As usual, a great and fascinating exchange Brian, just some inline reactions as I agree and find very informative, most of your analysis, (I am deleting the parts I'm not responding to) On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 2:10 AM, Brian Holmes <[email protected]> wrote:
Michel, Vasilis, how encouraging to receive your answers. I will read the texts you suggest, and I will respond to some of your remarks here.
However, people who think like us are written off as utopian, which is the experience I had with Multitudes and Autonomia more generally. We need to find more robust formulations, and we need to move away from an exclusive focus on the Internet. In Chicago, my art students would understand your concept of netarchical capitalism: they are confronted by it every day. But when you try to talk about that with anyone else in this huge city, no one gets it. Unlike, say, urban gardening, it is simply not part of their experience.
Yes, that is probably true, but also changing quite rapidly, I think we should remember that when Marx wrote his first analysis of the working class, there were really only a few thousands of them in Manchester, and the majority of the population was rural or lumpen, yet, he correctly saw it as the model of the future. And so it is with p2p, yes, marginal, yes emerging, but growing fast (actually exponentially) , more so in its subsumed forms (netarchical sector), but also significantly in its alternative sectors .. So the argument is not about the factual and overall dominance of the p2p modes, but of their significance, and I think you would agree with that. To reach the other sectors, we need alliances and convergences and mutual understanding, but I think classic social movements really need p2p understandings if they want to move forward and not just react defensively.
On that subject: you do say (in Chapter 2, not 1, sorry) that "The industrial mode of production is becoming obsolete, and the ‘network’ is the main pattern of organizing production and socio-political relations." Of course that is true, to the extent that informationalism has reorganized the big monopoly sectors into global supply chains, which are indeed a networked form of organization. For example, the North American auto industry is spread out along a network of rail lines and freeways extending from Ontario, Canada, through Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City and Houston all the way down to greater Mexico City. Semi-finished products move up and down this system, with intrants from Latin America, Europe and Asia flowing in all the time. But the idea of "network" here does not have the same referents as it does on the next page, where there is a diagram showing "traditional proprietary capitalism" declining, neofeudal cognitive capitalism coccupying the center and mature peer production rising. There is a tremendous gap between the major, dominant forms of networked industrial production, which remain thoroughly proprietary, and the forms of cognitive or netarchical exploitation experienced mainly by a relatively small sector of precarious cultural workers. I do understand that you are interested in precisely those workers, because they are also the ones who have most immediately been attracted to peer production. But the general argument is weakened when you conflate two images of the networked or informational economy. That was my point, just constructive critique and I am glad you have taken it that way.
I see what you mean, the majority of industrial and service workers are indeed affected in totally different ways, at the same time, I would not underestimate the new social structures of 'cognitive precarity' in the West, as a fast growing segment subjected to these new conditions
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.
That is really well said! I think it's particularly true because, as you point out below, the neoliberal mode of governance has had such lousy results: global supply chains are literally an ecological disaster, they also have very negative effects on employment due to excessive automation, and they are psychically alienating because all the social relations are managed, securitized, and manipulated at great distances. Nonetheless, they are receiving huge investments right now, with the expansion of the Panama Canal, the introduction of Maersk's new Emma class freighters and the consequent dredging of ports all over the world to receive them, followed by the expansion of intermodal railyards, third-party logistics firms etc etc etc. Proprietary industrial capitalism is hardly on the decline, unfortunately. But its ascendant is killing us.
agreed, but there are interesting ways in which the two intersect, i.e. how the new capitalism of production is also based in major ways on the nonproprietary (http://p2pfoundation.net/Gongkai ; http://p2pfoundation.net/Shanzhai
In my view, the make or break arena for peer production is not in Task Rabbit vs some LETS scheme of people exchanging haircuts for websites in Amsterdam or San Francisco (sorry for the caricature, but there is some truth there). The make or break arena is whether unemployed people in Detroit or Istanbul can build a cheap fuel-efficient car and an integrated off-the-grid permaculture house.
Now, Jakob Rigi is right to protest against me lumping those two geographical references together, and it is true that they are not equal (though, Jakob, if you just look at pictures of inner-city Detroit you might change your mind a little). But I'd say that without the success of peer production within those two distinct but related types of situations, and without solidarity between them, the next long wave will be characterized, in energy, by natural gas and huge proprietary solar installations and wind farms; in manufacturing, by the introduction of distributed CNC prototyping into global supply chains; in culture, by the expansion of netarchical platforms; in finance, by Goldman Sachs; and in governance, by massive biometric securitization. I am sure you agree and I guess there could be some gain in explanatory power by extending the field of analysis to include the dominant phenomena along with the emergent ones.
that is true, but my feeling is the opposite, i.e. that most of the left is busy with denouncing this, and does not see the emergent and alternative side; so they equate p2p with the new capitalism, and have already given up as p2p and its other side, its emancipatory potential ... there is much more social-liberal enthusiasm for p2p, than there is from the classic left; so I feel we are doing vital work by keeping alive a progressive interpration of the emerging p2p, rather than join the dominant chorus
Btw, I had the good fortune to meet people in inner-city Detroit who are working on a permaculture house and a Wikispeed car, and it kinda changed my whole perspective on the future.... It's Incite Focus, described pretty well here:
http://www.modeldmedia.com/features/greencity1113.aspx
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.
Even in the US, people are finally waking up to this kind of argument. In fact, they often find the ecological angle rather more persuasive than the insistence on a new growth wave, which only fascinates entrepreneurs. To create a credible and useful road map, I think one needs to cover all the bases, but in the right proportions, so as to address all the people who can usefully participate. It's a collective effort, necessarily.
yes, of course , at the p2p foundation, we have our own biases, so we need our work to be critiqued and complemented but also synergized and integrated with such other approches
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.
The thing is to grow the alliance in all directions. At this point it is shocking how few people even care, how few people think about alternatives rather than some reiteration of the past. Whether in the social sciences, in community work, in left political parties, in art, in civil service, in charitable foundations, in ecological organizations - very few people seem ready to imagine how their practice could be inserted into the really existing economy, in a way that changes that economy, precisely to acheive their own goals. The danger is that the next growth wave, whenever it comes, will turn everyone's heads almost exactly the way the 1990s "Californian ideology" wave did, and squander what is probably the last chance to get our civilization off its dead-end track. The fact is, we don't need a "growth wave." We need enabling investments that can lay the basis for a move away from suicidal monopoly capitalism. How to achieve that is the riddle of the sphinx for the early 21st century.
fully agree, and this is what we are working on, with our modest means, Michel
solidarities, Brian
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