Re: [ox-en] A name for a peer-production-based society?

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Hi all

This will have to be short. Raoul, I have only read this very quickly so will not comment on the substance. I am sure your points are good. The problem for me is simple: if one were to say that a name / slogan is necessary, the name has to sound good. I'm sorry, but I cant find an aesthetic / communicational pleasure / punch in the term  "gratisist" - to me it just does not sound right. Commonist may be wrong substantially but it has a better ring in my view. A superficial point of view maybe...

best
mathieu

----- Original Message -----
From: Raoul <raoulv-fBIn7JHAfCbUKx/[email protected]>
Date: Wednesday, September 2, 2009 1:15 am
Subject: [ox-en] A name for a peer-production-based society?
To: [email protected]

> A name for a peer-production-based society ?
> 
> Christian Siefkes wrote (13aug09):
> "So we're still faced with two very different futures, which 
> Rosa Luxemburg contrasted as "socialism or barbarism" almost 
> hundred years ago. Though nowadays, seeing that the reopening of 
> the commons is an essential precondition for the positive 
> alternative to appear, we might prefer to call it commonism instead."
> 
> The issue of giving a name to a "system" based on peer 
> production principles has been dealt with recently, more or less 
> directly, in the Oekonux list and also in a larger sphere. 
> Especially through the discussions about the Kevin Kelly's 
> article: "The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is 
> Coming Online", (22may09) (1)
> 
> About this article Stefan Meretz wrote (28may09):
> "Btw: Kevin Kelly used the term 'socialism' too – crazy."
> And Stefan Merten (4jun09): "Well, really an interesting 
> article. Indeed, very Oekonuxian in spirit."
> 
> At another level, Mathieu O'Neil wrote (27may): "In general I 
> have been thinking about what Oekonux is for. My short answer: 
> Oekonux aims to disseminate the idea that peer production is a 
> valid alternative to capitalism." And Diego Saravia answered 
> asking (27may): "Esclavism, feudalism, capitalism, p2p-ism?"
> 
> There are three interesting questions raised by these interventions:
> 1 The meaning of the words "socialism" and "communism" (both 
> words had a similar evolution).
> 2 The pertinence to call socialist or communist a society fully 
> based on peer production principles.
> 3 The need and possibility to find a new word to name such a society.
> 
> A few words about these issues.
> 
> 1. The meaning of the words "socialism" and "communism"
> 
> A whole book could be written (and that has probably been done) 
> about the evolution of the meaning of these words. In short one 
> can say that they appeared as expressions of a dream of a post-
> capitalist society and ended as synonymous of totalitarian forms 
> of capitalism, state capitalism.
> Even Hitler used the word socialism for his cause.
> 
> At the origin, as a negation of capitalism, the different 
> meanings of these words had in common to be opposed to the two 
> most specific characteristics of capitalism: capital profit as 
> the goal of production and wage-labor as the way to mediate the 
> participation of the majority of producers.
> The project, even if often nebulous, was generally identified 
> with a society without classes, without exploiters and 
> exploited, without private property of the means of production, 
> where production would be oriented exclusively towards the 
> satisfaction of human needs and where the participation of the 
> population and the distribution of goods would follow the 
> principle: "From each according to his ability, to each 
> according to his needs".
> Other important characteristics of the original concepts of 
> socialism or communism were the ideas that workers have no 
> fatherland, ("The workers have no country", says The Communist 
> Manifesto; "The International will be the human race", says the 
> famous song), and that in a classless society there would be no 
> State. Marxist and Anarchist could strongly disagree about the 
> need or not of a State apparatus in a period of transition, but 
> they agreed on its absence in a full-developed non-capitalist society.
> 
> For many reasons, some relating to weaknesses and defeats of the 
> workers movements, some relating to the manipulation skills of 
> the ruling classes, the understanding of these words evolved 
> dramatically until they could be used to name different forms of 
> state controlled capitalism. (2) It was the opposite of the 
> original meaning.
> Instead of production oriented towards humans needs, production 
> remains oriented towards accumulation of capital, even if it is 
> State capital, a huge share of the product being generally 
> devoted to maintaining an unusually important military apparatus 
> and a rich and powerful bureaucracy which controls and possesses 
> collectively the means of production; instead of eliminating the 
> wage system, this is generalized and the level of wages for most 
> of the population is "equalized" to minimums; instead of 
> internationalism and worldwide brotherhood, nationalism is 
> exacerbated till its most absurd extremes ("Patria o muerte!").
> Horrors like the Cambodian genocide under the Pol-Pot regime 
> were made in the name of "socialism" or "communism".
> Some "critical supporters" of that kind of regime argue that 
> they were/are not really socialist or communist, but "steps 
> towards" them. But historical evidence has violently showed that 
> it has never been the case.
> 
> If one sticks to the original definition of socialism and 
> communism , it is obvious that none of them has ever existed or 
> even begun to exist. The identification of these terms with 
> state-capitalist regimes appears then as one the greatest and 
> most poisonous lies of the 20th century.
> It must also be underscored that since the beginning of the 
> corruption of the meaning of these terms, there have always been 
> currents of Marxists or anarchists (generally minorities) which 
> remained faithful to the original meanings of these words and 
> permanently denounced the mystifications. Rosa Luxembourg, 
> quoted by Siefkes (above) was one of them.
> 
> In any case, it is obvious that nowadays using the words 
> socialism or communism without specifying the meaning given to 
> them is source of important confusions.
> 
> 
> 2. The pertinence to call socialist or communist a society fully 
> based on peer production principles.
> 
> Kevin Kelly's article reads:
> "When masses of people who own the means of production work 
> toward a common goal and share their products in common, when 
> they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of 
> charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism."
> 
> If one respects the original meaning of the word "socialism", 
> and if one leaves apart the political aspects of the question, 
> K. Kelly is correct. He could also had called that "communism".
> Peer Production has developed in a universe where abundance 
> prevails for most of its products. Digital goods being freely 
> reproducible, the principles of private/excluding property and 
> symmetric exchange are not only useless but also counter-
> productive. Original socialist/communist principles are also 
> based on the possibility of abundance (of material goods in this 
> case) and are thus basically the same. "From each according to 
> his ability, to each according to his needs", for example, is a 
> common practice in digital peer production. Peer production has 
> in addition the specific quality of being international, without 
> fatherlands and naturally worldwide oriented since the beginning.
> 
> The problem is that the meaning of the word socialism (or 
> communism), for most of the population, is seldom the original 
> one. It rather evokes social-democratic or Stalinists regimes. 
> As Lawrence Lessig puts it in his criticisms to Kelly's article:
> "So my argument against Kelly is that it is wrong to use a term 
> (in the context of a Wired essay at least; a philosophy seminar 
> would invoke a completely different set of ethics) that would be 
> so completely misunderstood. We choose our words. We don't 
> choose our meaning." (31may09) (3)
> 
> I understand Kelly's concern as I think it is useful to 
> understand how peer production is the beginning of the 
> concretization of an old dream of exploited and poor classes in 
> history, as were the socialist/communist ideas. Even if for the 
> moment peer production concerns essentially the specific area of 
> digital goods, such a recognition can only be a stimulant to 
> strive for its expansion to the rest of social production. 
> Maybe, one day in the future, the meaning of socialism and 
> communism will be again, in most of the world population's mind, 
> the original one. But that would not be for tomorrow. In the 
> meantime, at a "popular" level, when there is not enough time or 
> place to explain, the use of this words, without precisions, is 
> inevitably confusing.
> 
> 
> 3. The need and possibility to find a new word to name a peer 
> production "system".
> 
> If socialism and communism are problematical, is it necessary to 
> find a new "ism" to name the system which would prevail in a 
> society based on peer production principles?
> As Christian Siefkes (see above), I think the answer is yes. 
> Even if words may become dangerous by the ambiguities in their 
> meaning, as we have seen, we cannot think without them. "In the 
> beginning was the word". For human beings, a collective project 
> can hardly be devised, worked-out without naming it. A name 
> helps to concentrate the wills, the thoughts, the actions of a 
> movement in a given direction.
> 
> The word "commonism", proposed by Christian Siefkes (and Stefan 
> Meretz (4)) refers indeed to one of the most specific and post-
> capitalistic aspects of Peer Production: to be commons based and 
> commons oriented. It also gives the idea of a continuity with 
> the old dreams. But it is obvious that it echoes the word 
> "communism", especially verbally, and has thus the same 
> disorienting effects.
> 
> Since some time, I have been thinking that something like 
> "gratisism" could be a solution.
> "Gratis is the process of providing goods or services without 
> monetary compensation. It is often referred to in English as 
> 'free of charge'. ", says Wikipedia in English. And it adds: 
> "The term gratis in English comes from the Latin word "gratis" 
> meaning "for thanks". In several languages, including Italian, 
> French, Romanian, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, 
> Norwegian, German, Polish, Bahasa Indonesia and Afrikaans it is 
> the equivalent to "for free". (5)
> 
> I think that a word based on "gratis" has interesting 
> advantages, but also weaknesses.
> The advantages are of two kinds: theoretical and 
> "communicative". From a theoretical point of view it has the 
> virtue to puts the emphasis on the overcoming of the kernel of 
> capitalism: the law of exchange value. You don't sell, you don't 
> buy. Without exchange value, the wage system and the 
> accumulation of capital become nonsenses. Use-value, usefulness 
> as the object of production instead of exchange value is highlighted.
> From a "communicative" point of view, I see three obvious advantages:
> 1. The word gratis has an immediate meaning for every one. Even 
> if you are not familiar with the web and digital goods, you know 
> that your best relationships with others (friends, love, 
> relatives) are, generally, "gratis". 2. The word "gratisism" is 
> new. It does not suffer from the weight of "the tradition of all 
> dead generations". The continuity with the past is reinvented 
> from a new point of view. 3. Last and... least, the word 
> "gratis" has the same meaning in more than a dozen languages.
> 
> But I also see a weakness: "gratisism" may be identified with 
> practices that are "gratis" only apparently. Two of them are 
> particularly frequent and remain totally in a capitalistic 
> logic. One concerns the goods financed by commercial 
> advertising, very present in the web (Google is only one of the 
> most spectacular examples). Here, the good is in reality payed 
> by the buyer of the advertized products. Furthermore, 
> advertising relays on one of the darkest aspects of the 20th 
> century mind manipulation: "A lie repeated a thousand times 
> becomes a truth", (Goebbels). The second false "gratisism" 
> concerns the public services which are sometimes said "gratis" 
> but are in fact payed by the tax payer.
> This is not the kind of “graticism†we want. Commercial 
> advertising and taxes are meaningless in a world without money.
> I don't know how disorienting that can be, but there is here 
> obviously a problem.
> But, will we find a perfect term?
> 
> One may say that it is a waste of time to try to find a word to 
> name something that can only be the product of the action of 
> billions of people all over the world, that the movement itself 
> will find the most appropriated terms. Which is true. But the 
> problem is that we are also part of that movement.
> 
> Raoul Victor
> 
> 1sep09
> 
> Notes:
> 1. http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-
> 06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all
> 2. Socialism and communism have not always had identical 
> meanings. For example, socialism has some times been associated 
> to a previous step towards communism. During the first World War 
> the word "communist" was used by the left wing of the workers 
> movement to distinguish themselves from the majority of the 
> "socialist" (social-democratic) parties that had called in every 
> country to participate to the war. After the Russian Revolution 
> and the foundation of the Third International, also called the 
> Communist International, the communist parties where in general 
> much closer to the USSR and related regimes than the 
> "socialist". During the "Cold war", the Socialist International 
> regrouped parties associated to the Western (pro USA) bloc 
> against the parties affiliated to the Komintern (Communist 
> International, pro USSR), etc. But the evolution of the meaning 
> of both words suffered an analogous dramatic corruption.
> To a certain extent, something similar happened to Christianity 
> which started as a "commons based" religion (first christian 
> used to put in common their belongings) and evolved into one of 
> the strongest pillars of the inequality-based systems: slavery, 
> feudalism, capitalism.
> 
> 3. http://www.keimform.de/2008/11/08/seven-hypotheses-about-commonism/
> 4. http://www.lessig.org/blog/2009/05/on_socialism_round_ii.html
> 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis
> 
> _________________________________
> Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
> Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
> Contact: [email protected]

****
Dr Mathieu O'Neil
Adjunct Research Fellow
Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute
College of Arts and Social Science
The Australian National University

E-mail: [email protected]
Tel.: (61 02) 61 25 38 00
Web: http://adsri.anu.edu.au/people/visitors/mathieu.php
Mail: Coombs Building, 9
Canberra, ACT 0200 - AUSTRALIA





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