Re: [ox-en] Democracy and peer production
- From: Stefan Meretz <stefan meretz.de>
- Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:07:14 +0200
On 2009-07-14 09:58, Stefan Merten wrote:
I think this topic of (non-)democracy in peer production puzzles lots
of people
Indeed. Democracy is a sacred cow.
For me it is important to make clear under which circumstances a
democracy is absolutely necessary and under which circumstances
democracy does no longer play a dominant role (if at all). The first is a
situation, where a society reproduces through a logic of different and
sometimes antagonistic interests. Such a society, namely the capitalist
one, generates a wide field of opposite partial interests. Or in other
words: Fulfilling ones own needs get the shape of partial interests,
where one interest excludes others interests, which make it necessary to
find decisions of a majority over a minority.
In a free society the strive for fulfillung ones needs get the shape of
including the needs of others
Or more rougly: Under the logic of mutual exclusion, needs have to
become partial interests to be enforced against other partial interests.
Under the logic of mutual inclusion, needs have to find cooperative ways
to realize, because the
So what do you really need? I think there are these points:
* Know what the needs of people are
You have to know somehow what the needs of people are actually. The
most direct approach is to ask people for their needs.
Even more direct is that the people already tell, what they want. This
is one feature of Christian's Peer Economy model (yes, I know, you don't
like it). Anyway.
The situation in peer production is similar since often peer
producers just produce without asking much up front. Well, the
feedback from users usually is taken into account and because of
internal openness is easy to reach the producers.
The producers just produce because of their need to be productive (or to
solve an immediate problem). Thinking of a more generalized situation,
where everyone is doing/producing, because s/he wants to due to the
reason of selbstentfaltung, leads to a situation where all needs are in
principle satisfied. This simply due the diversity of people, given
enough people are doing/producing something useful. I assume this will
be the case if you let the people do or produce (not impeded by
"unemployment" or other capitalist-related restrictions).
The remaining question is how to coordinate the amounts of products
being necessary to quantitatively satisfy all needs, and the question of
how to organize the meshed flow of materials/semi-products being
necessary for overall societal production. In previous contributions I
named this the question of "societal mediation".
Most of these questions are solved by direct cooperation and
communication in absense of democracy (or if you wish: in presense of
total democracy without the necessity of decisions by voting).
* Let this knowledge influence decisions
Of course knowing the needs of people doesn't suffice. This
knowledge must influence the decisions made.
A precondition for this influence is that your decisions are not
influenced by alienated goals. Well, this is of course the whole
non-alienation point I'm making all the time.
True. But as I tried to show: If decision making is nothing separate
from selbstentfaltung, then needs are always the ground of actions.
Seeing it this way what is really key for representing the needs of
the people in a decision is to know their needs and that those who
make the decisions - the maintainers but also other producers - care
about it.
What do you mean by "representing" here? Here you have an entirely
different meaning compared to "represention" people in a representative
democracy. Here the meaning of representation has the meaning of "is
part of". Remember selbstentfaltung: The needs of others are part of
your strive for selbstentfaltung because you need others to unfold being
the condition for your selbstentfaltung. This societal dimension of
selbstentfaltung already includes the needs of others -- the question is
only, what shape this inclusion will take. Generally, I would assume,
that these need-inclusion of your actions have manifold shapes,
depending of the requirements in the different fields. Democratic elements
can play a role in some fields, but as industrial production will no
longer be dominant, also democratic will wither away.
Now I would say that if you do something out of Selbstentfaltung and
in the absense of alienation then you automatically have this goal as
a guiding principle of your actions. So in peer production you
automatically have the features which are useful from an emancipatory
perspective.
Dunn [1993]
underscores that representative 'democracy' (and general the
representation in every sphere) is nothing more than the alteration
of true democracy into a harmless one, appropriate for the modern
state. Castoriadis [Oikonomou, 2003, p. 257] alleges that
"representation is the alienation of power, that is, the transfer
of power from the represented to the representatives" while there
is created "a division of political function, a division between
the rulers and the ruled".
Peer governance is actually a step closer to absolute democracy -
towards the real core of democracy.
Is it really? Is the power transferred closer to non-producers? I
don't think so. The difference really is that producers can be
trusted more because they are basically driven by the same goals as
the non-producers.
17 months (526 days) ago Michel Bauwens wrote:
as you know, I'm myself not sure that peer governance is a full
replacement for representational democracy, and the reason is
scale.
The process of peer production is not necessarily replicable to
areas of life where scarce resources have to be allocated and
competing 'group' interests come into play.
I don't see why this is in principle a problem. What Michel describes
here is a conflict. Peer production always includes conflicts and
they are treated. So what is the general problem here?
Even within peer governance, see the degeneration of Wikipedia, the
tyranny of structureless may lead to power grabs that may
necessitate formal democratic rules (some of which may be
representational) to intervene to remedy the situation (elections
in Debian and apache work very well)
Well, Wikipedia IMHO is actually an example of the over-democratic
mode of governance which indeed ends up in structurelessness. The
governance process in Wikipedia needs to become more like in peer
production.
17 months (526 days) ago Vasilis Kostakis wrote:
As Paolo Virno
<http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno8.htm>says:
"Contemporary production has come to a point that is much more
complex, much more mature than the administrative and legislative
apparatuses of the States. The question, then, is what type of
democracy. It is not a matter of simplified democracy, assemblies,
direct democracy, but rather the contrary. Non-representative
democracy should be translated into politics, into new
institutions, as can already been seen on the level of global
production. In saying non-representative democracy it is easy to
think of the myth of direct democracy, which naturally is a
beautiful myth. But it gives the idea of a simplified and
elementary politics. This is why the question is what is adequate
to the complexity of social production in which all the cognitive
and communicative capacities of the human animal are valorized,
which Marx named with the beautiful expression "General Intellect",
the social brain which is a pillar of modern production."
I agree that this is the crucial question. IMHO the term
"participative" is quite well because participation is one of the
important features here. I'm in doubt whether "democracy" or
"representative" in the common sense is very helpful here.
Grüße
Stefan
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