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

[j.martin.pedersen]

On 31/12/10 06:45, Michel Bauwens wrote:
> again the answer here can be seen as either/or. I believe Martin argues
> essentially, peer production is an instrument of capitalism; cyber-utopians
> may argue the opposite

No, I am arguing for a philosophical position that can prevent P2P
falling further and eventually entirely into the hands of capital
interests. A position in which commoners of the land and digital
commoners find common ground and collectively defend commons against
enclosure. I am critically, but constructively arguing for ways in which
P2P can be understood and conceptualised in such ways that its utopian
realities can be realised.

I think many cyber utopians' libertarianism and various economistic
arguments serve capital interests in the long run, and not P2P culture.

Have pasted section below in which I conclude on some of this:

---------

1.5.2 Framed for the market.

We have seen how Benkler's work contributes to an expansion of the
economistic framework that enables it to better capture the dynamics of
social production. These social relations he defines as outside the
market and property, which he otherwise considers very important
institutions:

“The rules of property are circumscribed and intended to elicit a
particular datum— willingness and ability to pay for exclusive control
over a resource. They constrain what one person or another can do with
regard to a resource; that is, use it in some ways but not others,
reveal or hide information with regard to it, and so forth. These
constraints are necessary so that people must transact with each other
through markets, rather than through force or social networks, but they
do so at the expense of constraining action outside of the market to the
extent that it depends on access to these resources” (Benkler 2006: 24).

Social production for Benkler, then, is the kind of social relations
that are currently not captured within “the market”, as that institution
is traditionally understood. Moreover, social production should not be
subjected to the private property and contract mechanisms that define
the market, because these mechanisms are considered unfit for the
intangible realm of information. Instead the economistic framework – the
language of marketeers, essentially – must be enlarged to be able to
systematically capture the dynamics of social production, while, and
this is the crux of the matter, private property and all the wealth
concentrated on that basis remains unquestioned. In other words, the
power amassed through the private property regime in the tangible realm
is left untouched, but as an organisational mode is rejected from the
realm of ideas; because the operation of existing powers in the tangible
realm needs a free flowing virtual commons in order to continually have
access to ideas, knowledge and information. The organisational mode of
the tangible realm, however, remains. That is to say that Benkler is
developing a framework with which to capture social production without
destroying it. It is the construction of “capitalist commonism”, to use
an oxymoron, that we see in the work of Benkler.

Capitalist commonism recognises that existing economic powers cannot
sustain themselves without a minimal degree of commonalty in the
intangible realm. In order for the operation of the industrial apparatus
to sustain itself it must refrain from enclosing in a traditional sense
the intangible realm, because it needs this realm of ideas to feed its
increasingly information dependent, but heavy, physical machinery of
electronic commodity production.

The dynamics of social production, however, are captured through
incorporation in the economistic framework. That permits those
institutions that organise themselves with such means – corporations,
states and many NGOs and PGOs (Pseudo-Governmental Organisations) – to
scientifically grasp those dynamics and thus extract the surplus value
that arises from the excess capacity embodied in relations between citizens.

The excess capacity, as we saw, is capacity in excess of basic
requirements, such as housing, food, time and skills. Housing and food
are tangible matters, while skills are transmitted most often through
tangible means in physical spaces, most of which is organised by means
of private property and thus – largely – remain in the hands of the few.
Excess capacity, then, by a small stretch of the imagination, can be
understood as positive externalities that cannot be internalised on the
basis of the usual mechanisms of enclosure, because these mechanisms
would destroy the commons once and for all. By analogy, such enclosure
is like overfishing: if you land all the fish they cannot reproduce
themselves and you have nothing to fish for any more. The virtual
commons must be defended, but ways to reap its positive externalities –
the economic potential inherent in the pooling and extraction of its
productive forces – are required for capital interest, confined to the
tangible realm, to be able to carry on its expansionary movement. The
information commons, therefore, becomes a capitalist commons and it is
Benkler's great achievement that he has begun to establish a framework
from within which tangible powers can extract wealth from the intangible
realm without destroying that realm. From a capitalist perspective this
is genius, because it resembles a sustainable fishing policy: we can
keep fishing, but the fish will remain available. From an
anti-capitalist perspective it is a domestication of the virtual commons
and consequently a separation of the virtual commons from the real
commons, conceptualised in terms that relies upon state power and in
turn justifies state power.

It is similar concerns that have led to Tiziana Terranova (2000) to
argue that in the phenomena that Benkler calls “social production” we
rather see an emergence of “free labor” that offer new ways for capital
to consolidate itself through extracting wealth from social relations
hitherto external to direct market relations. Not only is it free
labour, we may venture, but resistance-free labour. In her later work
she sees Benkler's conceptualisation of social production as offering
“liberal and neoliberal economics a refinement of its logic that does
not significantly break with its overall political rationality”
(Terranova 2009: 251-252). That reflects the argument I am making here.
In Benkler's presentation she finds that “[n]on-market production, in
fact, is based in social cooperation, but it becomes economically
effective, that is it achieves the status of an economic phenomenon”
(2009: 252), because, as Benkler says “it increases the overall
productivity in the sectors where it is effective ... and presents new
sources of competition to incumbents that produce information goods for
which there are now socially produced substitutes’ (Benkler 2006: 122).
In the networked information economy “[s]ocial life and economic life
would thus find a point of convergence where the former would no longer
find its expression exclusively within the reproductive sphere of civil
society but would become directly productive in the economic domain”
(Terranova 2009: 251). It is this economistic perspective that
domesticates social production - ties it to capital - and funnels the
wealth created through these non-market relations back into capital. I
am arguing in this essay for a social analysis of property relations for
exactly the reason that Terranova criticises Benkler's account:

“Although nothing in principle prevents social production from
outperforming competitive markets as a more efficient economic form, it
still seems destined to remain subaltern to the logic of the neoliberal
market as a whole … In a way it seems as if, once passed through the
‘reflective prism’ of political economy, social production loses all
potential to actually produce and sustain radically different forms of
life – which would neither coexist nor compete with neoliberal
governmentality, but which could question its very logic” (ibid: 252).
Being able to question the “very logic” of neoliberal economics, I
argue, involves an analysis of property from a social movement
perspective. Paradoxically, then, I develop a view on property that is
inspired by the phenomenon of Free Software. It is paradoxical because
the Free Software Foundation, the self-organised civil society
institution and social movement that defines Free Software, does not see
the concept of property as relevant for Free Software. They vehemently
reject the idea. In that sense I am standing outside the movement,
insofar as we understand the movement as the voice of its leaders. But
why should we?

Although I argue against their rejection of property, the main purpose
is not to advise the Free Software Foundation on matters of policy
strategy and tactics, but to provide the wider global network of social
movements working to (re-)create commons with a map and matrix of
property that can be used to advance their causes and to grasp just how
multi-faceted a concept property is. Understanding Free Software as
property is a very useful starting point for transcending existing
conceptions of property, because when understood as property, Free
Software opens the door for radically different configurations of
property. Importantly, Free Software is an example of a community
articulating their own relational modalities and thus defining how they
self-organise to make space for a realisation of their “needs, desires,
aspirations, affects and relations” (De Angelis 2005a). While it is
certainly an important victory for community based, self-legislation, it
is perhaps even more importantly a crack in property where the light
gets in: if we inscribe the relational modalities of Free Software upon
the concept of property, then the concept is forever changed. In other
words, its “framing effect” would be entirely different and informed
debate become possible.

Above I used the term paradox to avoid any association with
self-contradiction. It might be read as if I am contradicting myself,
declaring allegiance with social movements, then turning around to
conceptualise the dynamics of a social movement in terms that they
reject.  However, the contradiction is on their part.

The libertarian values that the Free Software and Free Culture movements
exhibit are not liberties that were won in the struggle for virtual
commons and the right to share digital information and cooperate on
software projects. The freedoms upon which the Free Software commons
rests – the liberties that make it possible for such a movement to act
and organise – are liberties won by struggling women and men, who with
their bodies fought for land and freedom.  The habeas corpus in which
virtual commoners find themselves is an outcome of a struggle that has
been unfolding for almost a millennia. Arguably, the leadership of the
Free Software and Free Culture movements are separating themselves from
the real commons. The commons of the land and the commons of the means
of production and distribution are the fundamental commons without which
virtual commons are merely lambs for the profit slaughter.

The view on property that is shared by the Free Software and Free
Culture movements obviously invite a critique that clearly goes beyond
virtual culture itself, serving as a perfect point of departure for a
critique and reassessment, long needed, of property in general.
Critiques and reforms are certainly needed, lest the promissory notes of
Free Culture are to whither in the twilight of enclosure.

>From pages 130-136 of:

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