Re: [ox-en] Democracy and peer production

Hi Stefan,

when you give up democracy, what replaces it?
"Selbstentfaltung", non-alienation and peer production do not
"automatically" consider the needs of people. I find these
"automatisms" quite dangerous.
To put it frankly: this opens the door for little dictators,
who often have to be disempowered by strength-draining forks.
There are a number of examples of this in the free software
movement.

Actually, in "Wisdom of Crowds", James Surowiecki mentions
Linux as a positive example but questions the way of
Torvalds' maintainership. By contrast, he empirically shows
that the best way of decision making that is based on many
individual opinions that have been obtained independently
of each other. Certainly not the way current representative
democracy works, but still I would call this democracy:
many opinions, and not just a few, lead to a decision.

All the best,
Till

Stefan Merten schrieb:
> 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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