[p2p-research] dialogue with parecon, response to Michael Albert

[Ryan Lanham]

Is anyone making a claim that P2P answers all questions?  I don't see it as
an exclusive or ideal worldview.  It is a normative set of values that is
highly tolerant of other systems.  I might even go so far as to say the P2P
needs competing markets, but that might not be right.

I see the counter arguments that Michael Albert puts forward as of two
veins: 1) It isn't anything new or unique, and 2) It doesn't solve all the
problems of life.  Neither of those is very troubling to me, though I do
disagree with many of his points which I think Michel rebutted well.

P2P is not an idealistic control-all solution--though it may be an economic
system--it isn't exclusive.  It is a normative package for approaching
certain social problems.

Whether it is new or not seems particularly uninteresting because the point
is not exclusionary innovation in a market (or political) sense; the point
is to find sustainable ways of living and allocating resources efficiently.


I would argue that trust and sharing are extremely efficient if the problem
of free-riders can be adequately policed.  P2P minimizes policing by
maximizing cultures of trust and sharing with some necessary infrastructure
to protect against rogue parties (e.g. a copyleft license).

Ryan Lanham



On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 4:56 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
>
>
>
> Below is my response to Michaels’ questions and (counter)arguments.
>
>
>
> It does perhaps not adequately address the recurring question about p2p
> values, a subject to which I may return.
>
>
>
> 1.
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
> “You say peer to peer is “bottom-up” processes whereby “agents in a
> distributed network…freely engage in common pursuits”  and “permissionlessly
> undertake actions and relations.”
>
> Doesn’t any club has this character? “
>
>
>
> Peer production is easiest to implement and practice in conditions where
> the costs of reproduction are marginal. This includes content, software,
> designs. But it is very important that there is no a priori filtering, i.e.
> that you do not have to ask permission to add your contribution. In most
> newspapers for example, you can only write if your editor has asked you to
> do so, and if he then also accepts your article. By contrast, peer-produced
> citizen journalism, would accept your contributions, and would filter for
> excellence and quality ‘a posteriori’ after the fact. The overwhelming
> majority of NGO’s for example, would not allow this permissionless
> production of content. So it pretty much depends on the rules of the club:
> 1) can anyone participate (design for inclusion); 2) is the process of
> filtering participatory and a posteriori; 3) is the result available to all
> without exception. If the 3 conditions are met, we do indeed have peer
> production.
>
>
>
> 2.
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
>
> “If some group produces outputs that require inputs, it would have to get
> the inputs. It would have to get the labor. People could say no.
> Permissions, and perhaps acquisitions, are involved. More, peer to peer
> seems to be only about undertaking joint ventures that have no significant
> costs. Is that right?”
>
>
>
> The input must indeed be open and free, and obviously, this works only
> where communication, coordination, and reproduction costs are marginal, i.e.
> in the world of immaterial production. But please note: everything that
> needs to be physically produced, and therefore needs cost-recovery
> mechanisms, has a design phase. That design phase is ‘immaterial’ (in the
> sense we understand it), and therefore, can be peer produced. Hence, it
> becomes easy to imagine, and this is already practiced (see
> http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking) to combine an open design
> process, with a different mechanism for physical production. You therefore
> could combine this ‘peer to peer’ (or in other words, Marx’s definition of
> communism as last phase of history) in the design phase, with say, a
> cooperative, for the production phase.
>
> If you have a peer to peer design phase, then these designers start
> conceiving of producing the ‘product’ quite differently, in ways that are
> modular, etc… So the end effect is to have more distributed physical
> production infrastructures, which are more compatible with the peer to peer
> logic of the design process, since they lower the cost of entry for physical
> machinery, and help to decentralize and distribute capital requirements,
> reversing the logic of the capital system.
>
>
>
> 3.
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
> “I wonder, what are the virtues that peer to peer is trying to capture?
> What are the gains from the choices? If we could enumerate those gains, most
> broadly, shouldn’t we then see if we can we have the gains not only for
> inexpensive and essentially volunteer efforts, but also for all other
> economic activity?”
>
> Peer to peer combines the ability for everyone to volunteer his passionate
> contributions (equipotentiality, see
> http://p2pfoundation.net/Equipotentiality), to do so in an environment
> that does not necessitate hierarchical fiats, and where the results can be
> equally shared by all. Such production, because it relies on the most
> creative non-coerced intrinsic motivation, leads to hyperproductivity, and a
> striving for absolute quality, which can not be matched by purely commercial
> players relying on closed intellectual property. Most of the time, because
> of the issue you correctly described above, i.e. the different logics
> applying to immaterial vs. material production, a hybrid and cooperative
> logic emerges combining the open design communities, a nonprofit
> (‘for-benefit’) managing the infrastructure of cooperation, and a ecology of
> businesses producing scarce added value for the market.
>
> 4.
>
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
>
> “Apparently to call a project peer to peer its outputs have to be
> universally available but I am not sure what that means. A group writing
> essays and displaying them at no cost to readers would seem to meet your
> condition. But what about a group producing food, say, or violins, or
> something else? On two counts it would seem to fail to meet your definition.
> First, the products wouldn’t be for everyone, clearly. Second, the inputs
> would be expensive, which implies permissions, acquisitions, etc.  Is this
> correct?”
>
>
>
> Yes, this is correct. Typically, as in the Arduino circuit boards, or your
> hypothetical violin, the violin would be a market product, exchanged for
> money, but the design would be available to all, so any other company would
> also be free to produce it. One of the side effects of this is to destroy
> monopoly rent on artificial scarcity.
>
>
>
> 5.
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
> “What precisely are the virtues of peer to peer that you like? More, can we
> preserve those virtues even when production involves serious costs and
> generates outputs that are not universal? If so, what would it require? If
> not, why not?”
>
>
>
> As said above, peer production only works for immaterial production, but
> can be associated with physical production. Ideally, peer communities are
> strong enough to work with businesses that are closer in ethical values and
> practices. This is already happening in the existing hybrid practices. They
> can also create their own, such as for example coops, or parecon-inspired
> businesses.
>
> For some of the values associated with p2p, see:
>
> -     http://p2pfoundation.net/Holoptism
>
> -     http://p2pfoundation.net/Communal_Validation
>
>
>
> 6.
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
> “You say “peer to peer processes are emerging in literally every cranny of
> social life,” but unless I am missing something it seems to me they have
> been with us for centuries – unless you make the conditions very stringent.
> I understand that new  information technologies have opened a new domain to
> peer to peer – the production and distribution of information – but the
> technology is what seems new, not the peer to peer activity per se –
> voluntarism, self determination, etc. Am I wrong about that?”
>
>
>
> No, you are correct. P2P, or in technical terms (see
> http://p2pfoundation.net/Relational_Model_Typology_-_Fiske), communal
> shareholding, has always existed, but was limited in time and space to small
> groups. Only now can these small group dynamic scale to the global level
> through global coordination. Of the four human intersubjectivities and ways
> of creating value (the three others being Equality Matching = gift economy ;
> Authority Matching = Hierarchical Allocation; and Market Pricing =
> capitalism), it is the only form that has never really been dominant. With
> the affordances of the internet, peer to peer technologies, and other
> distributed infrastructures, what changes is that it can not only create
> very complex social artefacts, but can become a universal way of creating
> common value, and could even be the dominant logic of a new political
> economy/civilization.
>
>
>
> 7.
>
>
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
> “After your introduction to peer to peer, you get more precise with three
> conditions. To me, however, the conditions imply that peer to peer is about
> production of a common resource, only. Why is that? Why do you want to limit
> your attention to only production of public goods? Is it really true that
> only the production of public goods production can embody the virtues –
> whatever they turn out to be once listed – of peer to peer? Why not all
> types of production?”
>
>
>
> For peer to peer to expand to all types of production, we need to solve to
> issue of cost recovery for physical production. This may either never be
> fully attained, or may require a long transitional period. The best option
> therefore is to think of peer to peer in terms of a pluralist economy.
> Imagine that innovation and creation becomes a matter of global open design
> groups, this being the core of value creation; around this core, you have
> coops, parecon groups, gift economies, fair trade and non-capitalist
> markets, etc… To the degree that we can design more abundance (capitalist
> markets being designed to create more and more scarcity), peer to peer
> logics of voluntary contributions and universal availability can expand to
> more and more aspects of society.
>
>
> 8.
>
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
> “Does the fact that workers agree to participate of their own accord (even
> if in very constrained settings) and that the firm happens to produce
> information that it in turn makes available free – say via a giant web site,
> or something – though it then also sells ads to finance it all, qualify as
> peer to peer production?”
>
>
>
> If the income is conditional on production, it’s not peer to peer, even if
> the result is freely available. You can have a commons as outpout, without
> p2p as input and process. And you can have p2p input, but with the result
> being available only for sale. So the 3 conditions need to be met. In a
> capitalist context of courses, workers are never really free in terms of
> work contracts, since they cannot survive without one. It is important to
> distinguish the commons mode of peer production, where there is a common
> goal, from the sharing sites owned by corporate platforms.  In this case,
> you have a dual logic: individuals creating content for universal
> availability in a p2p-related way, while companies are selling the
> aggregated attention to the advertising marketplace. It’s a hybrid form,
> instrumentalized by capital. This creates a new type of social conflict,
> between the interest of the community, and the interest of the platform. But
> of interest is the greater opportunity for sharing, and that a sector of
> capital is abandoning its reliance on Intellectual Protection. Historically,
> modes of production have only changed, when there was a congruent change
> both from the value-creating classes and the value-extracting classes. The
> emergence of netarchical capitalism, as that sector of capital which enables
> and empowers ‘sharing’ to occur’ can therefore be seen as a partially
> positive development.
>
>
>
> 9.
>
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
>
> “What if a bunch of programmers create a project to produce a new program,
> that they will make available free, etc. They need offices, electricity,
> software, computers, and thy need to eat and sleep, etc. So they hire people
> to clean their workplace, to cook their food, to shop for them. They pay for
> the computers and their upkeep, for the electricity, etc. They get funds for
> all this by hiring some workers to provide technical support that people pay
> for. They then share the resulting profits among themselves, paying the
> other employees wages. Is that peer to peer because they are creating what
> they specify to be a public good and the programmers, at least, are doing it
> in a self-managing way (albeit while employing wage slaves as well)?”
>
>
>
> Interesting scenario, and it could conceivably happen. It’s a familiar
> situation with coops, who hire second-class workers to sustain cooperative
> logic of the privileged first tier (Mondragon comes to mind).
>
>
>
> 10.
>
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
>
> “It is as if peer to peer believes there is something wrong with getting
> remunerated or producing for use by limited numbers of self selecting folks,
> or as if when those conditions hold, we can’t aim for better relations.”
>
>
>
> As stated above, we have to struggle to make peer to peer a more general
> feature of social life, and combine local and global open
> content/software/design communities with economic forms for physical
> production, that are most compatible with its values (open and free
> contribution, participatory process, commonly available output).
> Constructing more distributed infrastructures that can allow
> self-aggregation outside of capital is another complementary strategy.
> Social struggles towards the basic income, or at least schemes that allow
> more people to periodically leave the market sphere, are another.
>
>
> 11.
>
>
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
> “Nearly everything produced and used in production is scarce in the very
> precise sense that if it wasn’t’ used for the chosen purpose, something else
> could have been done with it, instead. There is an opportunity cost for
> labor, resources, materials, time, etc. This is a timeless fact of life.
> There is no avoiding that last part but allocating assets to some ends
> instead of others can be done consistent with worthy values and assessments
> of full social and ecological implications, or can be done via methods that
> trample worthy values and utilize warped valuations … We should want to have
> those virtues present throughout and economy and society, rather than only
> for volunteer production of public goods.”
>
>
>
> I absolutely agree with you that we should extend the virtues of openness,
> freedom, participation, the common good, equality etc.. The question is how
> that can be done. As you say, scarcity is everywhere. But scarcity –
> abundance sit on a continuum, and the present system has it backwards: it
> considers naturally scarce physical resources to be infinite, and wants to
> make abundance naturally scarce. So we need to reverse it. Most abundance is
> available in the world of immaterial production, where p2p now naturally
> occurs, because we have a largely socialized infrastructure. Let’s keep it
> and extend it. Next, we do what we can so that individuals can aggregate as
> freely as they can in the physical sphere, by creating distributed
> infrastructures. If we have open designs, and easier access to capital
> goods, we can create a cooperative economy. This is however, not merely a
> technical or economic question, but a political question. My expectation is
> that the peer to peer movements will naturally evolve from transgressive
> behavior (say filesharing), to constructive behavior (say the General Public
> License), to practices which challenge the existing institutional setup and
> political economy.
>
>
> 12.
>
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
>
>
> “Further, “participatory non-exclusionary processes of production” sounds
> nice, but again I don’t know what it means. If we have a hospital or health
> team, or even a programming team, surely it is not non-exclusionary because
> one has to meet certain standards to participate, no?”
>
> If you are paid conditionality for what you produce, we do not have
> non-reciprocal voluntary contributions and hence no peer to peer. If someone
> hires you, there is no peer to peer.
>
>
> 13.
>
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
> “What I wonder is why you feel peer to peer induces desired social
> solidarity for all.”
>
> I do not think practicing peer to peer necessarily induces a desire for
> social solidarity for all, but I think that because p2p includes very high
> ethical values, and so it potentially does influence people in that
> direction. So I do think it is politically interesting to engage peer
> producers in such a way, as to use their natural desire for p2p engagement,
> with a broader social desire for a society that would expand its
> possibilities and generate social solidarity for all.
>
>
>
> 14.
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
> “When you say societal change requires at least “a sizeable section of the
> former ruling structure morphing to the new mode” I think it is an
> understatement, and yet it also concerns me. All of the old rulers exist in
> the new system, and thus must by definition morph into operating in light of
> the new system’s norms and structures. This is a truism, no? But when you
> say it is happening with peer to peer now, I have concerns about that –
> because the old elite’s motives remain capitalist and govern their
> willingness to exploit peer to peer.”
>
>
>
> I understand the concern, but that is the reality of a class society, that
> different social groups protect their interest first. So, as peer producing
> communities seek to extend their sustainability and possibilities, so
> capital seeks to profit from it. The historical precedents show us that the
> old order first seeks to use the new mode to bolster its own logic,
> infrastructure and institutions, while being in the end overcome by it.  This
> is how the transition occurred from slavery to serfdom, and from feudalism
> to capitalism, and why I expect the same process to apply to the transition
> to a peer to peer society. Obviously, where I come from, and the work of the
> P2P Foundation is dedicated to it, is to advance on the way to scenario one.
> However, it is also the case that netarchical capital does a number of
> things that are in our interest as well, and so they can both be partial
> allies and partial enemies. Google is a good example. When it fights for
> open spectrum in Congress, it’s an ally, when it abuses our personal data,
> it’s an enemy. The leaning of peer to peer advocates will be on a broad
> spectrum of positions. People like Lawrence Lessig are happy with a liberal
> economy for example, and people like Yochai Benkler, see peer production as
> an adjunct to the market. I see it as an alternative, a ‘conditional
> inevitability’ that needs to be fought for.
>
>
>
> 15.
>
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
> “The weakness of what has been called socialism, or 20th century socialism,
> or what I tend to call coordinatorism, was certainly not its inferior
> productive capacity – and since when is maximizing output our desideratum
> for judging societies, in any event even if it were inferior on that axis -
> but, instead, its social organization, class hierarchy, authoritarianism,
> etc. I assume we agree about that.”
>
> Peer production is hyperproductive not just in terms of production, but
> politically in terms of participation and democracy, and the universal
> availability of its production as well. ‘Really existing’ socialism was
> authoritarian and had uneven distribution. As a production alternative, it
> did not prove to be more productive in the long run, while capitalism proved
> compatible with some limited forms of democracy. But P2P retains the high
> productivity, introduces democracy in production and all areas of social
> life, and allows anyone to profit from its realizations.
>
>
>
> 16.
>
>
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
> “Why promote what purports to be a humane alternative to capitalism as a
> means of resuscitating a horrendously horrible capitalist system? But more,
> I am trying to see how peer to peer points toward a new “social compact” in
> your eyes, or in the eyes of its advocates, and am having trouble with that.
> For me, I think it certainly could – for example by highlighting as part of
> its ethos and aims the desirability of self management and thus
> classlessness, and of cooperative and solidaritous negotiation of
> allocation, equitable remuneration, etc.”
> So again, I wonder which it is?”
>
>
>
> You and I may find capitalism to be ‘horrendously horrible’ (I actually
> would have to qualify that statement, but let’s pass it for this time), but
> most people in the world disagree, and two hundred years of rhetoric and
> social struggle haven’t abolished it. (I also do not believe classlessness
> is a realistic possibility in conditions of objective or perceived
> scarcity.) So my view is: as we are seeing post-capitalist processes
> emerging, how do we extend them as much as we can. I’m not interested one
> bit in anti-capitalist rhetoric, only in actions which allow us to go beyond
> commodity production. For that, we strengthen our peer producing
> communities, build our institutions, do what we can to promote distributed
> infrastructures in every area we can, and create a social movement which can
> successfully defend our practices, and hopefully one day, remove
> constraining institutions.
>
>
> 17.
>
>
> Michael Albert writes:
>
> “I am afraid that even you are ignoring key aspects of economic life –
> remuneration, decision making structures, division of labor, and allocation
> – none of which peer to peer as yet addresses – when you say it provides a
> template for a better future.”
>
> I’m not ignoring them at all. Within its sphere of success, peer production
> has actually successfully addresses decision-making structures (peer
> governance), replaced the division of labour, by distribution of labour, and
> hierarchical/market allocation by self-aggregation of productive resources.
> However, we do indeed not have a solution for unconditional remuneration.
> For physical production, they are the central concern and I’m continuously,
> along with the community of practitioners/researchers/activists at the P2P
> Foundation, observing how peer producing communities are inventing
> sustainable solutions in that sphere.
>
>
>
> 18.
>
>
>
> Michel Albert writes:
>
> “When you say “peer production is therefore a great opportunity for
> workers, to create strong commons, and demand adaptations from their
> corporate partners, while nothing stops them from creating their own
> productive structures, such as parecon based cooperatives” it is of course
> in accord with the scenario one noted above, but wouldn’t it be more
> compelling if all peer to peer practitioners and advocates generally agreed
> about this, and thus were continually trying to enrich peer to peer rhetoric
> and practice with insights from broader social vision? Do they?”
>
>
>
> No, they do not, I wish they did. And I’m working on it. Can you do more?
>
>
> --
> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
> http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
>
> Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
>
> The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
> http://www.shiftn.com/
>
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>
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