[p2p-research] communism is silly
Richard Poynder
richard.poynder at btinternet.com
Mon Jul 12 16:16:41 CEST 2010
Could it be that there is a tendency for a confusion/conflation between
commonist and communist to arise in these kinds of discussions — a
conflation encouraged perhaps by Eben Moglen’s dotCommunist Manifesto?
From: p2presearch-bounces at listcultures.org
[mailto:p2presearch-bounces at listcultures.org] On Behalf Of Michel Bauwens
Sent: 12 July 2010 14:20
To: p2p research network
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-h
olloway-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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