[p2p-research] Why Post-Capitalism is Rubbish

[Dmytri Kleiner]

On Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:55:24 +0700, Michel Bauwens
<michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> However, there is one big change, and this is what we address at the p2p
> foundation, which is that knowledge workers now own the means of
> immaterial production, that represents a real shift.

In most cases they do not. Not until they can account for their own
subsistence costs by employing these means of production, which for the
vast majority is not possible. 

What is new is a common stock of productive assets which have nearly no
reproduction costs, thus a great many independent producers can share the
production costs by each contributing only small amounts, each having the
ability to derive more value from the whole common stock than that of their
own contributions to it.

However, exactly because the common stock is immaterial it can not directly
capture exchange value with out access to scarce inputs, physical, legal,
and financial, and thus this is not such a significant shift as you make it
out to be. Capital will still get it's surplus value in the main.

What is a real shift, is the ability to form and maintain near real-time
relationships at a distance. That the form of social and economic
communities is no longer geographical bound, and that the structure of
these communications is not mediated by any individual corporate or State
agency, but rather consists of direct interactions. This is the meaning of
p2p, and it does have explosive potential to reshape society. 

However I am increasingly worried that p2p is already on the decline,
already being dismantled as the internet becomes more commercialized,
centralized, censored, etc. "Cloud Computing" and "Web 2.0" are actively
displacing the free, peer, internet with centralized proprietary platforms
with proprietary APIs that are under direct corporate control and highly
restrictive user agreements, internet access is already consolidated in the
hands of fewer and fewer major corporations, under terms that more and more
restrict subscribers in their run their own servers, and more and more
degrade net neutrality. 

A distopian future could easily be one where your ISP sells you access to
YouTube and a package of other corporate sites, not the Internet, where if
you want to have your own site, you will need to overcome many legal and
financial barriers to entry designed to restrict the ability to operate
internet platforms to a oligarchy of well financed providers.

The future may look a lot more like CompuServ, cable TV and the mobile
phone network than the Internet as we know it.








-- 
Dmytri Kleiner
editing text files since 1981

http://www.telekommunisten.net