[p2p-research] A basic income guarantee versus peer production

[Andy Robinson]

I think on close examination the capitalist/libertarian types don't actually
expect capitalism to realise "abundance" as such, since they assume
insatiability of desires and constant emergence of new marginal utilities
generating preferences, which ensure that scarcity is part of the "human
condition".  Rather, they think that a free market leads to the closest
approximation to abundance by optimising production of goods in relation to
preferences, managing scarcity so as to generate a maximum (and increasing)
standard of living.  A small but important distinction.

On even closer examination (see Hirschman's "The Passions and the
Interests"), what they aim to "maximise" is actually not desire- or
need-satisfaction but a subtly moralised version of these: the market is
taken to maximise satisfaction of demands of agents of a particular
morally-valued type, i.e. instrumental-calculative rational
possessive-individualists, hence to maximise satisfaction of "interests"
(not desires, needs, welfare, utility, etc), while requiring that everyone
produce in response to market pressures.  The resultant economic coercion of
agency is taken as morally valuable because it helps to produce the correct
- productive, civilised, hard-working, conformist, Victorian/Protestant -
kind of human subject.  This becomes clear when they seek to make a case for
expropriation of indigenous peoples (or to defend the legacy of such
expropriation), and when they seek to make a case for a right to appropriate
primary natural "resources" - it becomes clear that the productive are given
a special moralised privilege to possess for purposes of production, while
the exclusion of the less-productive or unproductive (by their standards) is
taken to be morally just, rather than simply economically optimal.  Even the
argument that the market benefits the poor by trickledown depends on the
poor conforming to the required type of subjectivity to receive such
benefits (for instance, by working for others).

As for alliances - as I've said before, I think the key division within
capitalism is in terms of addition versus subtraction of axioms - and
peer-production is aligned with the addition of axioms side, though its
addition usually involves recuperation and domestication.  Paradoxically,
addition of axioms appears both in the libertarian/propertarian opposition
to tribute-extraction, and in the social-democratic regulation of capitalism
through the addition of decommodified spaces and expansive inclusion.  The
closest alliances, however, should be with those groups which are pursuing
similar strategies in different fields - in particular, between
peer-production in the virtual and intellectual fields, and subsistence
economies in relation to basic needs such as food, including rewilding,
permaculture, indigenous cosmologies, etc.  Difficult alliances given that
the two are located on opposite sides of a quite antagonistic debate about
the merits of technology, but necessary especially for the peer-production
side - a peer-production economy isn't going to work if everyone starves, or
if there's no way of looking after vulnerable non-producers such as
children.  The cutting-edge of peer-production is in fields of virtual and
intellectual production, probably because of the peculiarly appropriate
conditions, i.e. infinite (and for users, technically simple)
reproducibility.  The test of its expansivity as a social form is whether it
can handle the complexities and problems of fields of social life where
relations are more finite or at least take more nurturing to be abundant.

bw
Andy
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