[p2p-research] The difference between anarchism and libertarianism

[Stefan Merten]

Hi Smári!

I'll reply only to a few points. A few other I made in my reply to
Michel and yet a few others we are probably to far from each other to
get anywhere any soon.

3 weeks (27 days) ago Smári McCarthy wrote:
> Stefan Merten wrote:
>> Well, I'd go one step further: Money *encodes* scarcity (where
>> scarcity means a man-made limitation). If you want to end up at
>> commons (i.e. absense of scarcity) you have simply no more use for
>> money.
> 
> Your mistake here is that you confuse commons with abundance, which is
> something I previously thought not to be possible, but it is exactly for
> this reason that I urge people to consider the difference between the
> abundance/scarcity axis and the rivalry/sociality axis.

Well, first I stopped using the term abundance because it reminds of
cockaigne which is misleading. I use instead the term ampleness. It
expresses quite well what I mean here.

Second by no way I'd say that commons and ampleness are the same. In
the contrary: You need to have political means to maintain the
commons. That is pretty obvious [1]_.

.. [1] Though political means to maintain the commons seem to be
       rejected by Michel by some reason. Michel prefers to replace
       the lack of politics by money. Or in other words: Michel
       prefers to replace conscious decisions by an abstract
       machinery.

>> And merit is of course scarce. So you are introducing a new scarcity
>> in the attempt to remove scarcity. This makes no sense. But it
>> reflects how much your thinking is still bound to a scarcity based
>> system. I wholeheartedly suggest that you just look at peer
>> production. Scarcity is no part of peer production. And thus money is
>> not missing.
> 
> Merit is not scarce. It is finite, meaning that there is a limited
> amount of it available, but it is not scarce in the sense that
> reasonable use of merit will not deplete it.

You still don't differentiate between limitedness which for instance
need to be maintained even if they apply to a commons and scarcity.
I'll stop here.

>> What I never understood: When I can create as much money as I want -
>> which above is already impossible by the merit thing - for what do I
>> need money then at all?
>> 
>> Money is either scarce or it makes no sense. It follows that if you
>> want to overcome scarcity money makes no sense.
> 
> Again, wrong. Money encodes value, trust or merit.

Which in the end comes all down to dead labor (aka value) or the hope
for more dead labor (aka trust or merit).

> When I pay you for a
> good, you are accepting that there is a high chance that you will be
> able to use that payment's implicit trust statement to procure other
> goods. This has NOTHING to do with scarcity.

I'm sorry but you probably never sold something to an anonymous
market. If I sell something in exchange for dead abstract labor /
money then my only interest is to get the highest price possible. This
may include a situation where I don't sell at all because I hope for
higher prices in the future [2]_.

.. [2] This is an inalienable feature of abstract exchange. It is
       rooted in the abstraction.

Whether you need the good or not does not matter to me at all. That is
the prototype of a man-made limitation: You need the good but I don't
give it to you for unless you pay the price I demand. I do this
because of abstract reasons which are completely alienated from me,
you and the product. That is exactly scarcity.

If you are claiming that everyone can create as much money as s/he
wants then everyone can pay the price infinite for every good. It is
pretty obvious that money stops making sense then.

>>> With
>>> strong encryption these statements will be nigh impossible to forge.
>> 
>> You are moving the policemen into the computer. Probably you also like
>> DRM methods - they are doing the same.
> 
> How the hell do you manage to equate strong encryption with DRM? That is
> the most absurd thing I have heard, and it's also borderline offensive.

I hope you understand what I'm saying when you read the following.

Above you wrote: "impossible to forge". I.e. you anticipate a
situation where someone wants to forge something and thus you
anticipate that there are people you can't trust. To prevent forgery
you have to apply force - in this case in a structural manner by
making it very hard to forge the thing. It is the same as putting a
fence around your garden.

For DRM it is perfectly the same. The music industry doesn't trust you
to use the thing in the way the music industry wants - and as you
demonstrated rightly so. Thus the music industry makes it hard to
forge the commodity you bought. It's just the same use of structural
force as in your example.

The point is that trust in anonymous societies makes sense only if in
the end you can enforce it. This is something each money system has to
take into account - regardless of how much you don't like it. In fact
the burgeois state as the monopoly of force is the ultimate force and
that is why we can put trust in the monetary system.

> First off, strong encryption eliminates the need for "policemen" by
> providing everybody with a method of ensuring their privacy and proving
> their identity. Notice how this e-mail will be digitally signed with my
> PGP key when I send it; this is a mathematically strong way of helping
> you be able to trust that the message is from me. There is no policing
> involved, just a piece of smart mathematics coupled up with a p2p trust
> model.
> 
> DRM methods on the other hand aim to prevent the copying or otherwise
> realistic use of digital information, which is both impossible and
> stupid. This has nothing to do with trust models: with DRM you have to
> supply the user of the DRMed technology with both the product and the
> key to unlock it, and then somehow make it impossible to use the key
> outside of a certain context, which of course is impossible to enforce.

You are confusing a concept with the goals for which a concept might
be used.

> Further, you claimed to be familiar with anarchism. Why then do you not
> understand that anarchism is the political model for peer production,
> and what we're dealing with is merely a technological phenotype?

Well, I would agree that some anarchist virtues are useful for peer
production. For instance when I say that maintainership in peer
production is basically a form of consensus (== nobody has to object)
based decision making then I'm claiming this because of my anarchist
past.

But also I know that anarchism relies on virtues like equality [3]_,
which are void in peer production because they are overcome. So, yes,
some anarchist virtues are useful for peer production. But no they
have not been introduced there by a political program but because they
just emerged.

.. [3] Most types of anarchism at least. Anarchism is such a wide
       concept that it is hard to make general statements.

Also anarchism is a political movement while peer production is a mode
of production. A mode of production "creates" political movements when
it is necessary but it is not a political movement.


						Grüße

						Stefan