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

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Andy,

I'm publishing your remarks on the 4th, but do not understand your argument
about 'addition' vs. 'substraction' of arguments ??

Could you elaborate?

Michel

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 12:25 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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