[p2p-research] Fwd: Actually Existing Internet Communism

[Kevin Carson]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kevin Carson <free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 9:27 PM
Subject: Actually Existing Internet Communism
To: free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com




Sent to you by Kevin Carson via Google Reader:


Actually Existing Internet
Communism<http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/matthewyglesias/%7E3/xa9NDT-tkc4/>
via Yglesias <http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org> by myglesias on 11/9/10

<http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/marx460-1.jpeg>

Henry Farrell finds Steven
Johnson<http://crookedtimber.org/2010/11/08/i-am-not-a-communist/>running
away form the somewhat radical anti-capitalist implications of
his work on innovation<http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/where-good-ideas-come-from/>,
something that I think is a fairly widespread problem.

The issue is that most people don’t have a great vocabulary for talking
about valuable activity that’s neither organized by the government nor
undertaken for commercial reasons. And yet there’s lots of activity along
those lines in everyone’s life. Importantly, this has always been the case.
People have always had hobbies. The number of people who play sports on an
amateur basis has always exceeded the number of people who do it
professionally. And most significantly, people—especially women—have always
done intensely valuable work in the household sector and related to raising
and educating children.

But rapid improvements in communications and information technology have
drastically expanded the scope and importance of non-commercial activities.
It’s also created a (virtual) space where commercial, hobbyist, non-profit,
and government undertakings interact, compete, and collaborate in novel
ways. This nexus of undertakings has created several billionaires and “hot”
innovative businesses of the sort that those inclined to valorize the work
of entrepreneurs can and do valorize. But it’s also created a much larger
set of amateur or quasi-amateur producers who are impacting the lives of
people all around the world. In its 1875 Gotha
Program<http://history.hanover.edu/texts/gotha.html>,
the German Social Democratic Party “demand[ed] the establishment of
socialistic productive associations with the support of the state and under
the democratic control of the working people.”

It turns out that finding a feasible way to do that for industrial age
enterprises was fairly problematic. And yet their arguments that such
associations would be beneficial remain compelling. Meanwhile, the Internet
makes it much easier for individuals to form socialistic productive
associations *without* a ton of *explicit* support of the state. This means,
however, that the extent to which the state is *implicitly* supporting or
hindering the work of said associations deserves to be on the table
politically. And that discussion needs to consider not just the GDP impacts
of peer production (which are often quite small) but the giant quantities of
consumer (and producer) surplus welfare that are involved.

<http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/matthewyglesias?a=xa9NDT-tkc4:4qRrEKZeGIQ:H0mrP-F8Qgo>



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-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
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