Henry wrote:
"The article, "The Political Economy of Peer Production," by Michael Bauwens, advocates a supposedly new form of economic organization based on peer-to-peer networking. This social-network, flat, non-hierarchical system of production is anticipated in the political and economic philosophy of syndicalism, dating pack to 1895.
Syndicalism is a system of organization of the means of production which seeks to replace free enterprise capitalism (US) and state capitalism (China) with co-operative, voluntary federations of democratically-organized and administered trade unions. Mutual aid, self-organization, and self-administration are among the means and goals of syndicalism.
In other words, the first three "requirements"in this article, technological infrastructure that operates on peer-to-peer processes, alternative information and communication systems, software infrastructure, to the degree that they are requirements at all, in no way require computers or computer networks!
The article attempts to graft the author's (perhaps un-self-aware) syndicalist political views onto the development process of the Internet and Free Software projects. In fact, the most successful of these, such as the Internet under Jon Postel, the Free Software Foundation under Richard Stallman, One Laptop per Child under Nicholas Negroponte, and Linux kernel maintenance under Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton, have been what might more accurately described as "benign dictatorships" than syndicalist or peer-to-peer in nature.
"An injury to one is an injury to all."
http://www.facebook.com/l/32423/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism
http://www.facebook.com/l/32423/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel
http://www.facebook.com/l/32423/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
http://www.facebook.com/l/32423/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Negroponte
http://www.facebook.com/l/32423/www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/linus.html"
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