[p2p-research] communism is silly

Mon Jul 12 23:27:45 CEST 2010

There will always be a certain charm to the extreme left and the extreme
right that intellectuals will find too tempting to avoid.  Let us remember
Hiedegger was a strong Nazi.  He wasn't alone.  How many rich and elite
Oxbridge types were Soviet agents? Britain was pretty far left in
1948 (and nearly bankrupt by 1975).   France and Italy regularly play with
these things electing communist governments or whatever only to see
themselves get poor in the process and then throw them off.  I pity the
people without the democracy to change back from silly forays right or
left.

I think it is helpful particularly for young people to flirt with these
strong ideas left and right...tea parties and anarchism...whatever.  It is
good to try to find truth.  When I worry is the times when people become
convinced they have found it.  I don't see the world more split now than in
times past.  I'm no fan of metaphysics but I like to see young folks believe
in something.  WIthout a passion for something, life is pretty boring.

The US is often accused of brainless discourse by Euro-types.  In some ways
they're right.  But it is no less brainless than the silliness of small time
Italian communism or the ludicrous right wing of the English national
party.  It is, perhaps, a bit more available in the US because we sell our
TV, we don't control it by government.  If Skye gets bought by the Aussies,
it will make Fox News look like Namby-Pamby land because there is a
festering anger in Europe that hates immigrants, hates Islam and hates
Asia.  And that's because there is always a market for hate, xenophobia,
racism and know-nothingness.  The blame game is an old one.  Poor whites
were always the scapegoat in the US South...anyone who reads to Kill a
Mockingbird with any sensitivity to its time realizes that there are three
groups in the book...whites, white trash, and "negroes."    The question of
the book was whether whites would defend white trash over justice...not
whether justice could or should reign supreme.

LeMonde carries intellectual columns that would lead to outloud laughter if
printed in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, etc.  I think that is
great.  Vive la differance.

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 8:19 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
>>
>> --
>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>
>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
>> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>>
>> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
>> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>>
>> Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>  ------------------------------
>> The New Busy is not the too busy. Combine all your e-mail accounts with
>> Hotmail. Get busy.<http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?tile=multiaccount&ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_4>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> p2presearch mailing list
>> p2presearch at listcultures.org
>> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>
>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
>> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>>
>> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
>> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>>
>> Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>  ------------------------------
>> Hotmail is redefining busy with tools for the New Busy. Get more from your
>> inbox. See how.<http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_2>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> p2presearch mailing list
>> p2presearch at listcultures.org
>> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>
>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
>> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>>
>> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
>> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>>
>> Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> The New Busy is not the too busy. Combine all your e-mail accounts with
>> Hotmail. Get busy.<http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?tile=multiaccount&ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_4>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> p2presearch mailing list
>> p2presearch at listcultures.org
>> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>
>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
>> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>>
>> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
>> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>>
>> Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> The New Busy is not the old busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox.
>> Get started.<http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_3>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> p2presearch mailing list
>> p2presearch at listcultures.org
>> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>
> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>
> Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
>

-- 
Ryan Lanham
rlanham1963 at gmail.com
Facebook: Ryan_Lanham
P.O. Box 633
Grand Cayman, KY1-1303
Cayman Islands
(345) 916-1712
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20100712/c3d96323/attachment-0001.html>