---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Brian Holmes <[email protected]> Date: Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 4:49 AM Subject: Re: [Networkedlabour] Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>, Pat Conaty < [email protected]>, Stacco Troncoso <[email protected]>, Kevin Flanagan <[email protected]> Cc: e-mail robinmurray <[email protected]>, John < [email protected]>, margie mendell <[email protected]>, David Bollier <[email protected]>, Michael Lewis <[email protected]>, Ed Mayo < [email protected]>, Jason Nardi <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]> Hello everyone - Best of the season to all of you and thanks for the stimulating emails! I'm a little slow with the back-and-forth because I can only discuss these things in a kind of long-winded way, sorry about that. I would like to respond to Vasilis and Pat Conaty. And I would like to ask some questions. Vasilis wrote: 1) We chose to use the techno-economic paradigm shifts theory, and the Perezian framework in particular, because: i) it helps us to recognize the dynamic and changing nature of the capitalist system; ii) it embraces a mild-technodeterminism that reflects how we understand the various p2p-based developments; iii) it allows to develop both capitalist and post-capitalist scenarios (apparently, we are more focused on the latter) following, say, a "bird's-eye view" approach; iv) it is a well- established theoretical framework understood and discussed even by mainstream scholars (therefore, it can arguably promote the discussion in other circles); v) I have been a student and a collaborator of Perez Well, I think your approach is spot on. I would be very curious to hear from you, Vasilis, and maybe also from Robin Murray about how Perez sees current technological and institutional developments. Although it is a bit complicated to understand all that's implied in a long-waves perspective, it's totally important politically and practically. Long wave theory gives us the best framework for understanding how society changes in periods of crisis like the present one, and also how new balances slowly emerge (or so-called "metastabilities," that is, more or less predictable dynamics). In my view, Perez has made a fundamental but incomplete contribution. Perhaps her most important paper is "Structural Change and Assimilation of New Technologies in The Economic and Social Systems," where she says this: "We propose that the capitalist system be seen as a single very complex structure, the sub-systems of which have different rates of change. For the sake of simplicity we can assume two main subsystems: on the one hand a techno-economic, and on the other a social and institutional, the first having a much faster rate of response... A structural crisis (ie the depression in a long wave), as distinct from an economic recession, would be the visible syndrome of a breakdown in the complementarity between the dynamics of the economic subsystem and the related dynamics of the socio-institutional framework." The reason I suggested you might gain from the ideas of Trotsky and Mandel, as well as the historian Giovanni Arrighi, is that the socio-institutional system has been downplayed by her, while the geopolitical or geoeconomic framework has been left out entirely. The latter is a giant gaping hole, since what I prefer to call the techno*political* paradigm of Neoliberal Informationalism has been thoroughly transnational, with a complex and veiled economic relation between the US and China at its heart. Similarly, Neoliberal Informationalism has depended on precarious labor and the rollback of corporate taxation that Pat Conaty is so rightly concerned about. At worst, the result of these ommissions in Perez's recent texts is a kind of boosterism, which appeals to governments to provide the (unspecified) conditions for corporate growth. Or at least, that is what I can gather from her published work. This has some consequences on your own theoretical framework, of course, and I understand from the call to papers in triple-C that you have realized this. The paper by Christian Fuchs that you reference is great, and it really illustrates what the informational mode of production entails in terms of global social relations. Fuch writes: "Variations of work within a specific mode of production will be articulated, including slavery in mineral extraction, military forms of Taylorist industrialism in hardware assemblage, informational organisation of the productive forces of capitalism that articulates a highly paid knowledge labour aristocracy, precarious service workers, imperialistically exploited knowledge workers in developing countries, along with highly hazardous informal physical e-waste labour." For sure, many people working on commons-based initiatives are aware of this, and that's often why they do it in the first place, so it's important to theoretically characterize what we are really involved in with ICTs, in order for the theorizing to be of any help in actually getting out of those exploitative relations. However, there is in my view a further problem in Perez's approach, which directly affects the way she understands the present moment. If you go back to her 2002 book, from which the figures you use are derived, you will see a curious anomaly in the way she defines the different long waves of industrial development. First, 1771 to 1829, the first wave calculated from the very first steam engine - a period actually dominated by water power, with strong technological development only at the end. Then, the Age of Steam and railways, 1829 to 1875, or 36 years. Then, the Age of Steel, Electricity, or Heavy Engineering, 1875 to 1908, or 33 years. Then, the Age of Mass Manufacturing, 1908 to 1971 - that is, 63 years! Why the discrepancy? What's happening here is that she has conflated what most other theorists (notably Freeman, but also Mandel) consider to be two separate waves: one based on steel, electricity and chemicals and extending from the end of the 1890s depression to the end of the Great Depression in the late 1930s; and then another one extending from the early 1940s to the crisis of the 1970s. The period of "institutional change" that she would like to see the information economy go through right now is modeled on a moment in history whose actual characteristics, alas, she never mentions. It's World War Two. Creative destruction, indeed... Well, once again, I respect Carlota Perez and think she has tremendous insights into many things, but her idea of a mass manufacturing period extending from 1908 to 1971, and her use of it as a model for what is happening now, are totally unworkable for me. What's valuable in her approach is that she is trying to bring in the importance of institutional change, or what someone like Michel Aglietta would call a change in the mode of regulation. Clearly this kind of change happened in the United States during the 1930s, resulting in a new form of the industrial state which then became hegemonic in the developed world, and served as the basis for what we commonly think of as the Keynesian Fordist welfare states in Europe and also in Japan. What's at stake there, however, is not just welfare and mass manufacturing, far from it. Under the successive pressures of the depression and then the war, the US evolved a completely new kind of social order, essentially a corporate welfare-warfare state. Crucially, this involved public funding and centralized coordination of both scientific research and industrial development. Vast deficit-funded investments were made in industrial sectors including aviation, rocketry, nuclear weapons and power, synthetic materials, electronics (eg radar) and the beginnings of mainframe computing. All of this provided the basis for the capitalist expansion at the end of the war - the famous "postwar boom," based not just on mass manufacturing a la Henry Ford, but also on all the new sectors which I enumerated above. Added to that was the Thirties-era practice and ideology of the social state, with public works (notably transport infrastructure), welfare insurance, mass education, counter-cyclical spending, etc. This produced the globally dominant American hegemony which is described so well by people like Robert Cox. Of course the postwar order also included international institutions such as the Bretton Woods monetary framework (with the IMF and World Bank) as well as NATO, the Cold War nuclear buildup and the staggering quantity of US troop deployments around the world. So those are some of the "institutional arrangements"! It should be clear that what I have just described cannot be successfully reduced to a schematized "turning point" between the "frenzy" and "synergy" phases of a "mass manufacturing paradigm." Instead, in the 1930s and 40s you are looking at an historically singular process whereby the old organizational form (assmbly-line manufacturing, Ford's crucial innovation) can only be maintained and developed through the introduction of new institutional / governmental logics and new technology sets. In my view, something on a similar scale happened in the 1970 and 80s, and it's happening today. Under very different conditions, with very different contents, but with comparable risks and uncertainties.
From the 1980s onward - that is, after the crisis of the '70s - we witnessed and lived through the introduction, not just of a new bunch of technologies, but of a fundamentally new form of labor organization, that is, a new mode of production, which is informationalism in the way that Fuchs (or Castells, or myself, or any number of people) describes it. That's *networked labor*, by the way! Like mass manufacturing in the 10s and 20s, this new mode of production has been very poorly governed, and that's what we call neoliberalism. The big difference is, neoliberalism is a transnational form of government (or of regulation, if you prefer). It began under Trilateral auspices, and if you go back and read the public record of the Trilateral Commission you will find that the members, drawn from North America, Western Europe and Japan, got together at the behest of the US Council on Foreign Relations in order to deal with systemic dynamics of the global economy which, as they very explicitly say, the US could no longer manage and regulate on its own. Essentially, those dynamics came down to two things: borderless finance and what was then called "the new international division of labor." The regulation of the national welfare states was directly threatened by those two things.
Well, they did govern them in the end, because the world economy did not collapse in the 1970's as many feared it would after the end of Bretton Woods and the oil shocks. Instead, the new monetary regime of floating exchange rate and free cross-border investment was worked out, and global supply chains using container ships were set up between the Western countries and Asia. The welfare state apparatuses were partially dismantled and people were educated for a new kind of global economic citizenship. Then in the 1990s, after the the Fall of the Wall and the first Gulf War, when finance was finally ready to sink a bunch of capital in cables and routers and computer technologies, practically all of Asia could be exploited as a place to manufacture that stuff and everything else too. Only in the mid-1990s did the techno*political* paradigm of Neoliberal Informationalism finally crystallize, definitively replacing the old Keynesian-Fordist paradigm. Now, we all agree that the development of a technological and organizational paradigm is never uncontested, which is also why it is technopolitical and not just technoeconomic. Therefore we have been able to participate in p2p cooperativism, which has built its positive alternatives on multiple critiques and refusals of the previous mass-manufacturing order, including ecology movements as well as solidarity movements. Pat, your references to Martin Luther King, Schumacher and Meidner are all very evocative of the way that struggles from the Sixties and Seventies have continued evolving in parallel to neoliberalism. Now we are at a crisis point, where these alternatives could really bear fruit, on the condition that we, too, are able to add new layers to our own thinking. And that's what's so interesting about all of you on this list, you're doing that. The question is, what is this crisis all about? That's the question that I really have for all of you. How do we characterize the present crisis, and what possibilities does it offer for the creation of a far more just and ecologically coherent social order? In my view, this crisis is not just the result of an increasingly precarious labor regime, where individuals and families in the developed countries can no longer pay for their consumption through their wages and are forced into dependence on credit markets. That is happening, for sure, and it was the trigger of the crisis. What that has triggered, however, is a relative decline of US hegemony and the attempt of China to break away from its subordinate position under Neoliberal Informationalism and set up a new hegemony in Asia and throughout the Global South. Therefore, as in every major crisis, the whole geopolitical order is threatened and is in the course of profound mutation. A stake is the global financial and monetary regime, including the big banks (at the center of the mesmerizing informational system) along with the role of transnational institutions such as the EU and the WTO. And these things bear directly on everyone's daily lives, though of course in a differential way, depending on where in the world system you are located and what kind of class position you occupy. In short, we are in for big changes over the upcoming years, on the scale of those in the 1970s or even WWII, along with an ecological crisis that is unprecedented. However, big changes also mean the potential for alternatives to be enacted and actualized. The rise of Neoliberal Informationalism was predicated on the offshoring of manufacturing work from the so-called core countries to the so-called peripheries, in order to escape both labor and environmental regulation. It was also dependent on the expansion of petroleum production and the recycling of petrodollars through the global financial system. If Western capitalist elites can no longer exploit the former Third World in the way they have for the past forty years, and if the global monetary system is no longer completely controlled by New York, London and Tokyo, then the possibility for a new kind of more localized ecosocial industrialism arises, and with it, the possibility for a healthier mode of urbanization incorporating permaculture practices. Clearly it no longer just about free software anymore. We are talking about changing the mode of production! With the Dow at the inflated height of 18,000, the Greeks about to elect Syriza, the British about to pull out of the EU, and China forging a whole new military and economic posture in the world, I think we will clearly have another systemic shock pretty soon. It's urgent to project comprehensive and practicable alternative views that can be implemented in real social relations, because in their absences the elites have a free hand. I think it's much more about practical ideas than any kind of revolution - or rather, that's the real revolution, the one that can give substance and meaning to all the demands and desires expressed in the multiple uprisings we have been seeing over the last few years, all of which have been justified and necessary. Practical ideas matter. Michel and Vasilis see this from their position of grassroots/global engagement, and so does Rifkin at his more technocratic level. I am wondering who else with a long-wave perspective does? A full analysis of a paradigm shift appears dauntingly complex, but a vision of the ways that society could really change over the next decade or two definitely helps people a great deal, when it comes to coordinating their actions in view of systemically positive outcomes. In any event, it's great to have these conversations, All the best for the New Year, Brian On 01/02/2015 03:47 AM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
I am sharing your interesting response with Brian himself.
Brian: this is part of a ongoing conversation with key cooperative activists in the UK and Canada mostly,
Stacco/Kevin: have we made any progress in adding Pat's text on land and money as a commons to commonstransition.org <http://commonstransition.org> ?
Michel
On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 4:12 PM, Pat Conaty <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Happy New Year Michel and everybody
Michel this is a fascinating exchange between you and Brian Holmes in relation to the review he has done of your book with Vasilis Kostakis. Thanks for sharing this. Does Orsan share his analysis? He makes good points at the beginning of this exchange below.
Brian makes very precise and detailed comments that we need to capture and especially in relation to monopoly capitalism and TEPS theory.
Robin has been teaching over the past six months with Carlota Perez at the LSE about the technological shifts underway, TEPS and what these mean. So Robin may want to comment on the questions and points Brian makes about long K-waves and the nature of the current shifts. The directions of travel Holmes points to from the current conjuncture we are moving through are crucially important to analyse for all the correct reasons he cites.
Between Rifkin, Piketty and Naomi Klein’s latest book, we can see the changing aspects of this K-wave, but Holmes helps us fill out the picture.
At the end of Naomi Klein’s book she compares the current challenge as akin to the need to abolish slavery as the problem we face is an economic cost one. Here she cites the last book and wrings of Martin Luther King when he noted that civil rights could be conceded as a legal handover to people of colour as it was not hugely costly economically. But as in the USA and more recently South Africa, massive investment in affordable housing and jobs would take away from surplus value allocation and had to be denied.
Naomi Klein then talks about the climate change challenge as both tackling the dual needs to cut carbon and to end poverty. She makes this case so well and links it to current movements since 2008 to resist and build in Greece, in Germany, in South America and in the Blockadia campaigns against the tar sands pipelines. Where I think she misses the fuller analysis that you and Brian Holmes are talking about is that she does not situate fully and properly her solid analysis of the current crisis as being similar to the abolition of slavery. She talks about Martin Luther King’s 1967 book on Where do we go from here? but overlooks the point he was making about pursuing Economic democracy ownership transfer mechanism as the next stage of the struggle. This was why his thinking in 1967 was so powerfully important and on to the list of what needed to be done.
If this had been pursued in relation to bringing land and capital and people out of the market through focused struggle on these new economy building block, we would be today creating a new mode of steady state economic production. Schumacher saw this clearly in the last chapter of Small is Beautiful where he shows how to socialise wealth. The Meidner plan in Sweden indeed was focused on achieving this before it was curtailed in the early 1990s. See the analysis by Robin Blackburn below of Meidner’s legacy for us all. Robin and I have been having a conversation with Richard Wilkinson (author of the Spirit Level with Kate Pickett) about ways to revive and reframe the Meidner Plan to address the changed nature of late capitalism.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/12/22/a-visonary-pragmatist/
The commons thinking must be united to this theoretical perspective that King and Schumacher were focusing upon a decade before the K-Wave shifted to what we know as globalisation and finacialisation all linked since 1989 to informatizaion and networkisation of societies. of course if it can be framed in the ways you and Brian Holmes are exchanging thoughts about.
Brian Holmes may find of interest ways to connect a Meidner plan on ownership transfer tools for economic democracy making with next steps ideas in the Open Co-operativism paper and the Deep Dive one once these are commented upon by our colleagues and then published.
We are getting close to a transformative and practical vision I sense. Well done Michel in helping us all to move steadily closer to 20;20 vision!
Pat
On 30 Dec 2014, at 06:21, Michel Bauwens <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
This is I believe an interesting exchange,
if you want to make the voice heard of the cooperative commonwealth, for the sophisticated audience of nettime, please intervene and copy all the email addresses below in your response
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Michel Bauwens* <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 1:18 PM Subject: Re: [Networkedlabour] Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy To: Brian Holmes <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>, p2p-foundation <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>, Vasilis Kostakis <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>, lista net time <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>, Guy Staniforth <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> Cc: "[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
Dear Brian,
it's a great honour to have your considered response here, I may later respond in a flowing text, but I will start by reacting inline to some of your comments and critique, which I take in an entirely constructive manner.
On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Brian Holmes <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
*Orsan wrote:
global political economy theory started with Cox, and p2p theory would benefit from a fruitful exchange. Potentially a p2p update on the understanding of the 'transnationalization of production', which as process overlaps with the informatization of economy, networkisation of societies, and neoliberal globalisation offensive, or vice versa; a global political economy upgrade for p2p theory, in my opinion is necessary.
I totally agree, and that's the thrust of a response I just wrote on Nettime to the book by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis (I'll paste that response below). One of Cox's followers, Stephen Gill, showed long ago that neoliberalism has from the outset been a fundamentally trilateral hegemony (US-Western Europe-Japan). Now that all three poles of the hegemony are arguably in decline, it would be useful to analyze the weak points where an amplified and generalized p2p strategy could begin changing the common sense of citizenship, business and government, and of dissent and revolution too. I don't do that here - far from it - but the strong proposals at the end of the Future Scenarios book did seem to call out for exactly that kind of analysis, which would ground them in reality without invalidating them by any means. So I hope my critiques of the book do appear as constructive, because they were intended that way. - best, BH
* * *
http://p2pfoundation.net/__Network_Society_and_Future___ Scenarios_for_a_Collaborative___Economy
<http://p2pfoundation.net/Network_Society_and_Future_ Scenarios_for_a_Collaborative_Economy>
Thanks for this book, Michel and Vasilis. "Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy" is exceedingly timely and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the Commons specifically, or in political economy more generally. In response, I've written something in between a review and a letter to the authors. I address Michel because he posted it. Hopefully he will respond to a few of my comments!
I like the book, Michel, but I must also say, I'm somewhat mystified by it. I like the very sophisticated strategy that it sets out at the end for a possible transition to a society of commons-based production. I'm mystified by the rather simplistic presentation of contemporary capitalism at the beginning. What explains the gap?
First of all, I would like to explain a few caveats. This book explicitely says at the beginning it doesn't want to be yet another critique of capitalism. There are two reasons for this, first that I am probably not up to that task. I am far from being the classic intellectual who would have the time to keep up with all that necessary reading; I am more of a digital curator , playing a role as a networker and catalyst, from a certain and very specific angle: that of someone who believes that the core condition for change is structural first, i.e. a focus on the new mode of production that is emerging, and that is mostly embedded in the present political economy, but also starts to show early sings of an 'organic system', i.e. that it can eventually find the way to self-reproduce itself, and to create an accumulation of the commons, to replace the system of accumulation of capital. What interests us, me and Vasilis, are the specific parts of capitalism that 'react' to this emergence, i.e. the systemic logic of cognitive capitalism (living off rents) that is now in part morphing to netarchical capitalism, i.e. forms of capitalism which are entirely geared, not to destroy the emergent commons, but to subsume it and profit from it. So I see it that way, there are many scholars, who have studied in depth the current evolution of capitalism in its complexity, but they are missing an evolution of major import if they ignore the emergence of peer production, which I feel they do. If you know of any, let me know, but I haven't seen them yet. We have plenty of "social-democratic" or "social-liberal" approaches (Benkler, Tapscott, Rifkin), but I have not seen any thinker of the left. Yes , Michael Hardt and Toni Negri speak about the common, but it is a very 'metaphysical' approach, that is not concretely linked to the actual emergence of peer production and its institutions.
On the other hand, we are more closer observers of the emergence of the commons, and that part of capitalism that reacts and adapts to it. Thus, as Orsan suggests, p2p theory does need an upgrade, but it may not be us that are able to carry out such a necessary integration. But the book hope at leasts to jumpstart that process, which is why I really rejoice in your critique. I hope that it may wake up more classic thinkers of the left to take the challenge of peer production into account.
In Part I you adopt the theoretical framework of "long waves of capitalist development" as put forth by Kondratiev and Schumpeter, and more recently, by Freeman and Perez (Trotsky and Mandel aren't mentioned). In its most general form, the long-wave idea is that capitalist society periodically goes through major depressions, during which investment is withdrawn from production. Meanwhile inventions accumulate until such time as conditions look good, and a massive wave of technological investment lays the foundations for a new growth cycle. Right now we're in such a depression. Therefore you try to analyze the possible futures of the current "techno-economic paradigm."
There is some ambiguity here, but that's OK. On the one hand the book follows Carlota Perez, explaining that the information technology paradigm has run up against a set of internal contradictions and that a mature phase of sustained growth can only come under new political and institutional arrangements. On the other hand it hints in certain places at the emergence, in the upcoming years or decades, of an entirely new paradigm (which, according to Schumpeter or Freeman, implies a distinct set of technologies and organizational forms). And then near the end it quite strongly claims, with Marx, that capitalism must now be overcome in favor of a different system. The upshot seems to be that the new society will emerge from the old, perhaps not entirely smoothly, but not through an apocalyptic rupture either. That's realistic and desirable, in my view.
I agree with that assessment, but I think the situation is complicated by very real ecological and structural challenges. In my reading, the emergence of peer production is too fresh to be able to affirm that we are 'right now' in a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation. So we had the 'sudden systemic crisis' of 2008, and the Depression that followed it, but nowhere near enough of the political and institutional changes that would be necessary to launch a new successful kondratieff wave. So the wave will come (though probably after another 'aftershock'), it will incorporate 'green' and 'p2p-commons' aspects subsumed in a new capitalist compact, but it will be weak and messy as it will lack a new 'social compact'. On the plus side, it also gives the counterforces time. The aim for me is that, by the time the next mid-term Kondratieff wave hits, the counter-economy of the commons will have sufficient force to have achieved at least 'parity'. It is only once parity is achieved, that a true phase transition process will be on the agenda. So the priorities right now, are to develop those type of practices of governance and property, and those types of politics and policy with the social movements aligned with it. What is to be done right now is nothing less than a grand reconstruction of emancipatory politics, aligned around the structural changes brought about by both 'subsumed' and 'organic' forms of peer production. This is why our proposals are dual, on the one hand our proposals for 'open cooperativism', i.e. a set of interventions to create an organic counter-economy; and on the other hand, the 'Commons Transition Plan', a set of proposals to renew the transformative politics and policies of emancipatory social forces.
I too think some kind of new growth wave is almost inevitable, within a decade or so - and though it will probably not be on anywhere near so intensive as the postwar growth wave that so many theorists take as a norm, it could well be more extensive, reaching far more people on our densely populated planet. I also think such a new long wave does imply distinctly new technologies capable of attracting new investment; but in the absence of radical breakthroughs, the big difference is most likely to be in the political and institutional structures that govern those technologies. In other words, the current technology set is more likely to be augmented and institutionally inflected (as early mass manufacturing was by postwar Keynesian Fordism) than it is to be radically transformed (as Keynesian Fordism was radiclly transformed by the IT revolution). In other words, we are likely to get an extension and amplification of the certain aspects of the current paradigm, but under new institutional arrangements.
The problem is, Michel, you never really discuss the current techno-economic paradigm in any serious way. What you and your co-author are talking about, in Parts I and II, is a small though important field of activity, the one that can be identified with keywords such as P2P, social media, crowd-sourcing, sharing economy, etc. The best parts of the book contain significant insight into these activities, as one would expect. However, by claiming to discuss the future of the entire capitalist system and then not really doing so, you blur the issue and diminish the potential value of your work.
I have explained why we have done so above, both by choice and because of our real limitations. Nevertheless, we are unapologetic in the sense that though emergent, this is really in our opinion, the key to the transformation of our economies and societies. Yes, there is plenty going on, but the key lever today, that is our thesis, is the emergence of peer production, of the commoners and peer producers, and of netarchical capital. Living in age, I see the move to middle class realities, I see the popular mobilization to share more of the proceeds, and this is important, but it is not crucial. What is crucial is the change in the mode of production.
One can follow Manuel Castells and call the current techno-economic paradigm "Informationalism" - or better, "Neoliberal Informationalism," to give some idea of how this mode of production is governed. But Informationalism does not mean that the only significant commodity on the contemporary market is information. Nor does it signal an eclipse of industry, as you suggest in chapter 1.
I don't think we are suggesting this anywhere in chapter 1, so this is either in my view a misinterpretation, or a lack of proper explanation on our part. What we call for is in fact a new type of industrialization, ie. open, distributed and solidary forms of production, where 'what is heavy is local and what is light is global'. In fact, we don't believe at all that " the only significant commodity on the contemporary market is information"; we believe that information is being de-commodified.We believe that in the new emergence commons-driven economy, market activities develop around this decommodified core, either in capitalist formats, as in the current free software economy, or as we propose and is starting to happen, in post-capitalist forms (market and non-market). We don't believe that at this stage, these organic counter-forms of peer production can be dominant, but we believe they can be significantly build and strengthened, and form the basis of a new politics, just as the cooperative movement formed the basis of emergent labour in the 19th century.
Instead, Neoliberal Informationalism has been based on a "lead technology" which is new kind of producer goods, namely IT in all its facets (computers, software, cables, mobile telephony, communications satellites, etc). These goods in combination with networked organizational forms are used to create transnational supply chains, constituting what is generally called "just-in-time production" or "the global factory." The characteristic companies of neoliberal informationalism are not Facebook and Google, as one would gather from your book, nor even less, recent start-ups like AirBnB or Uber. They are giant networked firms like WalMart and Apple, which have their products manufactured in China, coordinate their work forces and supply chains through sophisticated IT systems, and sell their wares on the web as well as in the store. Or they are specialized corporations like Cisco, Verizon and IBM, which furnish the hardware and software for the new mode of production, distribution and sales. All these corporations have evolved under the anti-welfare policy mix of neoliberalism, and with the resources allocated by speculative finance, which has largely replaced the central planning of national governments. Not coincidentally, finance itself is crucially enabled by IT. Computers, cable and satellite networks, transnationalism and financial governance are key aspects of the current techno-economic paradigm.
I agree that this is the case, at the same time, I would strongly argue that the rapidly accelerating ecological, climate and resource crisis will severely weaken this paradigm. These transnational supply chains are extremely unsustainable and so it becomes a necessity for progressive politics for focus on smart re-industrialisation and re-localisation of production. The triple internets of knowledge resources, energy and manufacturing give a potential basis for a entire new vision of production and industrialization. The de-industrialization that neoliberalism wrought in the West is no fatality, and a very fragile construct in ecological terms. We can't know if we succeed, but we can't afford not to try, as the alternative is a chaotic desintegration of the world system.
Now, it's necessary to add that older sectors, such as petroleum, steel, chemicals, automobiles, engineering, grain production, etc, remain tremendously significant for the global economy. They are not just going to disappear in the next ten or twenty years. However, the way these sectors are articulated, both internally and between each other, has effectively been transformed by IT, and that's why we can speak of Neoliberal Informationalism as a distinct techno-economic paradigm. As you and Vasilis point out, this paradigm has been predicated on low-wage precarious labor, and it has called on finance to furnish the means of consumption through the extension of credit to individuals. The debt burden of the working and middle classes has risen tremendously and now, in the overdeveloped world at least, these classes can no longer consume enough to prop up economic growth. So the system is in a deep crisis, one which cannot be resolved by simply pumping money into asset markets as various governments have been doing. That crisis is further intensified by geopolitical factors (rise of Asia) and by climate change (which has been made a lot worse by the rise of Asia). How will the global political economy reconfigure itself under these circumstances? And what can civil society do to influence the next redeployment of capital? That's what we need to know.
Agreed, and we believe our proposals are part of this mix of what is needed, albeit not the whole story, as you correctly suggest, but it will be a crucial part of that new story.
In Part II, it's really interesting how you present a diagrammatic field of four distinct yet neighboring scenarios, divided on the one hand between distributed and centralized organization (or local and global scales), and on the other hand, between capitalist and commons-based development paths (or "for profit" and "for benefit" activities, as you also say). However, for the reasons already stated, the capitalist or for-profit side of the diagram is not very convincing. In chapters 4 and 5 we are introduced to two supposedly emergent categories. First, a corporate-scale "netarchical capitalism" where sharing and cooperative production are enabled by interfaces with closed, privately controlled backends that facilitate the harvesting of monetary value from social interaction. And second, an individual-scale "distributed capitalism" where everyone is asked to become a networked entrepreneur of him- or herself, creating their own backends for profit. Now, without a doubt these are already both realities. The first has already undergone significant expansion, partially wiping out the old media sphere with some inroads on the hobby, transport, in-person service and vacation sectors. The second has all the reality of neoliberal ideology: it is the computerized version of the entrepreneurial ideal, where everyone freely competes in an open, unregulated economic realm. But the claim that these figures represent the capitalism of tomorrow could only hold true if "we are not talking about monopoly capitalism" - which is a crucial caveat that you supply early on.
But Brian, the fact that capitalism has other more complex realities, does not at all invalidate that these are important emegent realities. The exponential growth of netarchical capitalism is a fact, not conjecture; and the very rapid growth of precarious cognitive workers is also a fact (along with other facts such as service workers growth and the growth of industrial working classes in the Global South). In the Netherlands, the so-called independent zzp workers (estimated to count for half of precarious workers only), and reaching 25% of the workforce if I'm not mistaken, are the most rapidly pauperising sector of the economy. Again what we are saying is that these are crucial trends, because they are the ones that are aligned with the tranformation towards commons driven developments. Netarchical capital is based on the direct exploitation of human cooperation, and networked structures, and attendant commons, are absolutely crucial for the survival and self-organisation of precarious knowledge workers. The existence of complex other forms of capitalism does absolutely not invalidate that.
The problem is that we are talking about exactly that, Michel, just look around you. The great oligopolies that corral major sectors of the world economy, fixing prices and blocking the entry of smaller actors, are alive and despicably well in every major economic sector, including IT; and they are supported by very solid forces of the national and transnational state. To suggest that monopoly capitalism is on the way out through some force of networked nature is just plain mystifying, and that's the principal argument I have with this book.
But we are nowhere suggesting that. In fact, netarchical capitalism is a new form of monopoly capitalism; and distributed capitalist networks are rapidly monopolizing as well. Already bitcoin mining is in the hands of one dominant player and the ownership of the coins is more concentrated than that of sovereign money! This is true for all distributed sectors, such as social lending, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, etc ...
The reason we stress this, is historical, since it is precisely a shift within the managerial classes, towards new systems of production that it could subsume, that prepared the ground for later phase transitions. It is the Roman emperors and landed gentry that moved from slavery to the 'coloni' system, and it is forces within feudalism that financed the growth of the capitalist sector. But the new feudal and capitalist sectors that were first subsumed and served the maintenance and survival of the old system, at the same time created new social forces and contradictions that prepared the ground for more fundamental change. So that is our argument, that the emergence of netarchical and distributed capitalism show a shift from the managerial classes towards the new modality of value creation and distribution. Given the understanding that this is precisely how the two other phase transitions that we now occured, rather than just deplore and critique this, our suggestion is to learn from it. This means: how can commoners and peer producers render the seeds of the new system into a 'organic' system that can reproduce it. This is therefore the meaning of the two other quadrants, they represent the organic alternatives to that netarchical capture. What we are doing is not denying the old class struggle between capital and labor, which continues to exist and operate, but to say that a new type of class struggle is emerging, that between commoners and netarchical capital. And we are saying, and of course you could dispute this, that this new type of contradictions is the most pregnant for social change, because it has in itself the seedform of the new. It is the alliance between the old and new emancipatory forces, which is key for social change.
Something else really is changing, though; and this is where the book's proposals, and more generally, those collected by the P2P Foundation over the last decade, are really worth one's attention. What's happening is an impoverishment of the former "First World," which is losing out to the newly developed countries at the same time as it starts being subjected to the environmental stresses of climate change. What one can see on the horizon is a gradual evening-out of global wages, leaving much of the former West in decaying housing with legacy appliances and amenities, while populations in the East and South rise up to a roughly similar level and then stagnate. That's already happening: and the frustration it engenders was behind the wave of protests in 2011-2013, whether in Egypt, Brazil, Russia and Turkey, or in Spain and the US. It is precisely the existence of the oligopolies and the financial elites (the famous 1%) that account for this dynamic. And we're likely to see even more intense frustration and anger as these populations have to confront the difficulties of climate change. Under these conditions, both newly unemployed people and those who have gained or retained a precarious hold on middle-class status are likely to find great attraction in what the book calls "resilient communities" and "global commons." Additionally, intellectuals with a capacity to see the dead-end future, whatever their class, will start to look for serious alternatives.
We agree here. At the same time, I would not consider the system as static. The fundamental problem for the European population is that the 'surplus value' is no longer available for positive social contracts. But this is no law of nature, just as the Latin American left showed that a revival of the progressive state was possible (and achieved tremendous social progress in just ten years, with every percent of GDP growth leading to four times more poverty reduction than in Asia); just so a renewed progressive left could set in motion, with a renewed vision of the partner state, re-industrialization policies that would relocate part of the surplus , available for social investments.
The discussion becomes tremendously interesting when the "for benefit" categories are discussed, in their local and global forms. This is the Marxian part of the book, where a change of the system itself starts to look desirable. Both the for-benefit categories are based on the generative matrix of the Commons, and I love the clarity with which you've expressed its basic principles: "It could be said that every Commons scheme basically has four interlinked components: a resource (material and/or immaterial; replenishable and/or depletable); the community which shares it (the users, administrators, producers and/or providers); the use value created through the social reproduction or preservation of these common goods; and the rules and the participatory property regimes that govern people's access to it."
At this point (Part III), the strict focus on information production is abandoned and what comes to the fore are the new possibilities presented by the maker revolution: not only 3-D printing, but all the computer-controlled tools which can use freely circulated open-source designs to create practical objects ranging from housing to automobiles. One can easily see the relevance of such productive capacities for impoverished communities, especially when they are beset by the stresses of changing climates, violent storms and soon, rising water levels. What's more, to take a page from Jeremy Rifkin's recent books, it becomes clear that with falling costs for solar and wind generation, energy production itself could potentially be decentralized and managed according to commons principles so as to build resilient communities. The combination of alternative energy sources with micro-manufacturing techniques represents a possible basis for a new form of economic growth that could cater to very large numbers of people despite, or rather because of, their inability to reach Fordist and Neoliberal levels of grotesque hyperconsumption. If the development of capitalist production during the next upswing could be influenced so as to furnish the infrastructure and toolkits of decentralized energy production and micro-manufacturing, then the next wave of growth could have many positive consequences. That's the paradigm shift that we need, and Part III makes that quite clear, bravo. The question is, how to make it happen? What are the "new institutional arrangements" that we need, and how to achieve them?
Part of the answer can be found in another ebook we are publishing, that contains detailed proposals for a Commons Transition Plan, see commonstransitions.org <http://commonstransitions.org/> . Guy James (Staniforth) in cc can provide you with copies on request. The transition plan is not complete, since it only focuses on 'social knowledge' (but does incorporate a stress on its material conditions), and we intend to work on this, with a focus on the material commons later on. Pat Conaty and Mike Lewis have already done brilliant work on transitioning towards material commons infrastructures, and we hope to achieve a convergence and integration of these approaches later on.
The site commonstransition.org <http://commonstransition.org/>, is
intended as a global platform to trash out precisely such commons transition experiences, practices and proposals.
Or as you and Vasilis write:
"Arguably, the issue is not to produce and consume less per se, but to develop new models of production which will work on a higher level than capitalist models. We consider it difficult to challenge the dominant system if we lack a working plan to transcend it. A post-capitalist world is bound to entail more than a mere reversal to pre-industrial times. As the TEPS theory informs us [ie, the theory of techno-economic paradigm shifts], the adaptation of current institutions and the creation of new ones take place in the deployment phase of each TEP. We claim that the times are, finally, mature enough to introduce a radical political agenda with brand new institutions, fueled by the spirit of the Commons and aiming to provide a viable global alternative to the capitalist paradigm beyond degrowth or antiglobalization rhetorics."
Now, that's not Carlota Perez talking anymore. That's a utopian Marxist strain that has affinities with Italian Autonomia, to the extent it believes that progressive use-values slumber within the technologies of capitalist exchange, and that these use-values can be liberated through the kinds of self-organization that the Internet facilitates. The question is, how to avoid making this a purely utopian thinking, as Autonomia has proven to be so far? How can commons-based peer production reach deeply into daily life? And how can it expand globally, both as a philosophy and as a set of informational tools that can take full advantage of the new decentralized energy and manufacturing toolkits? Or, to put it in strategic terms: How can civil-society actors find the opportunity, in the current depression and in the upswing that will almost inevitably follow it, to push corporate production into supplying the toolkits for a society that will finally escape the worst and most life-threatening consequences of the capitalist system?
The key thing here is to understand this is not utopian at all (in my view, Autonomia focuses too much on resistance and struggle, and not enough on construction/creation) , but that millions of human beings are doing precisely that. The key becomes to learn from each other, to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Things like open value accounting, open supply chains, commons-oriented crowdfunding, etc .. ALREADY EXISTS. The issue is rather, how to scale, how to create social and political movements that can support, expand and sustain it.
In chapter 8, I feel that you are groping for a way to bridge the gap between two rather different things. First, the many specific micro-examples of (mainly informational) commons-based production that you do provide, in welcome detail. Second, a full-fledged economic praxis that could rival with the existing forms of Neoliberal Informationalism, which you (and the rest of us) can only imagine somewhat fuzzily. The way you approach this problem suggests that you do recognize the difficulties of overcoming the norms imposed by monopoly capitalism: after all, they are exemplified by the trajectory of Free and Open-Source Software, which has still not been broadly adopted even though the operating systems are now perfectly serviceable and perfectly free. You cite two very promising projects from what could become the next techno-economic paradigm, namely the Rep-Rap 3-D printer project and the Wikispeed automobile project, both of which are impressive and point the way toward a new articulation of social production. But it's clear that without support from either large social movements, or powerful economic actors, or more likely both, a new wave of capitalist growth will render these projects insignificant - or at least, no more significant than Free Software is currently. Traditional monopoly capital will put the breaks on Wikispeed. The coming wave of investment and development has to be bent to fit collaborative priorities. Otherwise, a no-future scenario looms.
Here is a potential key: we already have a thriving nonprofit, cooperative, social and solidarity economy; and they have capital; we have growing sectors of ethical finance etc ... And we have rapidly growing open approaches, but that are subsumed by capital (such as the shared knowledge economy responsible for 1/6th of US GDP). The key is to create a convergence between the already existing ethical economies, and the open economies.
As you can see here, this has been one of the three strategic priorities of our work at the P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net/What_the_P2P_Foundation_Did_in_2014
It is in this context that you introduce the "Partner State Approach": "The PSA could be considered a cluster of policies and ideas whose fundamental mission is to empower direct social-value creation, and to focus on the protection of the Commons sphere as well as on the promotion of sustainable models of entrepreneurship and participatory politics." This is absolutely true: commons-based production requires infrastructure investments that commoners themselves cannot provide, at least, not as individuals or a members of small and fractious voluntary networks. The implication (which I don't think is anywhere clearly stated in the book) is that we need collective investments in order to stimulate forms of growth that are very different from those seen under Neoliberal Informationalism. We need a government capable of shaping an environment in which Commons-friendly investments will be possible. Yet so far, not a single state has emerged as a reliable partner. I'm curious: How do you feel about this today, Michel (and Vasilis), after the difficulties that the FLOK project encountered in Ecuador, in the attempt to generate exactly such a Partner State Approach?
I think it is definitely premature to have any national government, to fully take up such a transformational policy and to transform itself for it. But that does not mean that no prefigurative actions can be taken.
In our customary annual review, http://p2pfoundation.net/Top_Ten_P2P_Trends_of_2014
we point to two trends, one is what is happening at the local level:
i.e.
<*4. Cities and Countries of the Commons* The highlight for the P2P Foundation in 2014, was the invitation by three Ecuadorian institutions, i.e. the FLOKSociety.org <http://FLOKSociety.org> project, to create transition policies and proposals to create a social knowledge economy in that country. It resulted in a Commons Transition Plan <http://p2pfoundation.net/Commons_Transition_Plan>and more than 18 separate legislative proposals. The transition plan is the first ever transition plan to be focused around the commons, and historically important even though the project itself seems stalled at the nation-state level <http://p2pfoundation.net/FLOK_Society_Project# Evaluation_by_Michel_Bauwens>. But more local pilot projects, like the plan for open agricultural machinery in the poor district of Sigchos, under the leadership of mayor Mario Andino, is progressing, with the help for example of Kate Swade of Shared Assets. But if nation-state transitions seems premature, there is a lot happening at the city level. A breakthrough is undoubtedly the framework, co-developed by Christian Iaione <http://p2pfoundation.net/Christian_Iaione>, called the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons <http://p2pfoundation.net/Bologna_Regulation_for_the_ Care_and_Regeneration_of_Urban_Commons>, which has reportedly been copied by 40 other Italian cities. Co-Mantua <http://p2pfoundation.net/Co-Mantua> is one of the examples of such projects. Italy is generally a very mature country for commons initiatives, and Michel Briand, of the pioneering collaborative city of Brest in France, has calculated there may be more than 100,000 urban commons projects in France alone. Of great interest as well are the innovative territorial strategies for distributed fabrication such as the Barcelona Fab City project, see theBarcelona 5.0 Plan <http://p2pfoundation.net/Barcelona_5.0_Plan>. For more information about commons-oriented transitions, see commonstransitions.org <http://commonstransitions.org/> . *Of utmost importance is of course also the experience in the Autonomy Region Rojava <http://p2pfoundation.net/Autonomy_Region_Rojava>*, as an
impressive example of local and multicultural democracy, recently described as a 'DIY Revolution' in Roar Magazine >
The second trend is the likely coming to power of Podemos and Syriza. Whatever the difficulties they will face, whatever mistakes they will make and sabotage they will face, they will shake things up. I believe there is a significant opportunity there to create a dialogue and mutual learning, between the traditional reformist and statist approaches, and the new commons approaches.
One of the things I have been thinking, or rather 'dreaming' about, is the creation of 'Commons Transitions Circles', i.e. pluralistic circles of progressive commons-oriented activists, who would act to open the minds of the more traditional statist left, towards the new potential opened up by commons approaches.
OK, go to go for now, I'll try to the remainder separately
The problems that our civilization faces are vast. The extension of commons-based peer production from the software to manufacturing and energy production does suggest a path forward. But support for it, in the form of something like a Partner State, can only be generated from a far broader civil-society movement than we have today. Such a movement is being called into existence by the rising awareness that the current form of development is literally a dead end. One one hand, it is important to nurture this movement (and ourselves, as parts of it) with pragmatic principles of hope, of the kind provided by experiments with Commons-based peer production. On the other, it's necessary to cultivate a very lucid of what's actually happening in society, not to paint an apocalyptic picture but just to identify the really existing obstacles. That kind of analysis is often lacking on the postmodern left. You could have used a little more Trotsky and Mandel, imho.
I think that civil-society movements have a tremendous amount to learn from experiments with peer production, and therefore, from the reflections in the last third of this book. However, I don't think any of this will go anywhere without a more realistic assessment of the forces currently in play. A broad movement needs to know both what to ask for and what to create, in view of pushing the really existing political-economic system towards a fundamental structural change. That means clearly facing the structure and power of corporate monopoly capital in its transnational form. I feel you have dispatched that issue too quickly and on that level, the book could definitely be improved. Actually, a careful read of this book has left me with the desire to rewrite parts of it, while keeping others intact - which I guess is a pretty good outcome for a book that reccomends the use of Peer Production Licenses!
Let me close this long review/letter with one more quote from Bauwens and Kostakis, a particularly astute and admirable one:
"According to Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2011) 'When the changes happen faster than expectations and/or institutions can adjust, the transition can be cataclysmic.' To avoid such a cataclysm, we arguably need political and social mobilization on the regional, national and transnational scale, with a political agenda that would transform our expectations, our economy, our infrastructures and our institutions in the vein of a Commons-oriented political economy."
I could not agree more.
best, Brian
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-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
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-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
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