Re: [ox-en] Interview on Peer to Peer Politics with Cosma Orsi

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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