[p2p-research] [Commoning] Information sector: a qualitative different mode of production?

[Michel Bauwens]

I'd like to add to Martin's point by referring to the best and likely most
important book I have read this year, i.e.
http://p2pfoundation.net/Civilizing_the_Economy by Marvin T. Brown,

it's a critique  of the property focus of current economics since adam
smith, and it's replacement by a economics of provisioning in which labour,
land and money are de-commodified,

it is weak on how to get there, but strong on reconceptualizing the
alternative,

Michel

"SIX KEY ARGUMENTS


1. If we want to create a just and sustainable economy, we must free
ourselves from the legacy of the Enlightenment’s economics of property-as
illustrated by Adam Smith's silence about the role of slavery in wealth
creation.

2. We can create a new economics that is grounded in the three essential
aspects of all human communities: making provisions for one another,
protecting one another and creating social meaning.

3. If we treat labor, land and money as providers rather than commodities,
we can use what they provide and protect them from abuse.

4. As global citizens we can organize civic systems of provision (food,
housing, transportation and so on) that are based on civic norms, such as
reciprocity, and are responsive to supply and demand.

5. The future of our global economy depends on civic conversations in which
all people are represented in deliberations on how to turn systems of
provision toward justice and sustainability.

6. We can create the conditions for such civic conversations right now at
school, at work, in our neighborhoods, in our associations and in government
agencies."


 [edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Civilizing_the_Economy?title=Civilizing_the_Economy&action=edit&section=2>
] Contents

1 Introduction: Creating A Just And Sustainable Economy


*Part 1: Creating a New Economic Framework*

2 Adam Smith's Silence and an Economics of Property

3 Reclaiming the Notions of Provision and Family

4 Making Provisions in a Dangerous World


*Part 2: The Civic Option*

5 From Property Relations to Civic Relations

6 Society, Civil Society and the Market

7 Restoring Reciprocity

8 Civic Norms and Market Competition


*Part 3: A Civic View of Labor,Land, and Money*

9 Labor: Employment as Engagement

10 Land: Ownership as a Concession

11 Money: Commodity or Credit


*Part 4: Civilizing Economic Systems*

12 A World of Systems

13 Imagining a Stakeholder Economy

14 The Ethics of Economic Systems

15 Changing Systems of Provision


*Part 5: A Civic Agenda*

16 The Civic Obligations of Corporations

17 Creating Circumstances for Civic Conversations


 [edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Civilizing_the_Economy?title=Civilizing_the_Economy&action=edit&section=3>
] Discussion [edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Civilizing_the_Economy?title=Civilizing_the_Economy&action=edit&section=4>
] Towards a Citizen's Economy

Marvin Brown:

"The first premise of a citizen’s economy is that it belongs to citizens—not
to some citizens or citizens with property, but to all citizens. And who is
a citizen? We can return to the original meaning of citizen: a member of a
city, so all who belong to the city are citizens. Citizenship, in other
words, is based on membership, not on ownership. So what is a city? A city
is the place where people must cooperate in order to live together. This
cooperation does not stifle diversity, conflict, or even competition. In
fact, it does the opposite. It facilitates it and allows it to flourish.

Today, of course, systems of cooperation include urban and rural areas. Few
places still exist beyond these systems, especially when we think of issues
like global warming or sustainability. We are all citizens today (belong to
systems of cooperation) because we live in relationships with one another,
even if some refuse to acknowledge this.

A citizen’s economy would begin with this basic premise and then citizens
would design an economy based on such civic norms as reciprocity, moral
equality, and representation. This would require a change in our current
thinking as big as the change we need if we are going to move our economy
toward justice and sustainability." (
http://www.civilizingtheeconomy.com/2010/12/a-citizen%E2%80%99s-economy/)


 [edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Civilizing_the_Economy?title=Civilizing_the_Economy&action=edit&section=5>
] Dissociate Economics of Property as Foundation of Libertarianism

Marvin Brown:

"If you want to understand the foundation of libertarianism, there is no
better place to look than Adam Smith’s view of property relations.Laced
throughout Smith’s book, The Wealth of Nations, one finds the Enlightenment
doctrine of the four stages of history: the evolution from a hunter society
through herding and agriculture to a commercial society. These stages were
also about the development of property and the development of government. At
the commercial stage, ownership of property had become the basis of free
enterprise and government’s role was to protect property.

I think that libertarianism fits squarely on this legacy of property
relations. Freedom is the right to do what I want with what I have, with my
property. What is especially irritating to libertarians is for the
government to take from the “haves” and give it to the “have-nots.” What is
equally irritating to non-libertarians is the practice of treating the
people and the planet as property, and of ignoring how everyone is
interrelated and interconnected in social and economic systems. In contrast
to the Anglo-American property-based tradition, the philosophers of
continental Europe based human freedom on the moral will and human dignity.
This has given them a framework for seeing people related to one another as
a moral community. The Anglo-American tradition of property relations does
not have the same resources. In fact, if we want to create a political
economy that would move us toward justice and sustainability, we will need
to move beyond Smithian economics and libertarianism. We will need to create
a global civil society that includes all as members, instead of a
property-based society that separates us into the haves and the have-nots."
(
http://www.civilizingtheeconomy.com/2010/11/libertarianism-adam-smith-and-property-relations/)



 [edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Civilizing_the_Economy?title=Civilizing_the_Economy&action=edit&section=6>
] Civisism <http://p2pfoundation.net/Civisism> as Foundation of Politics and
Economics

Marvin Brown:

"Civicism believes that all citizens have certain obligations to each other
based on such civic norms as solidarity, moral equality, and reciprocity.

Solidarity may seem rather irritating for libertarians, because they tend to
ignore the very essence of citizenship: civic membership. A bit of
reflection, however, should make clear that without membership in a
political community, no one could enjoy property rights. It is a “we” that
makes it possible for any “I” to enjoy the benefits of ownership. At the
same time, membership does not negate ownership; it simply places it in the
context of civic relationships. Health care also belongs to these civic
relations.

Civic moral equality may be an even greater challenge for libertarians than
solidarity, because libertarians tend to divide the world into the haves and
the have-nots. If the government tells them what to do with what they have,
they see it as a form of tyranny. For them, morality is a kind of property
management—the management of their personal and private property. Some would
say that socialism is also about property management. They just want the
government to manage it.

The civic view of moral equality, however, begins with the notion of persons
as moral actors. Moral equality means that most of the time, most of us do
what we think is right considering the world we think we live in. Most
conflicts, in other words, are conflicts between right vs. right rather than
conflicts between right vs. wrong. This understanding of moral equality
serves as the foundation for civic deliberations about controversial policy
issues. All citizens have the right to participate in public conversations
about our life together. This means that everyone’s voice deserves equal
representation and equal attention in the conversations about health care.

Reciprocity refers to the foundation for making exchanges, for giving and
taking, and for mutual insurance against the risks we all face. One finds it
in almost all cultures. And yet, in our society, it has been mostly replaced
by the notion of market price. Today, many calculate whether to participate
in health care insurance programs in terms of whether the costs outweigh the
benefits. “Is health insurance a good investment for me? If not, why
bother?”

After 250 years of living in an economic legacy that pictures exchanges as
based on self-interest, this seems quite normal. In fact, in terms of human
history, it is an aberration. Human communities, for the most part, have
assumed that what one gives will someday be returned. It is not so much a
calculation as an expectation towards oneself and toward others. Obviously,
it rubs against the individualism of the libertarian. Still, even they can
see (if they want to) that we all live today in complex systems and get most
of what we have through these systems. Even a drink of water comes from an
elaborate water system. That is also true of health care. The fact is that
we do depend on one another. Reciprocity transforms that dependence into one
of moral value. It honors our capacity to provide for and to protect one
another.

In the United States, we do have a tradition of civil rights and civic
virtue. It is based on the recognition of the dignity of the individual as a
member of the civic community: as a citizen." (
http://www.civilizingtheeconomy.com/2010/12/health-care-not-socialism-nor-libertarianism-but-civicism/)

[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Civilizing_the_Economy?title=Civilizing_the_Economy&action=edit&section=7>
] Review

Ernesto Aguilar:

"In Marvin Brown’s Civilizing the Economy: A New Economics of Provision
(Cambridge University Press, 2010) the pillars of capitalism are thoroughly
examined and the role white supremacy has played is put forward forcefully
in one of 2010′s more fascinating books. Brown’s unflinching analysis of all
that capitalism holds dear, from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations to
industry’s advocacy of employment forms benefiting it, will enrich all who
read it.

Virtually all the examples within Civilizing the Economy‘s premise — that
the U.S. current economic order is unsustainable as it currently functions —
can be traced back to a single flashpoint in North American history: the
Atlantic slave trade and the use of chattel slavery to buffer early
capitalism from the pressures it faces today. While the roots of the
economic structure go back further, to the era of Scottish Enlightenment,
the constant tension of what Brown refers to as property versus provision —
ownership juxtaposed against civic needs and responsibilities — defined the
United States virtually from day one. Ideas such as at-will employment,
Brown writes, can be tracked back to master-slave relationships, which have
stripped away people’s moral obligations to each other in work environments.
While largely steering clear of slavery’s racial context in North America
and focusing on it as a brutal tool in modern capitalism’s birth, Brown
nevertheless gives an important understanding of how slavery profoundly
shapes society to this day. He is not the first person to write it, but
Civilizing the Economy gives an intelligent, concise overview of the
economic, legal and cultural framework created in the shadow of human
bondage.

Ideals such as civic deliberation (the idea that workers should discuss
effective work relations), appropriate land use and civic obligations of
business, he says, have been replaced by a mercenary system that is wrecking
people’s lives, the planet and our ability to see others humanely and
corporations as entities that owe the greater society more than jobs or
token donations. Brown’s historical citations on these issues are
provocative. He is certain to get you thinking about the things you take for
granted in the workplace, job interview and unemployment line. Brown is
further likely to make you think about what corporate responsibility really
entails in a modern society.

To be clear, Civilizing the Economy is not an anti-capitalist book. Far from
it, in fact. In Brown’s eye, an “economics of provision” would mean workers
would provide and protect one another primarily as a method for operating
ethically. A radical restructuring of the capitalist economy would shear
away the influence of lobbyists and power brokers and turn the focus more to
civic conversations involving communities as a whole. Those who may have
seen the impressive documentary Venezuela: Revolution From the Inside Out
(PM Press, 2008) may have caught a glimpse of how such neighborhood meetings
and civil society building endeavors could work. However, in Venezuela, with
a rich rebellious history, ideas of direct democracy took hold via a
sustained, well-organized block-by-block organizing drive in a country whose
crushing poverty pushed the masses to get active. In the United States,
where deprivation is relative, Brown’s ideas could be a harder sell. Yet
Civilizing the Economy‘s absorbing questions of history, community and the
future still make it worthy of debate." (
http://www.politicalmediareview.org/2010/12/civilizing-the-economy/)

On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 8:00 PM, j.martin.pedersen <
m.pedersen at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:

>
>
> On 31/12/10 06:04, Roberto Verzola wrote:
> >
> >> Another very common theme in these discussions is that the
> >> economics of this production is now very different from the
> >> past - as though the underlying Mode of Production and ownership
> >> of the Means of Production is no longer an issue.
> >>
> > I will argue that there are important qualitative differences between
> > production in the agriculture, industrial and information fields.
>
> Yes, for sure, but - from a philosophical perspective of property
> relations - I will argue that the focus here is on the *thing*, which I
> in turn will argue is a misleading focus derived from the philosophy of
> capitalism, where property has become a noun and thus signifying an
> object. Property, however, is (better understood as) social relations
> with regard to things, and it is not the nature of the object or its
> essence that ought to be important in the first instance, but the social
> relations and environments that affect it and are effected by it that
> are important in the first instance of articulating property relations
> and the architecture of social organisation.
>
> I have argued this at length in an essay that has just been published in
> The Commoner:
> http://www.commoner.org.uk/
>
> and reproduced here:
> http://commoning.wordpress.com/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commoning mailing list
> Commoning at lists.wissensallmende.de
> http://lists.wissensallmende.de/mailman/listinfo/commoning
>



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