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

[Michel Bauwens]

Ultimately, I think the underlying differences between Martin's position and
mine boil down to this, apart from what I think are the misrepresentations
and straw men descriptions of political opponents, which get me unduly
excited, and for which I must apologize

it is this:

1) can we imagine political coalitions for which anti-capitalism is not a
wedge issue, i.e. for which the fact that yochai benkler sees the
information commons as existing within an existing capitalist structure,
(and seeing no room for its radical transformation (yochai benkler is
otherwise a U.S. liberal, i.e. in Europe he would be a social-democrat,
probably on the left side of it), -- is not in itself problematic, because
there are enough commonalities for joint struggle between people who may
have various positions on this issue

2) and a political interpretation which leaves no room for such coalitions,
i.e. that anticapitalism must be the core common value (in martin's parlance
'the real commons')

This is apart from the following likely critiques I would have on the
excerpt below

a) I do not believe the free software movement is vehemently opposed to
property, or ignores the issue (I have used the concept of peer property for
4 years now, and no free software advocate has ever expressed shock on this)

b) I do not see free software/free culture/ virtual commoners are parasites
on the civil struggles of previous generations, but as continuators of it,
i.e. they are themselves movements of working people advocating and
defending rights, on top of those of previous generations

c) I do not agree that the 'leaders of the free software and free culture
movements' are separating themselves from the real commons

Of course it is true that many fs/fc advocates are either pro-capitalist,
pro-free market but against state or monopoly capitalism, social democrats
that accomodate to the market, or left wing latin american socialists, in
other words there is quite a variety in positions, but they coalesce around
the 'single issue'. On the other hand, we can see an increasing convergence
beween fs/fc movements and values, and social movements, including of 'real
commoners', and Berlin itself was an example of this convergence, even as we
must do a lot more to get subsistence commoners in this dialogue.

I would argue though that free culture and free sotware are not actually
single issue movements, but cultural and political expressions of the new
knowledge-based working class, and therefore natural allies to other social
movements, NOT opponents who want to, as Martin suggest here below, "lambs
for the profit slaughter"

While I think analytical quality and the airing of differences is very
healthy, I think we should also beware of those approaches which are
destined to drive wedges, and can potentially be used to break the
convergence that is actually happening

I suggest that the best way to deal with those differences are not to create
caricatural exagerations of political enemies, but to air and respect mutual
differences, in recognition that we are on the same side. The problem with
straw men characteristations is that it always forces you in lengthy
rebuttals of obvious points, instead of productively dialoguing on real
points of difference.

I quite ready to be corrected on point a, i.e. that I have completely
misunderstood the free software position on property, but b seems to me
quite politically errneous and counterproductive, and while c has a
important portion of truth, i.e. many fs/fc advocates compose with the
dominant system in various ways, I wonder whether the use of anti-capitalist
wedge issues is the most productive way of tackling ideological diversity
within the movement.

Michel


martin pedersen:

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.


On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 12:03 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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>
>
>
>


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