[p2p-research] a political program and approach for the p2p movement

[Michel Bauwens]

under pressure by Ryan ...

this anti-socialist piece <g>  just appeared here at
http://info.interactivist.net/node/13285


*"Marx, Cognitive Capitalism and the Transition to the Commons"
Michel Bauwens*

*[Snatched from a longer list-exchange at the Institute for Distributed
Creativity, ed.]*

I think we do have to accept that we are no longer in a mercantile, nor
industrial capitalist logic, but in a third phase of cognitive capitalism.
My thesis is that the marxist thesis, of a organized working class taking
power and then changing society, has been discredited. Not only because it
didn't happen in the last 200 years, but because it is based on a misreading
of history.

In the previous transitions, revolutions were always the end point of a long
process of reconfiguration. Hence, both slave owners and slaves morphed to
serfdom as domain lords and serfs, first as an individual strategy to
survive the collapse of the Roman slave economy, and thus in paradoxical
ways saving and strenghtening the system; and both nobility and working
strata of feudal society morphed to capitalist relations and practices, with
the same effect. The point is that these changes, initially seen as a way
out for the old system, turned out to be more productive overall, and
eventually it made no longer sense to keep the old social order, which
precluded this higher productivity to occur on a general scale.

We know that state socialism as it historically developed, lost the race
against the capitalist system, and furthermore, it offers absolutely no
incentive, neither for the ruling class, who loses everything, and for the
workers, who lose their freedom in a new class system dominated by a new
coordinator class.

But what if we observe that, not socialism is occuring, but a new
hyperproductive system, in which both the capital and managerial class, and
the producing class, see different advantages to move towards. A section of
capital becomes netarchical, and starts monetizing these practices. It
appears at first hand to create a new economic sector, but it is embraced
also by the producing classes, for different reasons.

The point is, while it originally appears to strengthen the capitalist
totality, it at the same time creates post-capitalist logics, such as the
direct production for value, forms of participatory governance that are
practiced outside corporate formats, and commons oriented property formats.
Commons-based peer production, the sharing platforms, and crowdsourcing are
three main forms of this mutual adaptation.

The paradox is that it both creates new forms of capitalism, and new forms
of post-capitalism. It is both immanent and transcendent, and we have to
resist any either/or logic but rather see them both occurring at once.

While apparently saving capitalism, as Adam Arvidsson and I have argued, it
also creates a formidable value crisis, and the return on assets has already
declined by 75% since the onset of cognitive capitalism.

So what could possible strategies be:

1) Strengthen these new social practices and the autonomy of peer producing
communities

2) Differentiate between those practices of the netarchical segment that
enclose, and those that create more opportunity for sharing and commons
based practices. Support the latter, fight the former.

3) Wherever we can, create independent infrastructures, based on open
standards and protocols, that can be operated in a distributed fashion, not
just for ICT but in every area of productive endeavour, to create
alternatives that are commons-based, rather than requiring netarchically
owned corporate platforms.

4) Create new economic formats that are maximally consistent with the new
peer to peer ethics and social demands and support those entrepreneurial
formats that overturn capitalist income-orientation to social-outcome
orientation. These entrepreneurial forces are on our side!

5) Create alliances with the social forces of the decaying former economic
system, such as farmers and workers movements, and link up with their
mutualist traditions.

6) Create alliances with the environmental and social justice movements to
overturn the present insanity of pseudo-material abundance and artificial
immaterial scarcity, to realize natural abundance in a steady state economy,
with free cultural, scientific and knowledge exchange in global commons
communities.

7) Create alliances with anticapitalist and a-capitalist neotraditional
movements around commonly shared immaterial values, thus finding a
connection with the vast majority of Southern populations.

8) Pressure state and public authorities to change their corporate welfare
orientation to a primacy of civil society and a partner state-based support
infrastructure towards the new productive modalities.

How could any nostalgic return to socialist strategies result in any
positive outcome after 2 centuries of failure?

How could a orientation towards attention logics that are subsumed to
capital bring any fundamental progress?

Why not inspire ourselves by the real process of change, as it occurred in
two previous phase transitions?

If this were true, then we need to be careful about time-scales and
recognize that we are not entirely ready for a phase transition, but are at
the same time rapidly approaching it. My hypothesis is that we can expect
the next Kondratieff upsurge, which should ‘normally start’ 8 to 15 years
after the sudden system shock that we are witnessing, to be used to move
peer production from emergent phenomena, to parity and from there to phase
transition. This timing is quite consistent with the expectation of Immanuel
Wallerstein and others.

Capitalism is not dead, but it is dying, and as infinite growth is not
compatible with a limited natural world, it has to die. Though it could
conceivably be replaced by something worse, and though it is unlikely that
19th century socialist scenarios will come to fruition, the phase transition
towards a fully commons-orientated mode of peer production, is a strong
historical opportunity, and we should not idly stand by while it is
occurring.


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

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