[p2p-research] What comes next?

Mon Jul 12 17:24:38 CEST 2010

Very nicely layed out Ryan. My thoughts also.

As you say, what comes next? Thats the question. One possibility is simply no growth economies in advanced countries (Japan simply got there first). And a significant shift in power/wealth to industrializing countries (which are the bulk of the world's population anyway).

And yet there is that nagging question of P2P. Could it replace capitalism... I like Michel's optimism there... just not sure on this myself

1. I believe free market capitalism has largely proved the happiest time for humans by far.
2. I believe in governments regulating markets. 
3. I believe these things require careful balances.

4. I believe that technology is all important in changing the rules.
5. Technology has made labour and learning problematic.  
6. Because of 5, the credit/debt economy of the world is now broken.
7. There may be ways to fix 6, but I don't see how.

8. If there is no way to fix 6, there will be great disruption and trauma.  
9. Something else will ensue.
10. P2P may be part of 9.  I think "free" economies are a logical technical outcome.  
11. Understanding free economies is therefore important.

12. There is no future in the past.
13. State socialism and communism are the past.  
14. It is possible that debt-based capitalism is becoming the past.
15. If 14 is true, there is an urgency to uncover some means of solving what will replace it.

Ryan 

From: levelsixmedia at hotmail.com
To: p2presearch at listcultures.org
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:09:19 +0000
Subject: Re: [p2p-research] communism is silly

shape the list as you see fit Michel. Its your party. As for
Integrative discussion. I don't see it. What exactly are you
integrating from the Right? Are there conservatives on this list?
Please speak up. I'll even take a red tory.

D

Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:19:33 +0700
From: michelsub2004 at gmail.com
To: p2presearch at listcultures.org
Subject: Re: [p2p-research] communism is silly

daniel,

dear Daniel,

we have always debated in an open spirit here, and if you take on your Cold War lenses and object to any mention of past theories and movements, you will have a hard time,

I'm not a marxist, and very few on this list are, probably less than a handful, but we take all ideas seriously, and have discussed many strands ... I personally talk with liberals, distributists, mutualists, red tories, conservative catholic civil society theorists, integral theorists and many others, and have featured their ideas and proposals in our blog, no one has a monopoly on the truth

I'm not a fan of your naive american mythologising either, but I can live with it, and I for one, won't insult you every time you exhibit it ...

sorry you can't deal with integrative  and rational debate and want to keep things ideological and intolerant

ryan doesn't like marxism either, but has never exhibited this level of intolerance and insulted contributors to this list

this is not a forum to call open and rational debate 'babble' and 'fog', so I hope you can refrain from insults in the future, it's just not part of the culture of this list

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 8:03 PM, Daniel Araya <levelsixmedia at hotmail.com> wrote:

This is really too lengthy to parse effectively Michel. My critique is of communism. I pay homage to the many social revolutions over the past centuries-- especially the recent civil rights movements in the US. Many of these movements owe something to worker protests. sure. But even more-- I would argue-- to a deep strain of Judeo-Christian ideology that successive waves of revolutionaries have borrowed heavily from. Including Marx himself. 

My bone of contention-- as I have already said-- is the loose way Marxists claim all social revolutions as their own. As I believe you are doing right now. 

You point out the many contributions of social protest and I would respond by saying, terrific. The more the better. But please spare me the Marxist babble.

D

Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:41:38 +0700 

From: michelsub2004 at gmail.com
To: p2presearch at listcultures.org

Subject: Re: [p2p-research] communism is silly 

communism was the dream of european and other workers to have a world in which equal relations and full democracy would be possible, and part of the broad tradition of emancipatory thinking who wants to give every human an equitable chance .... it belongs in the same tradition as the french and the american revolutions ... communism by the way was not a collectivism, i.e. a theory of subsuming the individual to the collective, but rather based on the principle, like in mahayana buddhism, that the liberty of the individual is predicated on that of his brothers and sisters, in other words, nobody can really be free by enslaving others, or in a world predicated on exploitation of others.

the reasons why class society persisted,  including in the state-capitalist or state-'socialist' countries, is a complex one, and I would welcome the debate on the issue, so why don't you start, and I'll promise to respond (not of course, that I have a full answer myself)

I'm personally not sure that this dream will ever be a reality and am not prepared to wait for it, but I think we can make substantial advances to a more equitable world order, not just because we can, but because we must, as the present infinite growth order is not compatible with our survival.

P2P is one attempt to formulate a narrative and a politics that can bring about such a change, by subsuming market dynamics (but not capitalism) to a higher purpose and deeper social logic through the generation of commons. In that, I honour the many previous attempts to achieve it, from many different sides, which for me includes that dead european philosopher, but also many others; and I recognize as primary enemies totalitarianism in all its forms, especially Stalinism in all its derivative forms.

You ask, "Tell me Michel, what technology, democratic practice, or medical innovation has a Marxist ever invented?" and of course the answer would be the same as for the masons or christians, many, as indeed many technologists, democrats, and healthcare pioneers have been Marxists, though of course much less people espouse the label today. Do you imagine that all the inventors in world history were all hayekians or schumpeterians? I would like to turn it around and make it personal as well: nothing you have today, your ability to study, etc .. would have been possible without the social struggles and sacrifices of the working men and women for social justice and a more equitable distribution of the social product, including in terms of education, anti-child labour laws, universal suffrage, etc... Non of these things would have been achieved without the 'socialist' workers movement in the 19th and 20th century. None of these achievements were 'given', or just a pure result of automatic prosperity. So, in your own privileged position of a Canadian studying at a prestigious university in the U.S., you are paradoxically a product of Marx, and without the inspirational force of him and many others who inspired social movements, you might still be working in the mines, or a foxconn equivalent, at a minimum wage, barely able to feed your family.

Then you ask: Why in the history of experiments with communism was there no democratic communist state? 

You probably know the classic marxist answer, which isn't mine, which is that this realization was supposed to happen in advanced western countries, the only one with the productive capacity to go beyond the scarcity paradigm, and when the many attempts failed, through violent suppression as you probably know, then successfull power grabs could only happen in countries without that capacity, and hence quickly degenerated into new class systems to allocate the scarce resources.

My own answer is different. First, I'm not sure that classlessness is possible without a very long cultural and psychological maturation, and with only 2% of the people at a peer to peer level of intersubjectivity (susan cook greuter's statistics), you can imagine what a long trip that would be. Like the going beyond the ego of eastern enlightenment, I'm not waiting for it. Second, I think that Marxists got the change scenario wrong, as i have argued in a few texts such as "To the Finland Station". Phase transitions did generally NOT happen with a class taken over power from another, but from a dual transformation of both producing and managerial classes around a new productive paradigm. It is only after a long maturation, through the stages of first emergence, then parity, that phase transitions occcur as a change in the state form and in the dominant form of political power. In this sense, socialism turned out to be to things, in the West, a means of redistributing the social product to the working people who create value in the first place (the social-democratic version), and in eastern europe and china, a different version of capital accumulation, based on the exploitation of the workers by a managerial class that was in control of the state, essentially a variety of capital-ism, with salaried workers on the one hand, and a collective ownership of the state by a managerial class on the other (the nomenclatura, or whatever you want to call it).

My analysis of the failure of socialism then, is that it did not fullfill the condition that Marx himself had put forward, i.e. that the old mode had exhausted its possibilities, and that a new productive mode makes it appearance. Obviously, though the state-capitalist or state-socialist mode did have some successes, such as higher growth than its capitalist competitors for a number of years, it could not deal with technological complexity in the way capitalist democracies could (and we will see how non-democratic capitalism like China will do on this score in the next 20 years), and it was thus NOT more productive than capitalism, and thus unable to overtake it.

But as I argue in my own work, peer production is hyperproductive in this sense, and this is why there is a re-orientation of capitalism towards peer-production modalities today.

In my take today, this means an increasing turn of working people towards peer production, and a turn of a section of capital towards netarchical capitalism, through the joint modality of the commons.

So the phase transition towards peer to peer is not predicated upon the creation of classnessness, but on the becoming core of the commons as a social relation of commoning, while the remaining scarce good dynamics can still be allocated through the market and other modalities. So the difference is that as the present system is based on competition, and within the competing entities on cooperation (through the hierarchical wage relationship but also moderated through more and more horizontal networking), then in the future I envision, based on the already evident practice of existing commons, the core becomes cooperation through the commons, while competition exists between the different commons. And we move from a system which cannot recognize externalities in its practice (market transactions are by definitions outside this purview), to a system where externalities are build in.

Let me stress that this had nothing to do with collectivism ... peer to peer is neither a return to premodern wholism, nor coercive cooperation in the stalinist version, but it is based on the free aggregation of individuals around the common creation of value through shared commons of knowledge, code, and design.

Otherwise, you need to explain to me why forced cooperation through wage dependency is individualism, but free cooperation is collectivism?

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 5:34 PM, Daniel Araya <levelsixmedia at hotmail.com> wrote:

I didn't realize 'communism' was about all that: Energy, the environment, economic freedom, innovation, the end of selfishness... 
Wow. I had thought it was merely a translation of Rousseau's urbane notions of tribalism into the field of economics (combined with a generous "borrowing" off Hegel of course). But lo-- communism is many many things it turns out. More than simply a critique of capitalism, or the forced manufacture of equality, it appears to be the swiss army knife of economic revolution. 

Tell me Michel, what technology, democratic practice, or medical innovation has a Marxist ever invented? Why in the history of experiments with communism was there no democratic communist state? 

Call P2P commonism if you like but the continued harping on a dead eurocentric philosopher who couldn't even feed his family is ridiculous. Collectivism is your hope not mine, so I'd prefer not to soil the promise of networked production with the adolescent silliness of class war and a "proletarian revolution". 

D

Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:55:14 +0700
From: michelsub2004 at gmail.com
To: p2presearch at listcultures.org

Subject: Re: [p2p-research] recommended video by zizek

most of the speakers specificially disavow such romantic yearning for a perfect future, and speak of the actual movement to create non-commodiized social relations, here and now ... this is something that I presume most people sympathetic to peer to peer are doing ... while the success of this is historically mitigated, the refusal to see humans as only commodified social relations and the continued practice of commoning, is really what sustains civilisations, which would collapse without it ..

romanticism, or 'positive hope' or 'false utopian expectations', are not characteristic of one particular side, since 1989 they were most prominently characteristic of the so-called free-market right, which so spectacularly failed in 2008,

at this stage, the left has a much firmer grasp of 'negativity', i.e. social and environmental externalities, costs and dangers, than anyone in the grasp of elite politics, free market absollutism, enterpreneurial romanticism, or transhumanist technological determinism, all dreaming for magical solutions that will wipe way all the real problems humanity is facing at this stage

what is the left really about, in its core, is expanding the field of opportunity to all, and the democratized choice of any policy which affects any individual, while the right hope that the free rein to the elite, restricting decision-making to moneyed interests, and letting the top 1%  grab the lion's share of the social product, will magically and romantically 'trickle down' ..

hoping that one day you will read evidence-based literature such as

- the spirit level, http://p2pfoundation.net/Why_Greater_Equality_Makes_Societies_Stronger and http://p2pfoundation.net/Just_Give_Money_to_the_Poor

what they show is that while neoliberalism has dramatically restricted post 1973 growth levels, most of the countries with high growth rates, such as Brazil, adopted more equitable social policies ...

I think a possible exception to this might be China, though your colleague Jan Niederveen Peterse calls it a 'social capitalism' as well, but is is the one BRIC country where social equality decreased ... but frankly would you want to live in a FOXCONN compound ..?

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 7:14 AM, Daniel Araya <levelsixmedia at hotmail.com> wrote:

I will maintain the romantic fiction that communism remains to be fully actualized somewhere somehow in spite of half a century of failed attempts across the planet if you'd like Michel ;)

(I just prefer science fiction to romantic fiction myself. Never been a fan of Rousseau...)

D

Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2010 19:50:14 +0700 

From: michelsub2004 at gmail.com
To: p2presearch at listcultures.org
Subject: Re: [p2p-research] recommended video by zizek 

hi daniel,

let's not have this discussion stalinist totalitarianism = communism, you should know better ... I'm assuming that your studies did include a minimum of political theory ?

your example is about just the opposite of what callinicos, himself a trotskyist, would mean under communism ..

Michel

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 7:37 PM, Daniel Araya <levelsixmedia at hotmail.com> wrote:

It strikes me as funny that Callinicos seeks the museum of Capitalism in a Communist era when it would seem to work the other way: Take a trip to Burma or Cuba or North Korea and you find the living museums of communism in the era of global capitalism...

'So often the vocabulary of the previous wave of emancipation is taken as
the standard for the next – as if all subsequent waves of emancipation
should carry the banner of Voltaire and Diderot, of Marx or Che Guevara.

As if secularism should be the touchstone for all newcomers to the
gate – emancipation frozen in time, gilded, decorated and elevated on
a pedestal, such as French laiciteì'.

D

Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2010 11:41:43 +0700
From: michelsub2004 at gmail.com
To: p2presearch at listcultures.org

CC: david at bollier.org; ronfeldt at mac.com; Silke.Helfrich at gmx.de

Subject: [p2p-research] recommended video by zizek 

http://versouk.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/idea-of-communism-callinicos-zizek-holloway-at-marxism/

this video is really worth viewing and listening to, in order to have an idea of left thinking today ...

alex callinicos presents the more traditional view, but zizek really rocks here, and if his nervous mannerisms irk you, just close your eyes

both speakers confront the idea of the commons, talk about recent events in China, and much more,

didn't get myself yet to the third speaker, john holloway ..

Michel
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