Re: [ox-en] Interview on Peer to Peer Politics with Cosma Orsi
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:13:18 +0200
Hi!
18 months (550 days) ago Stefan Meretz wrote:
A nice interview of Cosma Orsi with Michel Bauwens, reposted from
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/interview-on-peer-to-peer-politics-with-cosma-orsi/2008/04/10
and blogged citing parts here
http://www.keimform.de/2008/04/10/michel-bauwens-on-peer-to-peer-politics/
This is an older piece of Michel lying around I never got to respond
to. Though I generally agree with what Michel says I'd like to spell
out a few details which I think Michel got wrong.
I'll quote each question / answer I reply to fully so there should be
sufficient context.
Q: Your recent reflections gravitates around an alternative paradigm of
production that you have named P2P political economy. What is this
concept all about?
My main argument is that we have the development of a new set of
technological affordances, which changes the conditions in which the
production of social value can take place,
Unfortunately it is still very undefined what "social value" should
be. Since this is such a central concept it is really a pity that
Michel insists on keeping this concept cloudy.
and that this fundamentally
challenges the supremacy of the classic for-profit mode of production.
This time, not because the workers have undertaken any conscious
challenge to it, but because it enables the direct social production of
use value, through new life practices that are largely outside the
control of capital, and with means of production which have been
socialized to a very significant degree. These new processes are
post-capitalist rather than capitalist, in the sense that they no
longer need any specific role of capital for their reproduction.
The key characteristic of our new technological infrastructure, i.e.
distributed networks, is that they allow individuals to freely engage
and relate to each other around common projects. This has a multitude
of important effects. By dramatically lowering the thresholds of
participation in such common projects, a much wider range of
motivations, instead of just monetary ones, have become productive.
I'd not put it that way. I agree that the technological infrastructure
enables working together with (very) remote people. It also enables
that similar interests "find" each other easily.
But I think the motivations behind that have been at least partly
productive before - just in different, more local projects. Otherwise
this would mean that before the Internet all peer producers would have
been couch potatoes. I think this is not the case. And if I consider
myself this is also true: Before Free Software / Oekonux for instance
I have been engaged in local political activities.
What is different, however, is that the Internet leverages the impact
of such activities.
What I'm trying to say: The motivations ultimately based in the human
urge for Selbstentfaltung have been there always. Only now the
technology is there to lift this Selbstentfaltung to a level relevant
for all of society.
Amongst the newly enabled social processes, the first in importance is
therefore the ability to produce complex artefacts in common, without
recourse to either a for-profit or state-based form of social
organization;
Again I think it it not true that this is for the first time - at
least not if you generalize "complex artefacts" to "complex results".
Three big instances which come to my mind are churches, political
parties and trade unions. All are neither for-profit nor state-based
but nonetheless accomplish very complex goals relevant for all of
society.
In fact I think that throughout the history of mankind complex goals
have been accomplished without for-profit goals. The state can be seen
as one form of institutionalizing such activities but is also not a
necessary precondition.
second, the ability to scale small groups dynamics on a
global scale, below the scale where hierarchical simplification would
be needed, and so the possibility to replace hierarchical allocation by
the bottom-up coordination through a multitude of small groups and
individuals;
Indeed I think this is a good question. Basically I think that for
complex problems it is often useful to have different viewpoints. The
more abstract viewpoints - such as keeping a project on track or
following a certain architecture - can be seen as hierarchical. *Such*
"hierarchies" are specific to a certain problem and are necessary
because of the structure of the problem.
Other hierarchies are in fact induced by alienated motivations. That
often peer production projects just work in parallel and *nonetheless*
keep compatibility to each other is IMHO a result of the non-alienated
motivations. Standards which people follow voluntarily are an
important means to accomplish this.
Well, actually often the "hierarchies" are only partially a feature of
the problem rather than a feature of a certain solution. May be that
is the difference...
third, the ability in the context of production of
non-rival and `immaterial' goods, to share them without any loss of
usage or value by the sharer, so that a non-reciprocal logic of
voluntary contributions, coupled with universal availability, not only
becomes possible, but even a natural requirement which does not impose
any substantial extra cost to the system.
I keep emphasizing that this has nothing to do with immaterial or not
but with the availability of means of production to (re-)produce the
goods...
This is why I focus on
the `peer to peer' logic as a `non-reciprocal' form of generalized
exchange, which does not need any reciprocity. It is a form of communal
shareholding which should clearly be distinguished from any
reciprocity-based gift economy. It works in the immaterial sphere of
non-rival goods, but because every physical production is also the
result of an immaterial design, it also has a big impact on the
totality of productive processes.
...and because of this this logic is not limited to immaterial goods
in general.
In short, we now have commons-based peer production as a third mode of
production, self-organization of such peer projects as a third mode of
peer governance, and peer property as new mode of protecting that
common from private appropriation.
Why "third"? I thought it would be the 42nd in human history ;-) .
There are actually two ways peer property works against private
appropriation: The first are licenses Michel mentions below. The
second is the general availability without a price which makes it
pointless to try to exclusively own a peer product.
The political economy of the common is no longer based on the
circulation of capital, but on the circulation of the common. The
precondition for such social cooperation is the pre-existence, or
self-creation, of open and free raw material, i.e. material for which
no permission or payment has to be given; the raw material is processed
through new techniques, which have lowered the threshold of
participation to such a degree that every form of motivation becomes
productive, including especially the non-monetary ones, and finally,
the output takes the form of a commons, through a new type of licenses,
which act as a legal guarantee against private appropriation; this in
turn creates a new layer of open and free raw material which can serve
for the next phase of social cooperation, in a virtuous cycle of common
creation.
I'd like to emphasize that it is exactly this virtuous cycle which is
*the* basic strength of peer production. May be it is equivalent to the
Money => Commodities => More money
aka cycle of capitalism. As we now this cycle is the source of power of
capitalism.
In fact I think that we have a new sort of such a cycle is
historically new since the advent of capitalism.
Q: Do you see peer production as a way of re-empowering a worn-out civil
society that has been dispossessed of much of its creativity as a
result of three centuries of capitalistic exploitation?
Yes, peer to peer practices are a sign of the rebirth, and the coming to
prominence, of civil society as the primary actor of social life. Look
at our language: civil society organizations are either called
non-profit, or non-governmental, implying that they are derivative from
either corporations or the state. But the new breed of institutions
that are managing peer production, such as the Wikimedia or the Mozilla
Foundations, call themselves with the positive moniker of for-benefit,
implying a positive identity and practice. Peer production is the mode
of production, governance and property arising out of civil society,
and it has to be clearly distinguished, from the private or public
alternatives. Peer production is not state production, peer governance
is neither bureaucracy nor representative democracy, and peer property
is inclusive common property, not collective public property. The key
concern of peer governance is to eliminate permission seeking, to
abolish credentialism, to avoid democratic negotiation where possible,
to forego market pricing but most of all: to avoid the emergence of a
collective individual which arises out of the community, crystallizes,
and then turns against it or appropriates the common resources to its
own benefit. Peer production is post-capitalist, but it does not
necessarily abolish the market, rather it subsumes it as a subsystem
for allocating scarce goods according to the price mechanism; it does
not abolish the state, but expects the state to become a partner which
empowers and enables the infrastructure of participation, through which
the direct social production of value can occur. I call this the
Partner State approach.
In fact I think that in the final step of a peer production based
society markets are abolished and the state if it exists at all will
be very hard to recognize for contemporary minds. In fact I think what
Michel says here is that during a transformation period peer
production does not eradicate markets and states with a single blow
but step by step.
Q: One of the most attention-grabbing point of your reasoning is that
peer production embodies a concept of property (rights) substantially
different from the one entailed by capitalism. Peer production is, in
fact, geared around a legal infrastructure tailored for and aimed at
the creation of what you called Information Commons. Can you explain
what the technicalities of this alternative form of property are?
Every social form needs a technique for social reproduction, and in the
case of peer production it is crucial that it is protected from private
appropriation. Peer property is common property, not private nor public
property. Private property is exclusionary, simply put: what is mine,
is not yours. Public property is both of all of us, but also crucially
from none of us. The latter is a consequence of its representational
format. We choose, democratically, or it is chosen for us, that a
collective body represents the sovereignty over that property, so that
it can in fact exclude. The collective therefore potentially excludes
the individual. But common property takes a novel position, it is both
from you and me, and we cannot exclude each other from using it. So
peer property stands for the universal availability of what has been
commonly constructed.
Hmm... I prefer the definition given by Steven Weber:
Open source radically inverts the idea of exclusion as a basis of
thinking about property. *Property in open source is configured
fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to
exclude.* [p.16]
-- cited after
http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Research/SuccessOfOpenSource
In practice I think there exist collective bodies which to a large
degree are the sovereigns over common property. However, I think in
practice common property is not only a right to distribute but even a
*duty*. Any peer production maintainer will be out of contributors
quickly if she neglects to distribute stuff.
However, it comes in two slightly different formats, one appropriate for
the sharing economy and one appropriate for the commons economy. In the
sharing economy, the individual or small group produces an artefact,
over which it retains sovereignty, but it can decide over various
modalities of sharing. A typical example of this are the Creative
Commons licences, which say: you can use my creative output, under such
and such conditions. The other format is used for commons-based peer
production, where it is clear that large collectives are building a
common artefact. In this case the basic rule is that, though your
attribution and therefore ownership is recognized, it is in fact part
of a common pool, which takes precedence. You can use it, copy it,
modify it, but every modification is also automatically part of the
same common pool. Typical example is the General Public License used by
the free software community.
Especially by giving the examples I do not understand what Michel
refers to. Creative Commons licenses including the Share-Alike
building block are not much different from the GPL.
Also the difference between an individual and a community is not very
useful IMHO. If a individual decides to contribute she consciously
puts her work under the respective license. The only difference often
is that she can't choose the license but someone else did this before.
There is a third case, where corporations attempt to integrate various
aspects of peer production in their own value and production chains, or
attempt to monetize common production. Such cases, though they may
involve sharing or distributed production, do not constitute peer
property, but may have various dangerous clauses, such as claiming that
all your creative output is in fact property of the platform. This is a
new type of enclosure.
There are also cases where corporations produce peer products and are
engaged in peer production. They earn money from secondary services.
Q: Your proposal is gaining moment. You managed to organised several
university workshops here in Europe [notably in France at the Sorbonne
University and Nottingham Trent University] to discuss at academic
level this paradigm. Furthermore, there is a growing interest on the
part of commercial enterprises in understanding P2P processes, as shown
by the fact that your time is now divided up between implementing the
theoretical aspect and delivering seminars for commercial enterprises.
How do you explain this interests on the part of market enterprises,
and in light of such a growing interest, what kind of future do you
envisage, say in the next 20 or 30 years, for peer production?
Market players understand that the use of peer production principles is
a competitive advantage. I formulate this as the `law of asymmetric
competition'. It states that if a for-profit company, using wage labour
and proprietary IP, is facing competition from a for-benefit
institution that can draw on a large circle of volunteers and uses open
ownership formats, the former will tend to eventually lose out to the
latter. The reason is that peer production filters out any but the most
productive motivation, i.e. intrinsic positive motivation stemming from
passion, and strives for absolute quality, i.e. producing the very best
common artefact, never finished but continuously upgraded, while its
private competitor will only strive for relative quality, i.e. being
better than the competition. From this follows a derivative: any
for-profit company, or public authority for that matter, that adopts
open/free, participatory and commons-oriented practices will tend to
gain competitive advantages compared to those that do not do so.
Though I certainly share the first I doubt the second. If a capitalist
corporation would generally do better running on peer production
principles all capitalist corporations would be using peer production
for long - capitalists are not stupid. But as we see this is not the
case.
Also if this would be the case then peer production obviously could be
integrated in capitalism and therefore neutralized as a germ form. I
can not see that this is the case.
What is the case is that capitalist corporations start to adopt a few
elements of peer production. In some cases they include the opinion of
"lead" users, in some cases they give away some of their products
under peer production licenses or they offer additional services based
on peer products [#]_.
.. [#] It would be probably interesting to have an up-to-date overview
in which ways capitalist corporations and peer production
interacts.
Also we see capitalist corporations which have big financial
difficulties *although* they adopt peer production principles (Sun and
their for-long-time-close-to-and-now-fully peer production Java). So
adopting peer production by a corporation is not a guarantee for
success.
I think this is a very interesting question and based on up-to-date
empirical material it would be interesting to gain up-to-date
insights.
This
drives the adoption of peer to peer practices in the market sphere, and
strengthens the overall peer to peer logic in society.
I agree that even partial adoption of peer practices is good for peer
production.
The process is
very similar to how slavery changed to feudalism, and feudalism to
capitalism: by a mutual reconfiguration of both the elite and the
producing classes. Marx's vision was a historical anomaly which we now
know has never been confirmed.
I don't know what Michel refers to by "Marx's vision". AFAICS Marx had
very few visions of that kind. However, the spirit of peer production
matches indeed very closely the philosophical core of the critique
Marx formulated for capitalism.
So the image of change is the following: peer to peer develops as a germ
form in the margins of the market, and is increasingly adopted, until
it eventually achieves some kind of parity. At some point in time the
old meta-system enters into crisis, and the already existing new
subsystem becomes the new meta-system.
The best scenario is that the enlightened sections of the elite first
recognize that there needs to be a new global compact to save the earth
from biospheric destruction, say a form of green capitalism, but to
succeed, it necessarily will adopt many p2p features, and in any case,
such change can only come through a revival of popular power to drive
the system to such reform, which in itself will strengthen
participatory politics.
I think this is at best wishful thinking. The crash of the environment
never was a good reason for more than marginal actions and the reasons
for this is that nature comes without a price.
Apart from this the destruction of nature could be tackled in
capitalism alone - this needs no peer production. The green movement
is also clearly part of capitalism - peer production doesn't occur
there. I see no reason why peer production should be any more or less
affiliated to green than to anything else. [#]_
.. [#] May be it *looks* like this is the case but IMHO this results
from the fact that relatively more peer producers are younger
and have a greener mind set than the rest. But this doesn't
mean that there is an inner connection.
This in turn creates the space for the germ
form to grow to a level of equivalency - think of the situation before
the French Revolution with the absolute monarchs arbitraging between a
rising bourgeoisie and a declining feudal order. At some point,
frustration that the advantages of the new form are being frustated
through the old form of social organization, may then lead to a tipping
point, in which the new subsystem becomes dominant. This scenario has
of course nothing automatic, it depends on the pressures of the
populations driven by the effects of climate catastrophes, and in the
second phase, in the power of peer producers.
I think the power comes from the positive results of peer production
alone.
My hopes are driven by
the following conviction: that to maintain a infinite growth system
within a finite environment cannot in any case be a sustainable form of
society.
I argued against this before.
The question then becomes: what will replace it? It will
either be a new system of hyper-exploitation, based on a return to
authoritarianism, similar to the period of disintegration following the
decline of the Roman Empire; or it can transform to a higher level of
complexity, which in my view is the peer to peer based civilization.
Of course I agree with this.
Can we really envisage that humanity chooses for some kind of
collective suicide, and not for the obvious way out? Of course we can
envisage it, but our energies should better be directed to create the
desired future, and to consider it as a `conditional inevitability'. In
this context, a reconfiguration of some market forces to a position of
netarchical capitalism, their transformation into `enablers and
empowerers of the direct social production of value', as we see already
happening, seems like a good bet. Such forces are both partially allies
of peer producers, but of course they also have different interests.
Can we compare it again to the end of the Roman empire. It was
certainly better to be a serf than a slave,
I'm not sure whether each serf saw it that way...
and at the same time, for
former slaveholders, it was a way to externalise the cost of fully
feeding their slaves, by making them responsible for their own
livelihood. Mutual interest of both the elite and the producing classes
led to a reconfiguration of the class system into the new equilibrium
of feudalism.
My cents.
Grüße
Stefan
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