Re: Raoul Victor * Money and Peer Production (was: [ox-en] Conference documentation)

more on payed p2p workers

http://apcmag.com/linux-now-75-corporate.htm
http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/


2010/1/24 Diego Saravia <[email protected]>:
> excelent article, but I do not agree with central  aspects of it.
>
> 1) Money is not the universal way of exchange value, in all societes
> there exist others way of exchange value, but ok, thats not the
> central argument, that could be changed in the article, without change
> in its nature
>
> 2) Societies grow, so not all human actions are equal value exchange,
> in fact if all exchanges are of equal value (no comercial injustice)
> (if value could be defined without doubts), there are other acts that
> are not exchange
>
> That acts are central to all societies, and not only relevant in peer to peer
>
> all social production in all growing societies are "not balanced"
>
> we are living stuff, we become, more, bigger, (better?)
>
> peer production also produces more than it spends, (and could do it,
> even with balanced exchanges!)
>
> its part of nature
>
> its social
>
> 3) when we gives software to the world, we receive
>
> we receive "attentional power"
>
> that is what drives knowledge societies, as capital drives industrial ones
>
> attentional power could be easely exchanged for "money", for example publicity.
>
>
>
>
> 2010/1/23 Stefan Merten <[email protected]>:
>> Hi list!
>>
>> Here is the text from Raoul's presentation.
>>
>>
>>                                                Grüße
>>
>>                                                Stefan
>>
>> === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< ===
>>
>> =========================
>> Money and Peer Production
>> =========================
>>
>> I'll try to deal with the question of the relations between this two
>> realities: money and Peer Production. What are these relations today
>> and what they might be in the future? Especially if one thinks that
>> Peer Production is a germ of the future society.
>>
>> The question is not so simple, first of all, because money and Peer
>> Production relay on different and antagonistic principles.
>>
>> Money is based on exchange, on symmetric exchange. I give you
>> something and you give me something of equivalent value. Money, as an
>> universal equivalent of value, is used
>>
>> 1. to allow that exchange,
>>
>> 2. to measure the value of what is exchanged and
>>
>> 3. to hoard the value of what is exchanged.
>>
>> On the contrary, Peer production is not based on any symmetrical
>> relation. There is not exchange of equivalents at any level of the
>> process of production. There are different definitions of Peer
>> Production, insisting more or less on different aspects of it. I'll
>> use here something close to the Michel Bauwen's definition of P2P
>> which refers to the three moments of the process.
>>
>> 1. Input, raw material is "open" and "free", gratis.
>>
>> 2. The process of collaboration is based on "voluntary participation"
>>   and not on wage or coercion relationships.
>>
>> 3. The output, the result of the collaboration is "universally
>>   available", free, gratis.
>>
>> How these two antagonistic realities can relate to each other? The
>> answer depends on the historical framework we consider. If we think
>> that one day a full developed Peer society will exist, it is clear
>> that things will be different according to the advancement of the
>> process which leads to such a situation. Thus, I will deal with three
>> specific moments:
>>
>> 1. within the framework of dominant capitalism
>>
>> 2. in a period of "transition" defined by the fact that Peer
>>   Production has started to extend to the material (non digital)
>>   domain
>>
>> 3. in a full developed Peer Society
>>
>> I had thought at the beginning (as I wrote in the abstract of this
>> workshop) that I would follow here the Germ form theory and its 5 step
>> model (of Stefan Meretz and Stefan Merten) to distinguish the
>> different moments of that evolution. But I realized that it would have
>> been too long to describe that theory. So I choose to use a more
>> simplified presentation.
>>
>> But, before going forward, I think it is necessary to say a few words
>> about the frequent idea that money and symmetric exchange are
>> something "natural", almost inherent to human nature, which has always
>> been naturally accepted and that therefore which will always exist.
>>
>> Symmetric exchange did not exist within the old primitive communities.
>> Within these communities there was no private property nor exchange.
>> Production and distribution were organized as in a big family.
>> Exchange developed first as a marginal activity at the fringes of
>> these communities, through the exchange between them under the form of
>> direct barter. Animals furs against salt, for example. That was a
>> collective exchange, between communities. The first forms of money
>> appear later under the form of "commodity money". A specific good,
>> common and directly useful to all is used as mean of exchange. Many
>> goods have been used as such: shells (in the 5 continents), grains,
>> oil, cattle (the Roman word for money, "pecunia" derives from "pecus",
>> meaning cattle). Later precious metals silver or gold have been used
>> as money. It is only around the 6th century BC that fiat money, State
>> money appears in Greece and probably a little bit later in China.
>>
>> But exchange through money will remain essentially marginal during
>> almost one thousand years, before the development of capitalism. Under
>> the slave societies, Greece, or Roman Empire as in the feudal society,
>> the main economic activity remains agriculture. At that level, between
>> the slave and his master, between the serf and his lord, the economic
>> relations are mostly based on direct contributions under the form of
>> products or labor. It is only under capitalism that money plays a
>> dominant role in social life. Capitalism places money at the heart of
>> the two main dimensions which define a mode of production: the goal of
>> production and the way the producers participate to production. Profit
>> under the form of money becomes the real goal of production. At the
>> same time, wages, paid with money, become the medium for most workers
>> to participate to production. The labor force becomes a commodity by
>> itself and has a money price in a specific market.
>>
>> The tendency to imagine that the present use of money is something
>> natural coming from the beginning of humanity is completely wrong.
>>
>> Another common and wrong idea is that symmetric exchange and money
>> were naturally accepted since the beginning of their existence. In
>> fact the rejection and the mistrust of money are very old. In the 4th
>> century BC, Aristotle, made a pitiless criticism of money, of exchange
>> itself, opposed to "household management" logic. He wrote, for
>> example:
>>
>>  There are two sorts of wealth-getting, (...); one is a part of
>>  household management, the other is retail trade: the former is
>>  necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is
>>  justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain
>>  from one another.
>>
>> He also said:
>>
>>  All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
>>
>> In the Christian Bible you can also find a denunciation of trade and
>> money with the famous passage about Jesus chasing the merchants from
>> the temple. More generally, it is the same mistrust which explains
>> that in the "heavens" described by religions, money is absent. With
>> the development of capitalism criticisms of money became more
>> frequent. Thomas More in the 16th century in his Utopia. The Diggers
>> in England, in the 17th century who said:
>>
>>  When humanity started to sell and buy, it lost its innocence.
>>
>> The anti-capitalistic socialist movements that appear as from the 19th
>> century naturally develop and radicalized that rejection.
>>
>> No. Symmetric exchange and money are not natural and have not been
>> easily accepted by humans along history.
>>
>> That was a long parenthesis, but I think it is important to see how
>> the absence of symmetric exchange and money in the Peer Production
>> relationships are an achievement of an old human ambition.
>>
>> But let's go back to the main question: the relations between money
>> and Peer Production.
>>
>> And let's deal first with these relations within the framework of
>> dominant capitalism.
>>
>> I. Money and Peer Production within capitalism
>> ==============================================
>>
>> In a capitalist society, Peer Production is inevitably dependent
>> direct or indirectly on capitalist money, since hackers, and all "peer
>> producers", need to make a living, and, in such a society, one needs
>> money to get food or computers. Money can be accepted in order to
>> develop a Peer Production project, but in that case the main
>> preoccupation must be to prevent money from subverting the core logic
>> of it.
>>
>> What can be said at that level is that the main effort to develop Peer
>> Production in these conditions is to try to prevent money from
>> subverting the core logic of it.
>>
>> But things are not so simple. Capitalism has understood the profit it
>> can get from forms of Peer Production and has developed hybrid forms
>> where capitalist relationships are mixed with Peer Production. One of
>> the most significant examples is the participation of capitalist
>> corporations (as IBM) to the production of free software, as for
>> Linux. If we refer to the 3 main characteristics of Peer Production
>> (free and open input; free volunteering production; universally
>> available output), one can say that in this case we have hybrid
>> aspects at the three moments of the process:
>>
>> 1. at the level of the input: raw material is partly capitalistic as
>>   the computers, the offices, etc. are privately owned by the IBM)
>>   corporation, but, at the same time, for software production,
>>   free/open software is also a "raw material"
>>
>> 2. at the level of production, this is not based on free volunteering,
>>   but some aspects of the production are new, non capitalistic, as
>>   the cooperation between programmers of antagonistic
>>   corporations
>>
>> 3. at the level of the output, the result can be oriented by
>>   corporations more towards their own needs (commercial management
>>   software, for example) but the output remains universally
>>   available.
>>
>> The "social networking" also generates hybrid forms. Let's consider
>> MySpace or YouTube:
>>
>> 1. the input is partly capitalistic (the infrastructures and the
>>   financing by advertising), but for the rest most of the input
>>   (videos, blogs, etc.) are free and open
>>
>> 2. the production process is based partially on capitalist wage
>>   relations for the infrastructure management, but the rest is based
>>   on free volunteering
>>
>> 3. the output is supposed to be universally available, but
>>   corporations impose limits and try to extend these limits,
>>   provoking open conflicts with users/producers. (See for example the
>>   site: "why-i-am-deleting-my-myspace-account-and-you-should-too".
>>
>> Hybrid forms also developed in the past transitions between modes of
>> production. Between the 6th and the 10h century, many landlords,
>> including the Church, had simultaneously slaves and serfs (or "coloni"
>> which were the first form of serfs). Between the 12th century and the
>> 19th century many hybrid forms developed especially in the cities
>> where capitalism developed within feudal relationships.
>>
>> In the past, the evolution of these forms has been often slow, with
>> periods of acceleration but also periods of recession. The example of
>> the Arsenal of Venice, which in the early 16th century employed some
>> 16,000 people and could produce almost a ship per day using
>> production-lines, something not seen again after until the industrial
>> revolution, illustrates how non-linear this evolution can be.
>>
>> The dynamic of that evolution depends on many factors. The evolution
>> of technologies is one of them, but it is far from explaining
>> everything. Here the social consciousness, the social and political
>> conflicts play a crucial role. For example, in the past, the European
>> wars of religion after the 16th century and the bourgeois revolutions
>> of the 17th to 19th century, where indirect or direct expressions of
>> the conflict between the old feudal logic and the raising capitalistic
>> one.
>>
>> To day in the present conflicts concerning the use of Peer Production
>> aspects by capitalist corporations, we are witnessing the same kind of
>> conflict between the old logic and the new. The dynamic of that
>> conflict depends and will depend not only on material-technological
>> realities but also on social and "political" struggles, at micro and
>> macro scales. And things should become harsher when peer production
>> will pretend to extend to the realm of material production.
>>
>> Finally, just a remark about the role of advertising in the financing
>> of some hybrid forms of Peer Production.
>>
>> Hegel said that History advances by its "dark side". The reality of
>> the relations between some forms of Peer Production and capitalism are
>> a good illustration of that. Many free, gratis services offered in the
>> web are financed by advertising. But, advertising is based on
>> techniques developing pavlovian reflexes in the population in order to
>> make them buy specific goods. It is based on the famous Goebbels
>> formula:
>>
>>  A lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth.
>>
>> To a certain extent the development of non market relations remains
>> dependent on one of the darkest side of capitalist totalitarian
>> manipulation.
>>
>> As long as the material means of production remain under the
>> capitalist logic governance, the peer production realities will be in
>> a way or another limited.
>>
>> But let's consider what could be the relations between money and Peer
>> Production in a situation where the material means of production begin
>> to be collectively owned, put into the commons. As I said at the
>> beginning of this presentation, this would be the start of a new
>> period of transition.
>>
>> II. Money and Peer Production in a transitional period
>> ======================================================
>>
>> I won't really deal here with the question of how the material means
>> of production will become part of the commons. Some people think that
>> this will be the result of a pacific evolution of capitalism led by
>> enlightened sectors of the ruling class. Others that it will come from
>> the cooperation and the aggregation of small communities. I'll just
>> say here that I think that it will be mainly the result of global
>> social and political struggles where the main protagonists will be the
>> working pepole, the population directly exploited by capitalist
>> relationships. But let's leave here this problem aside.
>>
>> The situation would be the following. A significant share of material
>> means of production (factories, power plants, oil fields, land, etc.)
>> become collectively owned in one or several countries. But, because we
>> are just coming out from a world dominated by scarcity or limitedness,
>> it is impossible to apply immediately the principle: *To each
>> according to his needs/desires* without limits. The question is then:
>> how can be organized the distribution of goods collectively produced?
>> Since symmetric exchange and money have been the most efficient
>> "necessary evil" to manage situations where scarcity exists, are they,
>> here, an inevitable necessity?
>>
>> I must say clearly that I don't pretend to have a definitive answer.
>> But I will propose three kind of remarks in order to deal with the
>> problem. The first ones concern some lessons from history; the second
>> deals with the classic "Marxist" answer based on the principle *To
>> each according to his work*; the third concer a proposition of
>> solution.
>>
>> 1. Some lessons from history
>> ----------------------------
>>
>> We need to be careful not to have a fetishistic vision of money. You
>> cannot "abolish" money without eliminating the necessity of symmetric
>> exchange. The Argentinian experience in 2001, where the State was in
>> bankruptcy and became unable to issue normally official money, shows
>> how in a situation of scarcity, if official money disappears, money
>> re-emerges "spontaneously" from the need of exchange to survive.
>> During the second world war cigarettes were used as money by prisoners
>> and are today used as a form of money in U.S. prisons. On a much
>> larger scale, during the 20th century they were many situations,
>> especially during the first years of the Russian Revolution or in
>> periods of war, where governments tried to ban free exchange and
>> restrict the power of money in order to impose rationing solutions.
>> The result has always been that market and money reappeared in their
>> worst form: black market.
>>
>> Symmetric exchange and money will disappear only when the need for
>> them has disappeared, when abundance or rather "ampleness" has been
>> reached for produced goods, as for air or sea water. In the internal
>> world of Free-Software and Peer Production, money has disappeared not
>> only because of ethic convictions but because of the intrinsic nature
>> of digital goods which makes them abundant as soon as they are
>> created.
>>
>> If symmetric exchange is needed, money is required. And if money is
>> needed we must assume it and try to find the ways to prevent all its
>> most negative aspects, and in particular the possibility to accumulate
>> money and the power of the issuing organs. "Newly designed money",
>> electronics and P2P open here a lot of possibilities. But in any case,
>> that would be a provisional solution, a *lesser evil*. That would not
>> be a "Peer" solution. "Peer Money" is a contradiction in terms.
>>
>> 2. The classical Marxist solution: "To each according to his work"
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> The classical Marxist solution, as defined by Marx in his *Critique of
>> the Gotha Program*, for the distribution of products in a situation
>> where ampleness is not yet reached, can be summarized by the formula:
>> "*To each according to his work*".
>>
>> In principle, that would be an overcoming of capitalism, since it
>> represents an overcoming of the basic foundation of capitalism: wage
>> labor and its rule "*To each according to the value of its labor
>> force*".
>>
>> But, in order to function, that system needs a complex and huge effort
>> of measuring. On the one hand it must measure the value of each
>> producer's "contribution", calculated in abstract/simple-labor hours.
>> On the other hand, the value of each product. That poses difficulties
>> at a qualitative and a quantitative level. At a *qualitative* level it
>> poses 2 important problems. First, the question of making a
>> distinction between "work" for necessity and "work" for pleasure.
>> Second, the measuring of work in abstract terms which needs the
>> transformation of "complex work", the work of experienced or more
>> educated workers, into simple abstract work. That is a hazardous if
>> not an impossible task.
>>
>> At a *quantitative* level, measuring how many hours everyone is
>> working and on the other side what is the "value" of each product and
>> each service, all that implies a quantity of effort which one can
>> wonder if its not a hindrance rather than a factor of fluency.
>>
>> All this remains under the logics of exchange and measuring exchange
>> values. Things would be much more easier - especially with Internet
>> and P2P - if the distribution and production where evaluated in
>> use-values, needs and possibilities in physical terms
>>
>> Another critique is necessary to the systems based on the principle
>> "*to each according to his work*". The measurement of labor
>> contributions, is supposed to create a motivation for participating in
>> social production. But as such, this "motivation" is based on the old
>> bourgeois principles: if you do not work, you do not eat; if you don't
>> work enough, you won't have enough, and this, regardless of the social
>> material possibilities. To learn to participate to the social
>> production in a different way than under the whip and the blackmail of
>> individual starvation, under economic coercion, is a basic need as
>> soon as the main means of production become collectively possessed.
>>
>> The history of Peer Production realities brings here evidence that
>> this is not Utopian, that this is not an impossible dream. Who would
>> have said only 20 years ago that products like Linux or Wikipedia,
>> representing millions of hours of "work", could have been realized
>> without any economical coercion? Why would it not be the case with
>> material production? The social atmosphere created by the fact that
>> the means of production are on the hands of society, in the commons,
>> should engender an enthusiasm and a collective spirit which could be
>> the most powerful motivation to participate to production, without
>> individual economic coercion.
>>
>> But most important: in a society where the means of production are not
>> privately owned any more, the organization of production in every
>> place can be the task of the producers themselves. Further, the design
>> of the produced means of production can be essentially specified
>> according to the pleasure they can offer to their users. Producers are
>> the "end-users" of the means of production. Transforming the world of
>> production in order to make it a pleasant one should be a top priority
>> since the beginning of a post-capitalist transition. As far as things
>> will depend on humans will, we should rather bet on such a method than
>> on individual economic coercion as an incentive to participate to
>> production.
>>
>> 3. Another possible solution
>> ----------------------------
>>
>> As far as there is still not a sufficient ampleness of goods and
>> capacities of production in order to allow free and unlimited
>> distribution, how to restrict the consumption to the prevailing
>> possibilities of production? If we abandon the wage principle: "*to
>> each according to the value of his labor force*"; if we refuse the
>> principle: "*to each according to his work*", what principle to use? I
>> only see one possibility: *to each according to the social
>> possibilities*. It is a sort of "*to each according to his
>> needs/desires*" but limited, restricted by what is really possible, as
>> in the household/domestic economy, or as in a fishers village where
>> after drawing collectively the net, fishes are shared between the
>> population. This is a conscious, direct way of dealing with
>> limitedness in terms of use-value. It is the logic consequence of the
>> fact that the means of production are collectively possessed (in the
>> Commons). If we participate to production as collective possessors,
>> production can be distributed collectively, taking into account
>> permanently and dynamically what is possible and what is needed. As
>> already said, P2P networks make possible instantaneous and ubiquitous
>> availability of the necessary information for such a system.
>>
>> The question is then: will consumers respect voluntarily the
>> restrictions when they exist? Is not such a system going to collapse
>> because of multiple abuses? Such a system means a great degree of
>> collective consciousness, of self responsibility. That may seem
>> wishful thinking when envisaged from the point of view of the
>> capitalist social jungle. But we should not underestimate the change
>> in mentalities which would be induced by a society where production is
>> oriented directly and exclusively towards human needs, where
>> orientation of production is permanently collectively agreed. One of
>> the most important contributions of Free Software and peer-production
>> has been to prove with facts that humans can cooperate, share and
>> produce the most complex things without money profit incentive and
>> without State coercion.
>>
>> Some people thought that Wikipedia would never develop because it
>> would be permanently destroyed by "vandals". The intelligence of
>> Wikipedia has been to have confidence in the collective spirit of
>> contributors, to base its rules on the needs of that confidence and
>> not on the danger represented by vandals. Vandals existed ever since
>> the beginning of Wikipedia, but they remain a small minority and the
>> care of the majority has allowed to neutralize their negative action.
>> Collective consciousness will be a key element in managing the
>> transition into a post-capitalist society.
>>
>>
>> III. Money and Peer Production in a full developed Peer society
>> ===============================================================
>>
>> I'll be very short here. I don't see any reason for the existence of
>> money in a full developed Peer Society where generalized abundance is
>> a reality. Maybe some people might like to "play" with money and
>> exchange. But in that case they can play Monopoly.
>>
>> Conclusions
>> ===========
>>
>> I'll draw two conclusions.
>>
>> The first is about the fact that, historically, symmetric exchange
>> developed first not at the center of the primitive communities but at
>> their fringes, through the trade between them. Its movement was from
>> the periphery to the center. The disappearance of exchange and money
>> should follow the reverse process, from the center to the periphery.
>>
>> The second conclusion is about the existence of two contradictory
>> tendencies in the present society.
>>
>> One towards a deeper penetration of market relations in all domains of
>> social life. Introducing property and money everywhere. I recently
>> read, in the P2P foundation blog, that even Yoga is being privatized,
>> especially in the US where more than 2500 copyright patents concerning
>> Yoga have been taken!
>>
>> The other tendency is towards the elimination of property and money, a
>> tendency towards what could be called GRATICISM. The development of
>> the Peer Production reality is the main aspect of that tendency. But,
>> as Hegel said:
>>
>>  Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality.
>>
>> In front of the collapsing and devastating reality of capitalism, it
>> is urgent to develop, to support the dynamic force of that
>> contradiction, the movement towards a full developed Peer society.
>>
>> The question of knowing what could be an alternative to the capitalist
>> society is crucial for all the social movements which develop and will
>> develop in the future against the existing order. It is at this level
>> of consciousness that the Peer production reality should play a
>> determinant role. Even if it will certainly be in the long run...
>>
>> Raoul Victor
>>
>> 28mar09
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Diego Saravia
> [email protected]
> NO FUNCIONA->dsa-AySywPH+/[email protected]
>



-- 
Diego Saravia
[email protected]
NO FUNCIONA->dsa-AySywPH+/[email protected]
_________________________________
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