing the idea of commons-based peer-production in the context
of an information-only commons, Benkler is giving the peer-to-peer
economy, or the competitive sector, yet anther way to create wealth for
appropriation by the property privilege economy, or the monopoly
sectors.«

And what's wrong with it? The concepts of Selbstentfaltung and Free
Production play on a different playground than this one. They
undermine capitalist superiority on its very power base: The ability
to organize interesting production processes.

Commentary (Michel Bauwens):

I essentially agree with D. Kleiner, that it is reductive to restrict
peer production to the immaterial sector.

However, his argument about sustainability of peer production may rest
on a confusion. Peer production is essentially non-reciprocal
or 'doubly free': the freedom to contribute, and the freedom to use.
Thus a direct connection between an income, in exchange for an
engagement, is not peer production, but belongs to the exchange
economy.

Absolutely.

Nevertheless, peer production, already sustainable on a collective level
because there is always a critical mass of collaborators, despite
individuals being added or leaving the project, must be sustainable in
some way. And the only way to make it collectively sustainable, is to
introduce a basic income, where by definition there is no connection
between work and output, as it is unconditional.

Well, I think basic income would be one way to think a transition
period. There are other ways, however. Personally I think there will
be a wide range of coping strategies. People "somehow" transited from
feudalism to capitalism. IMHO they will similarly "somehow" transit to
the GPL society.

In my vision, this gives a society which has a core of non-reciprocal
peer production, responsible for the most valuable cultural,
intellectual and spiritual 'use-value' creation,

*And* valuable productive use value creation. Just as software
developers like to develop software engineers like to design things.
That's the very reason why they are engineers. There is no principle
reason why they can not design for instance a Free Car.

BUT, this needs to be
coupled to a pluralistic economy, that consists of a mixture of a
reinforced gift economies for services and surviving traditional
economies, and a reformed, peer-informed, non-capitalist market.

May be that reflects my "somehow" above.

But indeed, peer production need not be confined to the immaterial
sphere.

It's expansion in the physical sphere is dependent on 3 factors:

1) the possibility of an abundance or a distribution of resources (this
is already the case for computing resources)

I'd like to remind of Steven Weber's point about what is abundant in
Free Software and what is limited (where he talks about gift economy).
Of course the computing resources are abundant - but that's *not* the
key resource needed for the production of Free Software. Indeed though
Free Software certainly flourished through the Internet it existed
before - listen to Richard Stallman when he talks about sending tapes
around. What actually is limited is the availability of bright
developers. Existing Free Software is abundant but non-existing Free
Software needs limited resources.

2) the possibility of separating immaterial design processes from
physical production; in such cases, the first process can be
peer-produced; and the second can be much more distributed through P2P
exchanges

3) the interlinking of physical, logical (licences), and digital
resources, so that we can create physical commons of public goods that
are protected from abuse (the tragedy of the commons).

What really protects from the tragedy of the commons is the
impossibility to extract alienated value from the common good.
Abundance is one such example. If a good is abundant then it can not
be overused. And it also doesn't make sense to sell it. Distributed
fabbers could be helpful here because they give the power to produce a
wide range of goods to lots of people.

Licenses or similar contracts could be another way. That would mean
that you may not sell a common good. In a way a certain type of
property. Hmm...

But in any case, such extension can only be partial, as we will still
need an exchange-based economy for scarce goods.

I'd put it differently: An exchange based economy needs to make goods
scarce. Scarcity is something which is produced by a society and
namely by an exchange based one. Only in an exchange based society it
can happen that people die from hunger whereas in general there are
plenty of food resources available. Or need to live in paper boxes
while there are unused flats nearby.

But, such an exchange
economy need not be capitalist.

Well, I think capitalism is the best exchange based economy we can
think of. (Real existing) socialism tried to create an exchange based
economy without capitalism and we witnessed its ultimate failure.

IMHO the flaws of exchange based economies can not be cheated away
somehow. They are deeply built into the nature of exchange as an
economic principle.

I'm also particularly puzzled by Kleiner's argument that the portion of
the commons-created use value that can be monetized, can only be
appropriated by the owners of property. I have explained elsewhere that
peer production need not pass through vectoral capitalists, who own the
vectors of information, but that this can now be done by the organizers
of the participatory platforms themselves, the netarchical capitalists.
But there is no iron law that this must be so. Peer producers can, and
perhaps should, create their own vehicles to monetize the commonly
created value.

So to conclude: it makes no sense to argue for a full extension of peer
production to the physical sphere, because non-reciprocal producton is
predicated on abudance. For scarce rival goods, we need different and
appropropriate approaches.

As I said above the *production* of Free Software is actually based on
a rival good: the brain and time of experts. Only the reproduction of
existing Free Software is abundant. I think we need to take this into
account more thoroughly.


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

--
Please note this message is written on an offline laptop
and send out in the evening of the day it is written. It
does not take any information into account which may have
reached my mailbox since yesterday evening.

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Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



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