[p2p-research] Third Version of Article

[Michel Bauwens]

Deaer James,

thanks very much for pointing to your remarks on the commons beyond marx, I
posted them just below the link

I'm copying massiso, a marxist common-ist, and tere vaden, author of a
3-stage theory towards a full commons, to see if this generates even more
interesting remarks,

I woudn't say I have a developmental theory myself, but I have a definite
sense of seeing the commons evolving as a part of a new phase of capitalism,
going into a crisis  period of parity, before we have a phase transition
where market mechanisms become fully subsumed to the commons, and
eventually, making place for resource-based exchanges that do not need
market mechanisms

another way would be to say influencing the state, reforming the state,
transforming the state, and transcending the state

Michel




On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 5:49 PM, James Quilligan <jbquilligan at comcast.net>wrote:

> you may also be interested in the new comments (an exchange between Derek
> Wall and me) below the article on On The Commons
>
> http://onthecommons.org/beyond-state-capitalism
>


we need a comprehensive theory of the developmental stages of the commons



James Quilligan:

"Despite sharp differences in concept and ideology, economic thinkers from
Smith, Ricardo, and Marx to Keynes, Hayek, Mises and Schumpeter largely
based their assumptions on the world’s seemingly unlimited resources and
fossil fuels — their infinite potential for creating economic growth,
adequate supplies of labor for developing them, and the evolving monoculture
of state capitalism responsible for their provision and allocation.

I didn’t lump Marx in with these other economists simply for shock value — I
actually do see them all locked into a similar paradigm. You’ll note that I
didn’t say that Marx was explicitly endorsing these positions about resource
management in the emerging Market State. I had something else in mind: which
is that in critiquing the basic elements of industrial capitalism, Marx had
to engage them on their own terms. My implication is that because Marx
‘largely based his assumptions’ on the capitalist practices and principles
of his day in order to refute them through his chosen leverage point of the
commons (i.e, material and social labor), this effectively minimized or
sidetracked what he clearly understood about the essential importance of the
commons in earlier societies.

I deeply appreciate Marx’s insights about the pre-capitalist commons and his
desire to link modern society back with those modes of production. But I’m
sure you’ll agree that the metaphor of the commons only appears in selected
places in Marx’s writings and that the commons is not a consistent thread
that unifies his theory. If the commons were truly integrated into Marx’s
philosophy — rather than just his labor theory of value, which is certainly
a part of the material and social commons but largely excludes a range of
other commons (natural, genetic, intellectual, cultural and solar) — Marxism
may have been able to lead modern societies into a stage of political
economy beyond state capitalism, in which case I would have no business in
labeling Marx as a classical economist along with Smith and Ricardo.
Instead, as history has shown, Marxism was not a transformational principle
of the biophysical commons, even though it identified one very important
dynamic of the commons which was eventually co-opted by the Market State.
(No fault of Marx, who was way ahead of his time. A century-and-a-half ago,
who could have anticipated the extent of today’s global technology,
communications, Freudian-inspired marketing techniques, mass consumerism,
global political and economic integration, and pollution and climate change
as intervening factors in the extraction and production of material
resources and the suppression of social production?)

By putting Marx in the same box as the other economists, what I was implying
is this. Marx offered no specific critique of the fossil fuel economy — nor
did he seem to have deep sensibilities around planetary sustainability and
the carrying capacity of the global commons, as did Malthus and Mill,
neither of whom I included in the list. Although he sometimes spoke about
the worker literally wresting his life-force from the natural commons of
Earth, Marx’s sense of the environment was limited to its value in the labor
process. Marx was acutely aware of the economic growth imperative, but
mainly as a social justice issue in the labor-capital problématique rather
than as an issue of the ecological limits to growth — the result of which is
that the labor movement, untethered from the broader biospheric commons of
which it is a part, has now become a direct part of the apparatus of
resource expropriation and capital accumulation in modern society.

By criticizing state capitalism primarily in terms of the ownership of
production, Marx did not really transcend the operating premises of state
capitalism — which of course led his followers to attempt to implement forms
of Marxism through a centralized state with a capitalist mode of production
(i.e., the Soviet Union’s command economy or Communist China’s ‘capitalism
with Chinese characteristics’). Hence, Marx’s work was riddled with this
contradiction: on one hand, he was capable of calling for non-ownership of
the Earth and its commons, but on the other hand he firmly insisted that
workers first have ownership of the means of production (whether in a
financial or non-financial context). This ambiguity around ownership
undermined his larger theory. Marx’s idea of transcending the ownership of
production was not simply a difference in the historical stages of commons
resource management — that workers would first have to own the means of
production before they could liberate society into the non-ownership stage
of a future commons society. Because his theory did not encompass all
aspects of the commons, particularly the biophysical relevance of resources
in the production process, he could not formulate how ownership would lead
to non-ownership. Since Marx’s commentary on the commons was mainly
preanalytic and pre-capitalist, he never demonstrated how his theory of
labor would actually provide the means of liberating the contemporary or
future commons. In Marx’s writings, the commons is always in the background
but never in the foreground. His elaboration of the commons was simply not
comprehensive enough to underpin his labor theory of value, which ultimately
weakened the utility of his brilliant observations as operational
constructs.

So, by including Marx in this list of major Western economists who ‘dropped
the ball’, what I’m suggesting is that Marx was unable to articulate a
theory of the commons sufficient to underpin his critique of state
capitalism, and this, in turn, led to the reification of the very
assumptions about resource management in capitalist society that he was
criticizing. While Marx’s great insight was that labor is embedded in the
commons, his awareness of the biosphere was limited to material and social
resources. In deriving his major ideas on the production process directly
from the capitalist system instead of from the broader commons, Marx’s focus
was primarily on the ownership of production, rather than the trusteeship of
co-production and co-governance in a commons-based society. Today, we are
recognizing that the commons is much broader than just labor, which is why
the co-production of the commons has been emerging as such a vibrant
phenomenon beyond the clutches of the Market State. And that’s really my
basic point in mentioning Marx in this passage.

Anyway, Derek, thanks for bringing this up. Marx’s understanding of the
commons is still essential, but needs to be updated in terms of the present
state of the world, its political economy, global social disparities, the
climate crisis, multilateralism, and the emerging governance of the global
commons. But I’m afraid that progress in developing a transformative
economic model has been painfully slow and misleading. Most of the
contemporary attempts at ‘ecological economics’, ‘natural capitalism’,
‘conscious capitalism’ and ‘climate prosperity’ that I’ve seen are simply
variations of libertarian capitalism. What this suggests, I think, is the
need for a comprehensive theory of the developmental stages of the commons."
(http://onthecommons.org/beyond-state-capitalism)
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