[ox-en] Peer production manifesto?

Hi list!

I find Michel's text below interesting - though it needs perhaps a lot
of improvement. He formulated it for the P2P Research Group. The text
gave me the idea to try something like a peer production manifesto
[1]_. What do you think?

.. [1] I consciously started a new thread for this.


						Grüße

						Stefan

Last month (36 days ago) Michel Bauwens wrote:
> Appendix 1: *: Summary theses on the emergence of the peer to peer
> civilization and political economy*
> 
> 1. Our current world system is marked by a profoundly counterproductive
> logic of social organization:
> 
> a) it is based on a false concept of abundance in the limited material
> world; it has created a system based on infinite growth, within the confines
> of finite resources
> 
> b) it is based on a false concept of scarcity in the infinite immaterial
> world; instead of allowing continuous experimental social innovation, it
> purposely erects legal and technical barriers to disallow free cooperation
> through copyright, patents, etc...
> 
> 2. Therefore, the number one priority for a sustainable civilization is
> overturning these principles into their opposite:
> 
> a) we need to base our physical economy on a recognition of the finitude of
> natural resources, and achieve a sustainable steady-state economy
> 
> b) we need to facilitate free and creative cooperation and lower the
> barriers to such exchange by reforming the copyright and other restrictive
> regimes
> 
> 3. Hierarchy, markets, and even democracy are means to allocate scarce
> resources through authority, pricing, and negotiation; they are not
> necessary in the realm of the creation and free exchange of immaterial
> value, which will be marked by bottom-up forms of peer governance
> 
> 4. Markets, as means to to manage scarce physical resources, are but one of
> the means to achieve such allocation, and need to be divorced from the idea
> of capitalism, which is a system of infinite growth.
> 
> 5. The creation of immaterial value, which again needs to become dominant in
> a post-material world which recognized the finiteness of the material world,
> will be characterized by the further emergence of non-reciprocal peer
> production.
> 
> 6. Peer production is a more productive system for producing immaterial
> value than the for-profit mode, and in cases of the asymmetric competition
> between for-profit companies and for-benefit institutions and communities,
> the latter will tend to emerge
> 
> 7. Peer production produces more social happiness, because 1) it is based on
> the highest from of individual motivation, nl. intrinsic positive
> motivation; 2) it is based on the highest form of collective cooperation,
> nl. synergestic cooperation characterized by four wins (both the
> participants in the exchange , the community, and the universal system)
> 
> 8. Peer governance, the bottom-up mode of participative decision-making
> (only those who participate get to decide) which emerges in peer projects is
> politically more productive than representative democracy, and will tend to
> emerge in immaterial production. However, it can only replace representative
> modes in the realm of non-scarcity, and will be a complementary mode in the
> political realm. What we need are political structures that create a
> convergence between individual and collective interests.
> 
> 9. Peer property, the legal and institutional means for the social
> reproduction of peer projects, are inherently more distributive than both
> public property and private exclusionary property; it will tend to become
> the dominant form in the world of immaterial production (which includes all
> design of physical products).
> 
> 10. Peer to peer as the relational dynamic of free agents in distributed
> networks will likely become the dominant mode for the production of
> immaterial value; however, in the realm of scarcity, the peer to peer logic
> will tend to reinforce peer-informed market modes, such as fair trade; and
> in the realm of the scarcity based politics of group negotiation, will lead
> to reinforce the peer-informed state forms such as multistakeholdership
> forms of governance.
> 
> 11. The role of the state must evolve from the protector of dominant
> interests and arbiter between public regulation and privatized corporate
> modes (an eternal and improductive binary choice), towards being the arbiter
> between a triarchy of public regulation, private markets, and the direct
> social production of value. In the latter capacity, it must evolve from the
> welfare state model, to the partner state model, as involved in enabling and
> empowering the direct social creation of value.
> 
> 12. The world of physical production needs to be characterized by:
> 
> a) sustainable forms of peer-informed market exchange (fair trade, etc..);
> 
> b) reinvigorated forms of reciprocity and the gift economy;
> 
> c) a world based on social innovation and open designs, available for
> physical production anywhere in the world.
> 
> 13. The best guarantor of the spread of the peer to peer logic to the world
> of physical production, is the distribution of everything, i.e. of the means
> of production in the hands of individuals and communities, so that they can
> engage in social cooperation. While the immaterial world will be
> characterized by a peer to peer logic on non-reciprocal generalized
> exchange, the peer informed world of material exchange will be characterized
> by evolving forms of reciprocity and neutral exchange.
> 
> 14. We need to move from empty and ineffective anti-capitalist rhetoric, to
> constructive post-capitalist construction. Peer to peer theory, as the
> attempt to create a theory to understand peer production, governance and
> property, and the attendant paradigms and value systems of the open/free,
> participatory, and commons oriented social movements, is in a unique
> position to marry the priority values of the right, individual freedom, and
> the priority values of the left, equality. In the peer to peer logic, one is
> the condition of the other, and cooperative individualism marries
> equipotentiality and freedom in a context of non-coercion.
> 
> 15. We need to become politically sensitive to invisible architectures of
> power. In distributed systems, where there is no overt hierarchy, power is a
> function of design. One such system, perhaps the most important of all, is
> the monetary system, whose interest-bearing design requires the market to be
> linked to a system of infinite growth, and this link needs to be broken. A
> global reform of the monetary system, or the spread of new means of direct
> social production of money, are necessary conditions for such a break.
> 
> 16. This is the truth of the peer to peer logical of social relationships:
> 1) together we have everything; 2) together we know everything. Therefore,
> the conditions for dignified material and spiritual living are in our hands,
> bound with our capacity to relate and form community. The emancipatory peer
> to peer theory does not offer new solutions for global problems, but most of
> all new means to tackle them, by relying on the collective intelligence of
> humankind. We are witnessing the rapid emergence of peer to peer toolboxes
> for the virtual world, and facilitation techniques of the physical world of
> face to face encounters, both are needed to assist in the necessary change
> of consciousness that needs to be midwifed. It is up to us to use them.
> 
> 17. At present, the world of corporate production is benefiting from the
> positive externalities of widespread social innovation (innovation as an
> emerging property of the network itself, not as an internal characteristic
> of any entity), but there is no return mecachism, leading to the problem of
> precarity. Now that the productivity of the social is beyond doubt, we need
> solutions that allow the state and for-profit corporation to create return
> mechanisms, such as forms of income that are no longer directly related to
> the private production of wealth, but reward the social production of
> wealth.
> 
> 
> Appendix 3: A legal and regulatory framework for the participative society
> 
> 
> 1) In the immaterial sphere
> 
> a)      diminish artificial scarcities in the informational field so that
> immense social value can be created, and immaterial conviviality can replace
> the deadly logic of material accumulation.
> 
> b)      Public authorities adapt Partner State policies that enable and
> empower the direct creation of social value
> 
> 
> 
> 2)  In the sphere of materiality
> 
> a) introduce true costing in the material field so that the market no longer
> creates negative exernalities in the natural environment; dissociate the
> marketplace from the system of infinite material growth
> 
> 
> 3) create more distributed access to the means of production (peer-based
> financing, distributed energy production, etc...) so that the peer to peer
> dynamic can be introduced in the sphere of material production as well.
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