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

[Michel Bauwens]

just rereading your two paragraphs on FSF and property, and realising they
can be interpreted not as a general rejection of property, but only as a
rejection of property of software code, in this case of course, that fits
with my experience of them,

Michel

On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 12:12 AM, j.martin.pedersen <
m.pedersen at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:

>
>
> 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
>
>


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