[p2p-research] P2P revolution?

[Daniel Araya]

I resonate with alot of what you're writing here Kevin. I think networked production will change things dramatically. But the only economies in the world right now that are seeing significant economic growth are industrializing ones (BRIC, etc). This may change in the near future but for the moment it is BRIC countries that are predicted to become the largest in the world (while advanced countries begin to contract). To my mind, the P2P 'revolution' looks alot more like of a bunch of guys on listerves talking about a revolution in the abstract. I might concede that advanced economies lack the leadership to fully leverage peer networks for production. But for the moment, my money is on Asia and the development of industrialized capitalism outside the West. There we see a revolution in the concrete. 

For a fully fleshed out P2P revolution to unfold you will need to integrate the education system in some way. Its not going to simply happen spontaneously-- at least not in the numbers you would need to make ubiquitous. The feudal age had the church. Modernity had the university. What does peer production have?  


D


> Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:38:23 -0500
> From: free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com
> To: p2presearch at listcultures.org
> Subject: Re: [p2p-research] Concerning wikiworld and its use of socialist	terminology
> 
> 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
> 
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