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

[j.martin.pedersen]

On 02/01/11 05:38, Michel Bauwens wrote:
> Hi Martin,
> 
> below here is a part of the exchange between roberto and you, which I find
> extremely puzzling, so further details would be welcome
> 
> Roberto shows the differences between types of goods, and claims that this
> has consequences, which means, they are certain constraints,

Yes, of course there are constraints and it might be more difficult to
share a car than it is to share a poem, but that is only so if you have
(access to) a pen and a paper, or, as it were, a digital network,
electricity, and a vast industrial apparatus inventing, developing,
producing, distributing, discarding, disassembling, recycling hardware
and a labour force writing the software required to do so.

Therefore, in some situation, for argument's sake, it might also be more
easy to share a car than it is to share a poem digitally. It all depends
on access and configuration of society. That is, everyone is implicated
and therefore everyone ought to be allowed to participate in the
decisions about what can be and is shared, rather than just calculate
shareability on the basis of essential features of a thing.


> the way I interpret the argument is that  social relations are partly
> determined by an objective material basis,  i.e. the nature of the good does
> bring constraints

You shift terms here, which makes this exchange rather difficult. Now
you say "partly determine", sometimes it is "primary importance",
sometimes it is just "determine". In any case, nothing in a thing,
outside of an economistic dystopia (fast emerging!), determines its
shareability - only people (ought to) determine that.

What I am saying is quite simply: the nature of a thing does not
determine whether it is shareable or not, and should not, but political
processes - community dialogue - is where shareability is determined.
Anything can be shared, from mountains to scrolls you bring down from it.

In the moment you let the nature of the thing determine whether it is
shareable or whether it should be organised in this or in that way, then
we have fully entered the economistic reality that takes of - some say,
anyway, more or less - with Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics
(1890), which detached economics from moral, social and political
philosophy, rendering it an objective science detached from social
realities. The beginning of the end of the social.

It was a crossroads and to go further down the wrong road is not the
best route to a good, I would argue, but instead we need to reverse this
trend and remarry economics with social relations and not just let the
latter be determined by the former.

In other words, first and primary question is one of community: Who are
we, what do we have and how do we want to share it? The essential
features of a thing might influence these decision making processes and
localised, contextual arguments might be made invoking such essential
features in the political process, but to say that digital sharing is
"encouraged" by its essential features is entirely misleading unless you
hide/export the externalities, which is a common neoliberal thing to do.

> it does not talk or exclude other determinations, I see no hint of any
> argument against politics, that everything needs to be computed

No, that is an implication of the philosophy chosen, which follows the
economistic trend and which has produced the world in which we live
where social relations just follow (are determined by) economics (hence,
the crude marxism + neoliberalism statement-- where the former might be
a completely wrong association, it is just a feeling I have) and where
politics are economics calculations and virtually nothing more.

I have argued somewhat along the same lines in a critique of Benkler's
conception of commons-based peer production here (pp: 68-77 & 130-136),
although a lot of the more basic philosophical discussion about had to
be cut for the final version, as it is old hat in political economy:

Pedersen, J.M. (2010) ‘Free Culture in Context: Property and the
Politics of Free Software‘, The Commoner, Special Issue, Volume 14,
Winter 2010, 49-136:

http://commoning.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/the-commoner-14-winter-2010-chapter1.pdf


> empirically, from what I know of Roberto, his work is eminently political,
> he works with farmers, with the Greens, etc ...

Now you do this again, phrasing your comments so as to suggest that I am
attacking Roberto personally. I find it manipulative and divisive. We
are discussing concept and arguments. Not people.

What I am arguing against is a way of understanding economics as
detached from moral and social concerns and against letting things
determine social relations -- that is the world of capitalism and
commodity festishism, it is a reality distortion borne out of capitalist
democracy's narrow, economistic thinking. A straight jacket of which we
must rid ourselves.


> so both on a theoretical and practical level, I'm wondering how you arrive
> from that statement to your conclusions, what are the intermediary steps
> that you have taken to arrive at them?
> 
> i.e. as you write:
> 
> < a sad statement and testimony to the end of politics: let
> the thing determine all. Let us compute society.>

I hope this makes it a little clearer. It is what you could call a
bi-partisan concern in political economy - left and right political
economists are trying to being these fields of study together again, to
reconnect economics with social realities, and the way in which Roberto
argues for essential features of a thing as determining factors -
primary to social and community concerns, including environmental
justice and global solidarity - reflects this narrow, economistic
universe that is being pulled down over our eyes, in which livelihoods
are for sale and profit maximisation (one of the the essential features
of the thing called a commodity) determines society.

It is not a particularly big point, most social and environmental
philsophers, as well as sociologists interested in moral economy
studies, are well aware of this point. It is a philosophical point, but
it has extensive political ramifications - indeed, it threatens the very
fabric of community and is also the kind of thinking that helped turn
the Hardin's fiction of pasture tragedy into policy reality.

m