Hi Vasilis and all!
One of the comments after my talk in Nantes last week was about
democracy in peer production. The guy was somewhat puzzled when I
insisted that peer production is in general not democratic. I think
this topic of (non-)democracy in peer production puzzles lots of
people so this thread comes in handy to discuss this further.
In fact I think it is one of the major challenges in this whole debate
to overcome the classical concepts of democracy and replace it with
something more adequate. This requires some radical analysis, however.
Below I'm rambling a bit hoping for comments to improve this line of
thought.
17 months (530 days) ago Vasilis Kostakis wrote:
Michel wrote:
peer governance is post-democratic (because non-representational)
and Stefan added:
Not only because it is non-representational. It's also not so tied to
in numeric majorities - which to me is the core of democracy. It's
participative of course - something which is said to be a feature of
democracies.
In my opinion peer governance is post-representative, because as Michel and
Stefan admit, it is a form of governance that does not rely on
representation but where participants directly co-decide.
First of all every term starting with "post-" more or less only says
that we don't have a good explanation / term for what we are seeing in
reality. We just see that the "post-X" replaces the "X" somehow. In
this sense I agree that calling the decision making in peer production
post-democratic or post-representative makes sense - though...
...is it really post-representative? For this question I think we
need to dig a bit deeper into concepts. From an emancipatory
perspective I would say that the real goal is that the needs of the
people are reflected in decisions made. If we talk about production
then I think the most adequate term here is production of use value.
Democracy now is one attempt on the political track of this road,
where the people may vote on the government and in some cases may vote
on single decisions.
But to reflect the needs of people you not necessarily need democracy.
The market to some degree also reflects the needs of the people,
because they don't buy useless commodities.
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.
This approach is taken neither by the market nor by democracy. In
both cases you make an offer and let people decide afterwards what
they like.
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.
* 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.
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.
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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