Re: [ox-en] There is no such thing like "peer money"
- From: Raoul <raoulv club-internet.fr>
- Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:58:26 +0200
On 27 aug 08, 18:27, Stefan Merten wrote :
"BTW: This is really a great discussion :-) ."
I fully agree. The compatibility between peer production and money, the
possibility of the disappearance of money, what could be the process of
that disappearance, these questions are all crucial if we pretend that a
"peer society" is possible. (It is funny to notice that this discussion
develops at the same time a new major financial/monetary crisis hits the
world economy.)
Stefan Merten (27aug08, 18:33)
Hi Michel and all!
Last month (44 days ago) Michel Bauwens wrote:
there are 2 discussions:
1) whether money, 'by itself', has problematic aspects ... it probably does,
but may be a necessary evil for a long time to come
Well, I replied to Sam that it is *capitalist* money which is really the problem. Indeed we should probably be more specific here.
Yes, we should be more specific. It would be useful to agree on what we
understand by money, as a general concept. During the discussion this
has not always been very precise. If we use the most elementary
definition of money, as the one given in Wikipedia (English), money
existed thousands of years before capitalism. "Money is anything that is
generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of
debt. The main uses of money are as a medium of exchange, a unit of
account, and a store of value." That definition includes of course the
"commodity money", that is "money whose value comes from a commodity out
of which it is made": Shells (in the 5 continents), grains, oil, cattle
(the Roman word for money, /pecunia/, derives from /pecus/, meaning
cattle), etc. and later silver or gold have been used as money long
before capitalism. State-money, fiat money, (as from the 6th century BC)
bring new features and sources of power for the ruling classes, but its
basic functions remain.
Also, long before capitalism humans could note that - using Michel
Bauwens' words - "money has problematic aspects". In the 4th century BC,
Aristotle, who already saw the three main uses of money (reproduced in
the Wipkipedia's definition above), made a pitiless criticism of money,
of exchange itself (opposed to "household management" logic), and even
"usury", which would 14 centuries later become one of the basis of
capitalism. He wrote, for example:
"There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of
household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary
and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured;
for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The
most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a
gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For
money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at
interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from
money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring
resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is
the most unnatural." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_(Aristotle))
He also said (more than two thousand years before the hackers) that "All
paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind".
In the Christian Bible you can also find a denunciation of the
"problematic aspects of money" with the famous passage about Jesus
chasing the merchants from the temple (one of the very few events in
Jesus' life which is described by all four gospels).
More generally, it is certainly because of its "problematics aspects"
that in "heavens" described by religions, money is generally absent.
The problem with money, from the beginning, is not only the fetishistic
aspect it tends to develop, but the reality for which it exists:
exchange, symmetric exchange: I only give you something if you give me
something "equivalent". If that principle had dominated the
hunters-gatherers societies in the paleolithic era, humanity would have
perished. Many of the solidarity and altruistic aspects of the
family/household management would have been (and remain) impossible with
symmetric exchange.
In addition, the third function of money: store of value, brings a lot
of new "problems" for social relations. Storing value has the great and
crucial advantage of allowing to break the exchange in time: you sell
today and can buy something equivalent later. But it also creates the
possibility to cumulate value and thus to become richer, more powerful
than the others and eventually able to exploit them. And the richer you
are the easiest it to cumulate more money. (The Gesellian money
solutions try to eliminate or limit this last function.)
In that sense, it is not only "capitalistic money which is really the
problem", as humans ancient distrust shows.
But before capitalism, even in societies where the use of money
developed, for example "in the slave economies of the roman empire and
the Hellenistic/Ptolomaic kingdoms which preceeded it", as Paul
Cockshott noted (13jul08), it did not played an important role in the
main domain of production: agriculture. Here, as Christian Siefkes says:
"most economy relations where based on direct dependency (slaves
producing for their master, serfs producing for their feudal lord,
etc.)." (13jul08). One could add, peasants communities producing for
their lords in the oriental-despotic societies.
As it has been said many times in the discussion, it is only with
capitalism development that money plays a dominant role in social life.
Capitalism places money at the heart of the two main dimensions which
define a mode of production: the goal of production and the way the
producers participate to production. In abandoning the old use of money:
commodity-money-commodity (C-M-C) to develop M-C-M', profit and
accumulation of capital/money become the goal of social production.
At the same time, wages, paid with money, become the medium for most
workers to participate to production. The labor force becomes a
commodity by itself and has a money price in a specific market. The
workers access to products is limited by the the possibility of having a
job and by the value in the market of their labor force.
This is important when considering the overcoming of capitalism. (See below)
Michel Bauwens
2) whehter money has different characteristics according to 1) its usage in
different societal models; 2) its underlying protocol
Stefan Merten
If an exchange system dominates society then it is a problem - no
matter on how you model the details.
But there were pre-capitalist societies which had money but were not
dominated by it - partly because the money-driven sector was marginal.
I wonder whether one can think of post-capitalist situations where
money exists but no longer dominates society.
It is indeed important to specify which societal model we are talking
about. The problem of the relation between money and peer production is
very different if you consider it within the capitalist society or in a
post-capitalist society, or rather in a society where peer production is
becoming the prevailing form and the material means of production are
becoming "peer possessed", falling into the commons. I am not sure this
distinction has always been made during this discussion.
In a capitalist society, peer production is inevitably dependent direct
or indirectly on capitalist money, since hackers (and all "peer
producers") need to make a living, and, in such a society, one needs
money to get food (or computers). Even if there were differences on that
question during the discussion, Michel Bauwens and Stefan Meretz have
both insisted on the need to preserve the specificity of peer-production.
Michel answering to Stefan says: "I think we agree on that, money cannot
be a means to subvert the 3 important conditions for peer production
(voluntary contributions, participatory processes, commons oriented
output).(...) This is the core issue: accepting that the reality of peer
projects does need money, but using it in such a way that it does not
affect the core logic." (13jul08)
They both accept that money can flow into a free project: "bounty-based,
fixed contributions by the members" (Stefan) , "voluntary fund raising
from the public, support from public authorities or foundations, or
support from the 'business ecology' profiting from the common resource"
(Michel). But money has no role to play within the internal
relationships and regarding the output: "There is no money or
product-to-market flow to the outside world", says Stefan.
I agree with all that concern.
Next years, or decades, will probably bring out new forms of interaction
between the two worlds. But they will inevitably suffer from the limits
of a relation between two antagonistic logics and from the fact that
means of material production remain in the hands of the lords of the
old. For example, the question, so many times posed by Michel Bauwens,
about how to manage in capitalism peer-production in sectors where
"cost-recovery" is required seems hardly solvable without abandoning, at
least partially, some of peer-production principles. As he says:
"Reality is complex".
BTW, I found interesting the Michel's mails and links giving information
about the way free-software writers paid by commercial corporations, as
IBM, manage to keep the maximum of a "peer" spirit and practice. But I
think he goes too far when he says these developers get a "patronage" or
something like "basic income" rather than a "traditional labor wage". It
is true that the labor force is not exactly possessed as it is the case
with "normal" capitalism. It is true that they are contributing to the
commons (and that is great). But, free-programmers are paid because IBM
needs their work in order to get profit (even if that is in a more or
less indirect way) and they are paid the price of their labor force.
And, of course, they are paid only if they work. These are important
specificities of wage, not only formal ones.
Back to the original issue. The question of the relation between
peer-production and money changes radically as soon as peer-production
becomes dominant in society. In a fully-developed "peer society", (the
end of last step in the Five-step model: "reconstruction of the entire
system process"), where material ampleness has developed and extended to
the whole planet, where symmetric exchange has become unnecessary and
even counter-productive, money has no reason to subsist, or maybe very
marginally. I agree with Stefan Merten when he writes:
Frankly I can not imagine what money could be good for if it is no longer necessary for
the organization of the whole social fabric.
But, the same is not true before the end of that step. There is
necessarily a period of "transition" where symmetric exchange, and thus
money, subsists.
>From a certain point of view, the "transition" between capitalism and
that society has already begun. According to the "Five-step model", we
are in the 3d step: "Germ form becomes an important dimension". But
there is a qualitative jump when reaching the 4th step: "Germ form
becomes the dominant form". I don't know whether I am very "orthodox"
in my understanding of the model, but I would say that this step implies
2 important aspects. First, a significant share of material means of
production become "managed" according to peer-principles. They are no
longer under private/exclusive property. (BTW: I consider State property
also as "private" since it "deprives", excludes the users of the means
of production and the consumers from direct possession of these means -
as it was the case in the wrongly-called "socialist" or "communist"
countries.) Second, the new form, peer-production, coexists with
important sectors managed according to the old forms, capitalist and
even pre-capitalist forms, since capitalism (as all the other modes of
production -except the hunters-gatherers) has always coexisted with
older modes of production.
I'll begin by this second aspect, as things appear more clearly. The
need of an exchange between the different sectors of social production
means the need of a mean of exchange, and thus the need of money... or
at least a form of money.
The consequences of the first aspect, ("peer possession" of the
material means of production) are more complex. Here, the old problem of
providing a material living for the peer-producers finds finally, at
least partially, its logic solution: "prosumers" produce collectively
their own living. But, because we are just exciting from a world
dominated by scarcity, it is impossible to apply immediately the
principle: "To each according to his needs/desires". The question is
then: how can be organized the distribution of goods collectively
produced? Since symmetric exchange and money have been the most
efficient "necessary evil" to manage situations where scarcity exists,
are they, here, an inevitable necessity?
I don't have a definitive answer. But I have some convictions about the
method to deal with the problem.
We need to be careful not to have a fetishistic vision of money,
inputing to money powers that come from the reality of exchange itself.
You cannot "abolish" money without eliminating the necessity of
symmetric exchange. The Argentinian experience in 2001, the "Social
Money Movement" (thanks Michel for:
http://p2pfoundation.net/Argentine_Social_Money_Movement), shows how in
a situation of scarcity, if official money disappears, money re-emerges
"spontaneously" from the need of exchange to survive. Cigarettes were
used as money during the second world war by prisoners and are still
used as a form of commodity money in U.S. prisons . On a much larger
scale, during the 20th century they were many situations, especially in
periods of war, where governments tried to ban free exchange and
restrict the power of money in order to impose rationing solutions. The
result has always been that market and money reappeared in their worst
form: black market.
Money will disappear, or be reduced to a very marginal role, only when
the need for it has disappeared or reduced to marginal goods, when
abundance or rather "ampleness" has been reached for produced goods. In
the internal world of Free-Software, money has disappeared not only
because of ethic convictions but because of the intrinsic nature of
digital goods which makes them abundant as soon as they are created.
At another level, but again concerning the method do deal with the
problem. Too often, we try to imagine what a post-capitalist society
could be by defining only what would be good for human beings: justice,
harmony, ecological rationality, etc. That is useful an necessary. But
insufficient and some times hazardous. A post-capitalist solution, in
order to be able to survive and remain, needs first of all to overcome,
to solve the impasses of capitalism. It needs to break the specific laws
that block the old machine and the society it dominates. Not all aspects
of capitalism will disappear (using machines to produce, worldwide
cooperation, for example) and it would also be a nonsense to define the
post-capitalist society and the way to it just by saying it will be the
contrary of capitalism.
In order to define what blocks the capitalist machine, I follow Marx, or
rather my understanding of Marx, since this is a very discussed question
between Marxists . To make it short, there are two main contradictions,
interrelated, which condemn capitalism to cyclical and eventually
"mortal" crisis. One is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,
the other is the tendency to limit the possibilities of consumption of
most of the population by the wage system. That appears rather clearly
during periods of open real crisis, recessions. Factories close, not
because nobody needs what they produce, but because they cannot make
profit. The majority of the population consume less, not because their
needs have reduced, but because they loose their jobs, source of wages,
or because their real wages decrease.
In that sense, any new form of re-organization of the
production/distribution process, if it is to be a step towards a
post-capitalist society, must include these two characteristics:
shifting of the goal of production from profit to human usefulness and
overcoming of the wage-system. Even if the need of symmetric exchange,
and of a sort of money to realize it, may subsist, these two
characteristics are indispensable.
Raoul Victor
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