[p2p-research] Concerning wikiworld and its use of socialist terminology

[Kevin Carson]

On 4/30/10, Joss Winn <joss at josswinn.org> wrote:
> Hi, I've recently joined the list, partly because I'm interested in
>  thinking about P2P and other aspects of online sharing in terms of 'the
>  idea of communism'.
>
>  Having seen the C word used in Michel and Daniel's discussion below, I
>  thought I'd offer a few recent references and ask you for any further
>  references on (re-)asserting the idea of communism.
>
>  I'm specifically trying to get a sense of what theorists are asserting
>  as communism and how developments in Open Education may or may not be
>  positioned within this discussion, but am interested in arguments for
>  and against the idea of communism, today, in all aspects of life.

I can think of three aspects of P2P that might be relevant to
traditional Marxian ideas of "communism."

The first is stigmergic organization, which I mentioned earlier in
this thread, as a way of removing the transaction costs of collective
action and permitting collective action to emerge as the sum total of
free individual actions without having to be coordinated by large,
hierarchical institutions.

The second is the realm of non-rival goods with zero marginal
reproduction cost, specifically digital information.  This is an
example of the law of value being superceded, in Marx's terminology,
as well as of what the Austrians mean by non-economic goods.

The third, which might also be treated as a weaker subcategory of the
second, is the cheapening of producer goods in the physical realm.
The effect is to drastically lower the capital outlays and overhead
cost of production; make productive organizations smaller, more
decentralized and more resilient; and to blur the boundaries between
being a worker and owner that originally came about because of the
high cost of producer goods in the Industrial Revolution.  Because
expensive product-specific machines are being progressively replaced
with cheap general-purpose tools affordable by individuals and small
groups, and because the overhead cost from capital amortization to be
serviced is imploding, we'll see a shift toward networked production
model in which there's little cost to being out of the market for
extended periods waiting for new projects, and the
employment-vs-unemployment dichotomy will be replaced with constant
shifting of free agents between networked projects (something like
what Piore and Sabel, in The Second Industrial Divide, described for
the construction and clothing industries).   In this area, short of a
nanotech revolution in the indeterminate future, I don't see the law
of value or market exchange being superceded.  But least it's a move
in the direction of Free.  As Chris Anderson put it, "Atoms also want
to be free--they're just not as pushy about it."

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html