a mustread ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 4:44 PM Subject: Fwd: <nettime> The Communard Manifesto (1/2) To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Felix Stalder <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 10:49 AM Subject: <nettime> The Communard Manifesto (1/2) To: [email protected] [This strikes me as the most advanced attempt to outline a historical perspective on an emancipatory trajectory contained within the current crisis. It's not simply a theoretical text, but a testimony to the scope of vision driving the development of the Spanish "rebel cities". The manifesto makes two key arguments. First, the two main social institutions of our time -- the state and the markets -- are are "decomposing". As a consequence, ever more economic activity is devoted to rent-seeking rather than production, leaving ever greater numbers of people as "exiles" from the still dominant society (and open to destructive communities of nationalists, racists and jihadists). Second, that technological (and organisational) advances have altered ithe scale necessary to produce many necessary products and social goods (think from atomic power-plants to solar panels). This enables many of these goods to be produced outside the market (what they call "p2p economy") and where the market remains necessary through "direct economy" meaning ways of raising the necessary capital that does not hand over control over the productive process to the owners of capital. It's a very long text, so I split it up in two mails in old nettime tradition, but it's really worth reading in its entirety. Felix] https://lasindias.com/the-communard-manifesto-html Communard Manifesto The dilemma of our time Abundance within reach Inequality, unemployment and demoralization What is decomposing is not only the economic system, but what the human experience means Capitalism and its critics Capitalism shaped the world because, before changing the State, it was able to create a new form of human experience Revolutionaries that loved crises and large scales The history we weren’t told The new world will be born and affirmed inside the old New relationships, here and now Scale and scope From the era of economies of scale… …to the era of the inefficiencies of scale Today, capital is too big for the real productive scale… … and the optimal scale is approaching community dimensions Building abundance here and now Abundance has to do with production, not with consumption A scarce product in a decentralized network is abundant in a distributed network The “P2P mode of production” is the model for the production of abundance (PART 2/"2) The two faces of productivity Artificially creating scarcity has become a way of life for over-scaled industry Abundance is the magic that shines through the “hacker ethic” The path of abundance does not mean producing less What will we do about the overuse of natural resources? Connecting the dots Conquer work, reconquer life To be unable to access work is to be in social exile There’s no self-realization without work To conquer work is reconquer life From adding to multiplying The scene will be urban The tasks of the communards You are the protagonist Appendix: concrete things you can do with this manifesto Expand the conversation Prepare to “make community” To the friends in the Club de las Indias, because we owe them the most valuable half of this manifesto. To the communards of all times, because their mistakes left us with the right questions. To the new communards across the whole world, because their enthusiasm brings us closer to the spirit of a time to come. The dilemma of our time Abundance within reach Never before in History of humanity have technical capacities been as potent and accessible to common people as today. The massive development of the Internet through the ’90s profoundly changed ways of socializing, sharing, and working. Wealth was created in places that were socially and geographically peripheral by the hands of millions of small producers that, for the first time, could effectively access other markets and knowledge. In Asia alone, we saw hundreds of millions of people escape misery, more than in the rest of the history of humanity. As technological change became generational and social change, there appeared more and more environments of abundance, free goods, new forms of collaborative work and, above all, a new work ethic based on knowledge, the creation of goods, and “de-alienation.” The “hacker ethic,” as it was termed at the turn of the century, inspired the birth of first universal public good to be intentionally constructed by our species: free software, which, by itself, has meant a transfer of knowledge and technology greater than all developmental aid from rich countries. And, yet, not even the other great crisis of the last hundred years—the one that started with the “Crash of ’29″—created such discontent, such a dark spirit, and so much widespread pessimism. Neither admonitions nor hope work any longer to create attractive narratives. Well-being has ceased to be a credible expectation of analysts’ predictions or political parties’ options, whether old or new. All lines of contention have been shown to be futile for the common people. We’re entering a time in which no narrative can be believed if can’t demonstrate, here and now, that it successfully allows a new generation to develop and live decently through work. Inequality, unemployment and demoralization And, if anything has been really global over the last ten years, it’s been the experience of social decomposition. It’s the same whether we look in the most developed regions in the world or at emerging nations, in the Mediterranean or in the South China Sea, in the English-speaking world or in South America: society is more and more unequal, and the differences quickly become cumulative. If you miss the train, you don’t reach the destination. In the most developed nations, the middle class has rediscovered unemployment. New generations don’t even have access to work, or if they do, it’s so precarious that it doesn’t let them experience the meaning real of what they do. Work has ceased to be considered the center of collective action, the origin of personal autonomy, and each person’s contribution to society. In today’s popular culture, work is a scarce good. There’s no lack of start-ups and NGOs that speculate with it, as if it was a precious metal. Work, the necessary link between personal effort and collective effort, is devalued to the limit, not only in the market—reducing its piece of the pie compared to capital—but also morally, in its public consideration and in its internal organization. It has gone from being universally considered the center of social organization to being perceived as facing extinction, from being experienced as the basis of personal realization to being seen as a source of anguish. In a world where being able to contribute to the common well-being, work is talked about as if it was a privilege, and the only way of building a life seems to be getting rents. Rents are not just any income, but an opportunistic and undeserved position, a extraordinary benefit produced outside of the value that one contributes. Rents are the benefits created by big businesses thanks to made-to-fit regulations or monopolies that only exist by legal imposition, like intellectual property. Rents are “incentives” that are decided on and inflated by the same directors that receive them, or the consequences in cold, hard cash of belonging to certain social spheres where certain positions and contracts, public or private, can be accessed. Rents easily become cumulative and create a spiral of inequality when access to information and education depends on personal income, or when competition to assure them is systematically restricted, as the State routinely does in key sectors like energy, telecommunications or the media. In a world of rents, everything looks like a zero-sum game, where one wins because others lose. Distrust of everything and everyone, institutions and people, is the norm. It shows an individualism of the worst kind, for which life is senseless, and mere survival. What is decomposing is not only the economic system, but what the human experience means It’s not just social cohesion that’s decomposing. The rules of the economic system are decomposing, and with them, the human experience and what it means to be human in our time. It’s the inability of the economic system to create a future for everyone the that produces loneliness and distrust of everyone; it’s the pettiness of a system in which businesses depend on the benefits they get thanks to rents more than selling their products, or on eliminating competitors more than improve themselves, that produces lives of dependency, begging, and voracity. Never has there been so much wealth or so much knowledge as now and, yet, far from feeling like both things give hope of abundance for everyone, more and more people are afraid that this is a threat to Nature, the same way they feel, day in and day out, like it’s a threat to personal survival. Capitalism and its critics There were a time when capitalism transformed the world, bringing our species closer to the abundance that, today, scares it so much. The “cancer of business” took over from the old European societies, feudal first and colonial centuries later, and smashed them from within in a long process of almost six hundred years. Capitalism, which started off as marginal—urban in a rural world, dynamic in a traditional society, equalizing in a system in which identity was based on lineage and origin—was revolutionary right from its first steps. In the city and its markets, it created new lifestyles and mentalities, new forms of knowledge, new freedoms, and new collective belongings. Capitalism shaped the world because, before changing the State, it was able to create a new form of human experience Capitalism created a new form of human experience and, by doing so, dynamited established relationships, its castes and its classes. It wasn’t the work of a generation. It could only deploy its full potential after centuries of evolution and entrenchment, of turning fairs—temporary markets—into a large, permanent urban workshop and, later, turning the guild craftsman into a factory worker under the thumb of the merchant investor, who bought the materials and carried the products to distant markets. It was only then that industrialization made a profound social transformation out of what, until then, had only been “tendencies.” It was the great revolutionary moment of the bourgeoisie. In the first place, capitalism made a commodity of land, the principle means of production of the times. In the process, the agrarian and forest commons—the oldest and most widespread form of property—came to occupy a marginal place. And, with it, the real community of the family, the clan or the village, in which everyone knows each other by face and name, because they are linked to them by interpersonal relationships and affection. The vacuum was filled throughout the nineteenth century by another innovation: the imagined community of the nation. “Imagined” not because it was unreal, but because those who are considered its members don’t know more than a tiny portion of the others, and have to imagine the rest through common attributes, practices, values, and memories, which are always debatable. Fraternity based on the friendship of personal relationships and shared work will give way to an abstract fraternity in search of a “common good” that the new social classes linked to wage labor make a permanent part of social discourse. Secondly, work became indistinguishable from whoever did it, because of the homogenization of the processes in the new productive space of society: the factory. The new relationship with work and, through it, with society and nature, was impersonal and anonymous, and no longer had to do with “being,” with lineage, or with geography. The vacuum created by the dilution of the servant, the communard and the guild craftsman was filled by a new abstract human type: the “individual.” Although it may sound strange today, that whole advance—which allowed humanity to grow in number, well-being, and knowledge like never before—was produced thanks to making a commodity of everything that, until then, had not been, like land, which hadn’t usually been rented or sold, only possessed. Even for the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, it was impossible to deny the progressive nature of the great works of capitalism. They were well aware of how the industrial boom brought Humanity towards abundance, increasing knowledge and its practical consequence, technology. They were witnesses of the formidable historical spectacle of a world in revolution where distances were cut, the population multiplied, energy and water flowed in people’s houses for the first time, and the most distant and closed empires saw their walls give way before the onslaught of global commerce in manufacturing. For the first time in history, humanity as such took on a real existence: through new markets, we would all end up connected with everyone throughout the world; and in the factory, the immense majority of society would share a common experience—and therefore, would come to be the same thing—to the rhythm of the new mechanical geniuses. Capitalism, as they saw it, was preparing an egalitarian society through equality of living conditions, work, and social relationships that that it was, itself, expanding. Revolutionaries that loved crises and large scales But those revolutionaries saw something more: the growth of capitalism, in the first place, wasn’t the least bit linear. Its crises, like all prior crises, produced underconsumption (scandalous, miserable situations for those excluded from production). But, in contrast to the crises of agrarian societies, capitalist crises weren’t crises of under-production, but of “over-production”: it’s not that the factories couldn’t produce enough for the needs of all, it’s that the very dynamic of the economic system made it impossible for them to sell it to the great masses that needed it, because they didn’t have the money to buy what was produced. Additionally, the revolutionaries asserted that all this happened regularly, in cycles in which each decline necessarily led to a confrontation between an ever-more concentrated group of owners and an ever-more global and uniform class of workers. Everyone would struggle in a large global revolution for control of the States that held the social structures in place until, similar to what the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century did in the French Revolution, the proletariat would take control of the State with one purpose: to direct a massive process of decommodification, giving way to a society of abundance where the essential purpose of production was to serve this or that need, instead of being sold as objects and services for a price. Marx and Kropotkin never proposed to to close the factories. They thought that crises of overproduction signaled a limit of capitalism, the limit at which the logic of the commodity clashed with human needs. But they saw in the technology of mass production and in the ever-greater scale of the businesses a reflection of the progress that would lead the working class to “change the world from underneath.” They thought that by eliminating the commodity nature of objects, the “productive forces would be released,” which is to say, that productivity would be developed even more, and with it knowledge, well-being, etc. The very scale of production would also develop, until it constituted a great global factory-State, so productive that it could satisfy the material needs of all humanity with nothing more than volunteer work. Nothing of the sort happened. No “global revolution” took place. Since 1871, there were local and national revolutions in which communists and anarchists looked for its first signs. Most were overthrown; none was able to produce on a larger scale during the following cycle of growth and crisis; and those that triumphed never brought about the decommodification of production. On the contrary, they gave power to repressive, totalitarian regimes, with very hierarchical and inefficient nationalized economies and such low levels of well-being among workers that they belied every delusion of the “liberation of productive forces.” When the Soviet Union fell and China took its first steps towards capitalism controlled by the Communist State, communism and socialism were discredited as alternatives. In the ’90s, their place was taken by “anti-capitalism,” which fluctuated between affirming that another world was possible and denying that capitalism and the human species could survive together, but avoided explaining how the former would become real and what made the latter inevitable. To a certain degree, this was the result of the sense of profound failure of “alternative” thought that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But, lacking a theory of its own, it would become an invertebrate socialism, a “big no” into which anything and everything would fit. It was, in a certain way, a leftism chastened by false socialist paradises, hesitant when it came to describing any future society, and far removed from any pretense of building functional models in the present. La historia que no nos contaron Decades before the first socialist and libertarian groups of any weight were formed, an alternative trend had started down a long path with a very different focus: communitarianism. The new world will be born and affirmed inside the old The basic idea of communitarianism is that the new world will be born and grow inside the old. Profound changes in social and economic relationships—system changes—are not the product of revolutions and political changes. It happens the other way around: systemic political changes are the expression of new forms of social organizing, new values, and ways of working and living, that have reached enough maturity to be able to establish a broad social consensus. As of a certain point in development, a “competition between systems” is established. The new forms, until then valid only for a small minority, begin to seem to be the only ones capable of offering a better future for the large majority. Little by little, they expand their spectrum and their number, encompassing and transforming broader and broader social spaces, and become the center of the economy, reconfiguring the cultural, ideological, and legal basis of society from within. For communitarians, egalitarian forms should accompany capitalism in its evolution as a parallel society, not as a utopia—the promise of a society to come—except as a heterotopia: a different, alternative social place, with values and ways of its own. At first, they do it from behind, through learning, utilization and re-elaboration of existing technology and, as of a certain point, entering in competition with it. This perspective was called “constructive socialism.” The first objective was always to show the feasibility of a decommodified life, “here and now,” on any scale. Communitarianism is not centered on creating political parties, but networks of small productive egalitarian communities. The maxim of economic organization comes to be “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”: communities of goods, revenue, and savings are established, production is organized by consensus, and from the beginning, the highest diversification is sought to serve the diversity of personal needs and gain autonomy for all. New relationships, here and now
From 1849 to today, egalitarian communities have always been working: Icarian communities, Russian artels, Israeli kibbutzim, US, Japanese, or German egalitarian farms… They’ve been on practically all continents, they’ve had different names and nuances in different times and places, they’ve been through all manner of crises, and their members have made enormous sacrifices. In place of the centrality of the class nature of the collectivist narrative, they wrote a story of their community and their experience, which gave substance to the central idea of constructive socialism: building—here and now, within the community and between it and its surroundings—social and economic relationships that are desired or postulated as valid alternatives to the existing socioeconomic system, without delegating power to parties or organizational structures outside of the communities themselves. Without thinking of themselves as “experimental” or having detailed “roadmaps,” they have created a heritage and a culture themselves, little by little. They are the seeds of a society of abundance.
In the framework of the young and expansive capitalism of the nineteenth century, or the capitalism of technological revolution and permanent war that followed up through the present, if these “decommodified islets” want to maintain their autonomy and approach abundance, they have to enter the market: to live without needing money at all within the community, they must learn to think like merchants outside of it. It’s no contradiction: being in the market is the only way to not lose the technological pace of the system they want to overcome. But, at the same time, it’s the way to bring the first cultural and technological fruits of the new society to the old society. It is, in many senses—including the moral, since it aspires to expand the improvement in living conditions to more people—the first step towards a competition between systems. The bourgeoisie, in its medieval infancy, introduced the revolutionary principle of equality of origin and a few technological improvements that expressed their vision of the world into some small spaces in feudal society. All of them happened far from the center of the production of value at the time, the fields. The medieval commercial bourgeoisie invented important things, but eccentric for the times, like the check, the letter of exchange, and double-entry accounting. In contrast, communitarianism demonstrated from the first day the feasibility of an economic organization thought of in terms of the needs. It was the first to make a reality of equality in spite of differences in gender or social or geographical origin, and across the 20th century, left a series of pioneering technologies: weatherization and sanitation in popular housing; the improvement of agricultural productivity, like drip irrigation, seed improvement, or the scientific management of dairy facilities; the development of free software for distributed networks; and the first analytical tools for public intelligence. These are innovations that continue to be significant and closer and closer to the productive core of the economic system. In what little we’ve seen of twenty-first century, that sense of a cultural and technological “membrane” between the past and the future, between capitalist society and the small, decommodified space of egalitarian communities, has become even more clear. The appearance of new ways of producing based on new forms of communal property—like free software—and distributed communication architectures—linked directly to decommodification and the creation of abundance—put forth the notion that we are on the threshold of a new phase in which we will be able to change the nature of that competition between systems. But, above all, what justifies a new time for the development of communitarianism is an irreversible economic change that has been imposed gradually: the reduction of the optimal scales of production. This decline in the optimal productive scale explains the deep trends that have produced the current economic crises, and why the political and corporate responses are often times counterproductive. And any alternative is not centered on social class or the nation, but on community. Scale and scope The optimum scale is most efficient dimension of the productive units of a society, the size as of which inefficiencies created by having to manage the excessive size of those units exceeds the benefit produced by being a little bigger. For each dimension of the market and each technological level, there exists an optimal scale of production, and it turns out to be easy to understand that, in principle, technological development reduces the optimal dimensions, because the better the technology, the fewer resources—work hours, capital and raw material—are needed to produce the same quantity of products.
From the era of economies of scale…
During the height of capitalism, in the 19th century, between British imperialism’s bet on free trade, American expansion, European unifications and the revolutions in transportation—the clipper, the railroad, and steamboats—markets grew much faster than productivity. The optimum size always remained out of reach, and capital to reach it was always scarce. It was the Golden Age, and it saw the most authentic of joint-stock companies: gigantic collective efforts that brought together the savings of tens of thousands of small savers and capitalists to put whole countries into production, to charter faster and faster boats, lay telegraph cables across oceans, or cross continents from end to end with railways. For a long time, the continuous growth of scale seemed to confirm the Marxists, Kropotkinists, and social democrats. In all of their economic models, underneath the permanent expansive dynamic of capitalism, there was the need to reduce prices by increasing production per hour to survive competition and even—if the owner was the first to incorporate new machines or technologies—get extraordinary benefits while other factories adapted. Every time productive capacity increases, the benefit that each unit of product contributes is reduced, so to maintain or increase the total benefit, the owner has to produce even more quantity, which requires the incorporation of new machines and processes to reach a still-greater scale. Finally, according to these authors, when production approaches or even exceeds the potential size of the market, crises of overproduction erupt. This model, described for the first time by Marx, is known as “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” For decades, Marxist economists repeated the mantra that “the decreasing tendency of the rate of profit is compensated for with the increase in the mass of product” and took for granted that each cycle of growth and crisis would begin with a greater scale and would increase it further still. Accordingly, capitalism was on the path to create big businesses, true global monopolies in each and every industrial and consumption market, which fit like a glove both with the quasi-religious Marxist vision of a great, revolutionary, global Armageddon between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and with the social-democratic vision that socialism would be the result of the nationalization of the great industries by the democratic state as they reached critical sizes. However, underneath both models, revolutionary and reformist-nationalizing, was a presumption that would soon be shown to be erroneous: that in each cycle, greater effective demand would appear. It’s obvious that the average scale of the businesses in the capitalist world would not increase unless owners could foresee a growing volume of demand, because with demand that was not growing globally, if they could produce the same thing with fewer resources, they weren’t going to increase scale, but reduce it. At time when Marx was writing his economic theory—in fact, for almost the entire 19th century—that extraordinary demand came largely from the incorporation of Asia and Africa into the world market. Colonialism, by subjugating backward economies and tearing down trade barriers for British and French products, continuously increased the demand for manufactured products, overcoming the tendency to reduce the size of the productive units that drove technological development. …to the era of the inefficiencies of scale We could put the date of the change at 1914. Twenty years after the colonial division of Africa among the great industrial powers at the Berlin Conference, the expectation that new, extra-capitalist markets would join those of the great powers had already dissipated. Territorial tensions in Europe reflected the rigidity of the delimitation of colonial borders. The war that was about to break out was a “world war” precisely because it meant the end of the first stage of the configuration of a unified global market. Marxist prophecies were coming true. The crisis of ’29 would seem to corroborate them. However, from there—through another World War, the processes of decolonization in Africa and Asia, and a very long Cold War—the evidence set about dismantling the idea that capitalism was constantly evolving towards increases in the scale of businesses. In fact, big national businesses—which flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century, after the war—were only central in the socialist countries and for some nationalist regimes in backward nations. Both in them and in the developed world, where they briefly flourished as a tool of post-war reconstruction, they were not the “spontaneous” result of the evolution of markets. In every case, they were a shortcut to get production underway and reinvigorate industry after the enormous destruction left by the crisis and war. But they soon reached a ceiling, especially in the framework of the planned economies for which they had become a banner. In each new phase of technological development, Big State Businesses increased inefficiencies and their costs, which, in an authoritarian and centralized system, would spread with extraordinary speed across the economic system. The USSR, which promised to “overtake the USA” in the middle of the ’60s, entered into a crisis by the ’70s, and into open decomposition in the ’80s. In the Western bloc, not even the largest multinationals had dimensions comparable to the great State dinosaurs of the USSR, and yet the weight of the inefficiencies of scale started to be obvious by the mid ’50s. That was when economist Kenneth Boulding called attention to problems of communication, management, and control in large, pyramidal organizations. Boulding also warned that, given the size and weight of certain companies in the economic system and their effect on employment, inefficiencies threatened to spread to the whole economy through the state, since over-scaled businesses competed to “capture it” and to make up for the costs of inefficiencies due to over-scaling with rents resulting from tailor-made regulations. Following Boulding’s warnings, technological research then became centered on information science and data management, on communications, and on forms of work. The “information revolution” that started at that time was the first line of defense against the effects of of over-scaling. It wasn’t enough, however. In the middle of the ’70s, it became obvious in Europe—and not only there—that the State of the postwar period, captured by big businesses and sectoral interests, was effectively unviable. This was when the set of policies called “neoliberalism” was designed. It was basically an attempt to confront the results of over-scaling in the other possible way: by expanding markets. What’s original about neoliberalism is that not only does it extend markets in space—through reduction of tariff barriers and creation of free-trade zones—but also over time, with the use of new tools such as “financialization.” Today, capital is too big for the real productive scale… It’s well known how financial innovations and deregulation came together to lay the foundations for the global crisis of 2008. What’s less discussed is that in the same “exuberance of capital” that preceded the crash, a problem of excessive scale was manifested. Investment exuberance is a mass mirage produced by the hopelessness of investors who can’t find a place for their capital. Also, this problem, already endemic, was multiplied by the capture of the State and of the market itself by banks. The State had deregulated financial activity for the benefit of the big banks beyond a reasonable point. State agencies were powerless, and often conditioned or seduced by pressure from institutions that were considered “systemic,” and had turned “too big to fail” into a pirate flag. And not even the market could act as a counterweight. With ratings agencies captured by their own customers—and distributing hyper-optimistic descriptions—the mass of small investors could only follow the great tendencies of capital as an independent indicator. The trouble is that that movement wasn’t independent at all, since the same financial groups were channeling it. The result is a system that, even in midst of the crash, they contained their damage by abusing asymmetries of information and their power to set prices at the expense of their own customers. Today, eight years after the fall of Lehman Brothers, that system remains basically intact. The root of the problem was that the financial system was also suffering form the inefficiencies of over-scaling: the amounts of capital were too large in relation to real, productive businesses for anyone to pay attention to the reality of the investments; and even to find interest in investing in a scale that was known to be really productive. The problem to solve was—and is— “placing” big piles of capital that couldn’t, and can’t, find enough projects of their size. Over the last two decades, it’s become common to hear complaints in the economic press that fewer new large industries that justify grandiose investments are appearing than in prior periods. The attempt to solve this that arrived with neoliberalism was to “financialize” whole markets: to “package” risks—to “dissolve” some from over here with some from over there—and create abstractions of value to bet, more than invest, those huge amounts of capital. Enron, the business that made financialization its flagship product, made it possible to invest in things like “Megabit of bandwidth installed” or “Megawatt consumed,” showing that not even telcoms and energy companies were capable of meeting the need to place large masses of capital on their own. And the famous mortgage derivatives, which were at the center of the crisis in 2008, showed that the construction sector had also become too small for the scale of capital that wanted to cast its lot with it. The crisis of 2008 made clear the origin of the “decomposition” with which we begin this manifesto: the simultaneous destruction of the two main social institutions, the State and the market, by the hunger for rents of over-scaled companies—and financial companies are just the tip of the iceberg—which see in them the only way to make up for their own inefficiencies of scale. What everyone saw in the financial sector in the years that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, was later seen with equal clarity in the dominant businesses in sectors as apparently different as energy or agroindustry. … and the optimal scale is approaching community dimensions But if the result of neoliberal financial policies was object of a profound public scrutiny, what does not usually receive so much attention is how the information revolution joined the globalization of commerce in goods with the reduction of optimal scales to create a whole series of new productive forms. Surely the reason is that the first to take advantage of it were thousands of Asian small businesspeople, the true engines of the drastic reduction in global poverty. Only more than a decade later, in the middle of a crisis, have the new models started to reach Europe and America, driving a wave of sustained, small-scale, entrepreneurial projects on a new technological base and often oriented towards niche demands in the global market. We can group these new forms around two broad trends: the “P2P mode of production” and the “direct economy.” The P2P mode of production replicates the free software model in all kinds of industries where knowledge condensed into design, software, creativity, blueprints, etc., is central to the creation of value; and can accumulate in a “immaterial universal commons” that can be improved, reformed, and used in alternative ways for many kinds of different projects. This multifunctionality of tools and value chains—which is what economists call “scope”— is the key to the direct conomy, a way of creating products created by small groups and launching them on global markets by using, on the one hand, low-cost, adaptable, external industrial chains and free software and, on the other, advance sales systems or collaborative financing. That is, before our eyes, before and after the large financial crisis, a new kind of small-scale industry has developed, which is characterized by being global and by getting capital and credit outside the financial system, some in collaborative financing platforms, others announcing their own pre-sales and getting donations in exchange for merchandising. In fact, it’s an industry of “free” capital, which doesn’t have to give up ownership of the business to the owners of capital because, on the one hand, it reduces its needs by using publicly available technological tools, like free software, and on the other, obtaining the little capital it needs in the form of advance sales and donations. Taken together, P2P production and the direct economy, two ways of substituting scale with scope, are the leading edge of a productive economy moving more and more quickly towards the reduction of scale. That makes them essential to understanding why communitarianism has a unique opportunity in the new century. Building abundance here and now Abundance has to do with production, not with consumption Abundance is an economic concept in the setting of production, not consumption. Abundance exists when an extra unit can be produced without that meaning a perceptible increase in costs. For economists, it can be reduced to a formula: “zero marginal cost.” In an ideal competitive market, when the marginal cost is zero, that means that the prices that would maximize the benefit to producers would also be zero. Common sense would say then that the business would have no incentive to continue producing. But really, just the opposite would happen. Although the price of the product is zero, the interest of the producer is to produce the maximum possible to dilute fixed costs as much as it can among all units produced. It is at that theoretical moment, with zero price, when a business stops thinking about the market and starts to seek the maximization of meeting the human needs its products match. That is, if the marginal cost approached zero, the products would be “decommodified,” would stop being commodities that have to be sold, because if they aren’t, that would create a new loss. As a consequence, as of a certain level, anyone could enjoy as much as they need without giving up anything, and the same rationality that orients the behavior of the businesses towards the maximization of benefit would lead to an economy centered on satisfying human needs: anyone could enjoy as much as they need without giving up anything. This does not mean that capitalism tends to be “decommodified” by the mere effect of competition. But this extreme solution of a basic model of economic analysis is, in any case, very illuminating. In practice, abundance exists when the cost of producing one more unit is negligible and, given a sensible calculation of potential demand, we can do it indefinitely. For example: the cost of serving a web page or an electronic book to one more user from our own server is, for all practical purposes, zero. A scarce product in a decentralized network is abundant in a distributed network We should say that this example would only be true within a definable range of requests, but that if the number of people who want read our book were to pass a certain critical point, we would have to increase our bandwidth and the number of servers as well. So, if we look at it over the long term, these cost increases should be attributed to the units served. The marginal cost, the cost associated with the last copy distributed, wouldn’t be zero. Abundance, in that case, would have been just an illusion, a mirage, sort of like the cost of taking more person to work in our car: it’s practically zero… until the seats run out. Once the places are full, we need other car, or at least a bus ticket, for each additional person we’d like to transport. The marginal cost, the increase in costs for one more person, would be positive and easily perceptible. But in our example, an information good, this criticism would only be true if the copies were distributed from a single server. If we share it on a distributed network with other users who, by downloading it, make it available to others in turn, each new download, each new user, will mean a possible place for others to download more. The more people download it, the less possibility there will be that, no matter how fast or large increases in demand may be, that any member of the network would have to increase their costs so that someone could download a new copy. This is doubtlessly the most important thing the Internet has taught us: the same product that is abundant in a distributed network certainly would not be in a centralized or decentralized network. And, conversely, what is scarce in a centralized or decentralized network, can be abundant in a distributed network. This finding may seem limited, since with current technologies, it would only affect intangible goods. But some of those intangibles—like industrial design, hardware, or processes—are the motors of the increase in productivity in physical goods and, since the world wars, the percentage they represent of total value produced has only increased. Their conversion into free goods can’t help but have a profound effect on the whole productive system. That’s how, for example, the creation of free software works, as does the whole growing economy in general, the immense majority of it decommodified, that we include under the label “the P2P mode of production.” At the same time, the direct economy uses the results of innovation outside the productive apparatus controlled by over-scaled industries and the very over-scaled financial system, increasing productivity in the manufacture of tangible goods and pushing scale even farther downward. The “P2P mode of production” is the model for the production of abundance Although we are still far from general abundance, we have a model of the production of abundance for intangible goods and innovation—the “P2P mode of production.” This, in turn, feeds a sector, the direct economy, that demonstrates enough productivity in the market to compete and beat the industry “from the outside,” without the help of over-scaled finance. That is, this new productive ecosystem is capable of competing and gaining ground against a giant that enjoys the advantage of extra-market rents, like customized regulations, grants, or patents. We’re talking about the same extra-market rents that multiplied with neoliberalism and which have produced the simultaneous erosion of state and market, which is to say, social decomposition. So, just to demonstrate that a productive alternative exists is already big news. This social and productive space around the “new digital commons” or simply, the “commons,” is today’s equivalent of the first cities and markets of the medieval bourgeoisie, a space where new non-commercial social relationships appeared, and the new logic, together with signs of autonomy, begin to show a limited but direct impact on productivity. Throughout the lower Middle Ages, the bourgeoisie was able to drive those cities to turn them, first, into a big “urban workshop,” and later, into “municipal democracies.” A similar historical task, now with a society of abundance as the goal, is what lies ahead for communitarianism. This is because this whole reduction of scales brings the optimum size of productive units ever closer to the community dimension, and therefore, points to community as the protagonist of a society of abundance. And it is in community that we can understand why the struggle to overcome a socioeconomic system cannot be proposed as an electoral platform, revolutionary as it may be, but rather, happens in the setting of more profound competition: productivity. [End part 1/2] -- ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: 056C E7D3 9B25 CAE1 336D 6D2F 0BBB 5B95 0C9F F2AC # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/