Dear Andy, thank you so much for these clarifications, which I'm adding to Ning, I will only respond later as I'm on the road starting today, Michel On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 6:00 AM, Andy Robinson <[email protected]> wrote:

Peer-to-peer production + Marxism is a difficult topic because Marxism is very internally diverse. I think peer-to-peer production has a different relationship to different types of Marxism, and different ways of reading Marx. So it is almost useless to ask 'how does peer-to-peer production relate to (unmarked) Marxism or (unmarked) Marx', because everyone will have a different sense of what (unmarked) Marxism/Marx is.

The following, in contrast, are very much answerable questions:

1) how does peer-to-peer production relate to autonomist Marxism

2) how does peer-to-peer production relate to world-systems analysis

3) how does peer-to-peer production relate to 60s-wave neo-Marxism

4) how does peer-to-peer production relate to the ostensibly Marxist regimes of the USSR, Eastern Europe and China

5) how does peer-to-peer production relate to analysis of the labour process

and more along the same lines (since there are dozens of varieties of Marxism: we could ask specifically how it relates to Luxemburg or Kautsky or Gramsci; how it relates to a particular Marxian concept – alienation, exploitation, use- vs exchange-value, class struggle; how it relates to Marxist theories of stratification, of power, of everyday life, of work, etc).

Peer-to-peer production, if theorised as gift economy or creation of commons or egalitarian collective production, has a strong affinity with a certain kind of socialism/communism – especially autonomia/autonomism, libertarian/New Left socialisms, and anything else in the bottom left quadrant on Political Compass (i.e. both anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian). This would inform a lot of the analysis if going down the path of comparisons to autonomism, New Left Marxisms and other libertarian Marxisms (though I understand Terranova's critiques of open-source come from an autonomist stance). Personally I don't think it's as direct as, 'capitalism is creating new productive forces', it is more of a process of exodus and recuperation (the early hacker culture emerges from the counterculture, and is later recuperated into forms of production modified to incorporate it).

As a production process, peer-to-peer can also fit into accounts of exodus and recuperation in the 60s/70s wave, the rise of 'creative workers', growing trends to unremunerated labour, a return to dependence on non-capitalist sectors to sustain capitalism, the “labour-on-self” (human capital formation) trope in neoliberalism, the transition from mass to niche markets, the growth of leisure and/or unemployment and/or casual and intermittent work (as available time for non-market production)... there must be a huge literature on these kinds of things. This is all speaking to Marxism, to the extent that Marxism is the underpinning of socially-informed political economy. If I understand rightly (and I'm only marginally familiar with the literature), there's some controversy over whether peer-to-peer production is an alternative to or simply a supplement to capitalism. There's also debates over whether it is a single phenomenon or can be divided into fields or periods when it was more and less autonomous from capitalism.

Peer-to-peer production has much less affinity with forms of socialism occupying the top left quadrant (i.e. anti-capitalist and authoritarian). In fact I'd say peer-to-peer is far more significant on the up-down axis (it renders power more diffuse) than on the left-right axis (it's a non-market form itself, but it may or may not be marketised or connected to markets), which is why it attracts right-wing libertarians (bottom right quadrant) as well as left-wing libertarians. The danger of peer-to-peer production to top-left-quadrant systems is marked, and is clear from the continued hostility of authoritarian regimes to the Internet: it enables unmonitored activity, creates technologies which subvert the hierarchical practice of breaking down horizontalisms to render people dependent on vertical power, moves production into fields where it is difficult to plan, and generally 'smooths' social space against the state's 'striations'. It poses the same kind of danger to top-right-quadrant regimes, but less sharply, because these regimes can rely on the market to hybridise and recuperate networked logics.

In fact, it can be argued that the collapse of the 'communist' (top-left-quadrant) regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the reform of those in China, Vietnam etc, is partly due to networked forces similar to those involved in peer-to-peer production, and partly to economic and strategic problems in sustaining strongly hierarchical regimes (without network supplementation) in the post-Fordist era.

1) These regimes were highly vulnerable to diffuse social movements using 'netwar' or 'swarm' tactics, due to their systemic rigidity. The response (standard in the capitalist world) of becoming more networked to combat such movements was not available to them due to systemic rigidity.

2) These regimes were unable to compete with capitalist regimes in the new emerging sectors such as the Internet, owing to an economic architecture geared to mass-production. This would ultimately lead, among other things, to a decisive military disadvantage against America.

3) These regimes could not meet consumer demand based on niche markets and non-massified goods, as their model was completely tied up with mass production. They were ideologically subverted by the import of consumer goods and images in samizdat form (see Wagnleitner's work on this).

In order to address such problems, the regimes were forced to open up (to outside forces and to capitalism) to some degree, and this caused the collapse of their special, 'socialist' form – directly in the USSR and Eastern Europe, and indirectly in China (capitalists given a little bit of local leeway outmanoeuvred central state bureaucrats to negate continuing restrictions). In effect, attempts were made to keep the regime in place by moving 'rightwards' along Political Compass.

The other alternative open to them would have been to open up 'downwards' instead – to turn into something more like the Chavez project, with a lot of reliance on bottom-up agency to sustain the regime. This is what was tentatively attempted in various Eastern European countries (Yugoslavia especially), but was not viable as it wasn't taken far enough and couldn't address lingering dissatisfaction with the existing regime. (Actually, most of these regimes had some degree of localised peer-to-peer production and an extensive commons, but in a highly striated form, i.e. the vertical moment of ascriptive assignment to a particular collective took priority over the formation of horizontal connections: workers would be cooperative within the work-unit, but the work-unit would be established by and subordinate to the state hierarchy).

I've seen a lot of different theories of what Soviet, Eastern European and Chinese 'socialism' really was/were, and they all have rather different implications. Here's a few of them:

1) It's an attempt by certain countries to engage in autocentric development by pulling out of the world-system – developmental rather than socialist (certain world-systems theorists);

2) It's a variety of capitalism in which the state takes on functions otherwise held by the capitalist class (in this kind of theory, the state is taken to always perform such functions for capitalism to some degree) (some Trotskyists, autonomists and anarchists; convergence theory);

3) It's a product of modernism, a following-through of tendencies in modernist ideology towards instrumentally rational management and planning, and part of the Fordist/Keynesian wave (Foucauldian approaches);

4) It's a system in which the bureaucracy, or a special kind of tributary elite, or a 'new class', takes power instead of the capitalists (Djilas, some Trotskyists, Bakunin's critique of Marx);

5) It's a distorted/degenerated variety of socialism arising from revolutions succeeding 'prematurely' or being taken over by bureaucrats (some Trotskyists, soft-Stalinists, some New Left);

6) It's some kind of transition to socialism, but the 'wrong kind' of socialism (top-left of the political compass spectrum instead of bottom-left) (a common position in the New Left);

7) It was in fact socialism, at least in a minimal sense, and really was building a completely different society (most 'orthodox Marxists'/Stalinists, some New Left pro-Maoists).

The accounts of why it collapsed would vary with the theory:

1) It collapsed because the inner development succeeded, and the countries could productively re-engage with the world market, or because it was abandoned as less effective than export-driven growth;

2) It underwent internal state reorganisations for greater effectiveness, which led to a transmutation into capitalism, much like that experienced by Westphalian states such as Germany in an earlier period;

3) It failed because it couldn't meet the demand for consumer goods, and hence was outpaced by developments in capitalism, and it couldn't stay ideologically viable once modernism went into decline, hence suffering a crisis of legitimacy;

3) As a modernist-Keynesian-Fordist project, it couldn't survive the global transition to post-Fordism or neoliberalism (it became uncompetitive with a 'higher stage' of capitalism, or unattractive within a new discursive frame);

4) or 5): The bureaucracy gradually turned into, or unfolded over time its desire to become, a new bourgeoisie;

5), 6) or 7): It was defeated by external 'siege' by the world-system (e.g. US-imposed costs of the arms race);

5), 6) or 7): The bureaucracy has been 'overthrown' by a nascent capitalist class which has developed in its interstices.

Peer-to-peer relations (not necessarily direct production-relations) would be tied-up with the move away from modernist centralisation, the move towards niche production and the growing advantages of the US state; it would also be implied in theories suggesting an empowered agent (either a local bourgeoisie or a popular movement) as the source of collapse, since these agents used diffuse power against concentrated power. One could question, however, whether peer-to-peer is cause or effect of the moves away from modernism and Keynesianism. It would also be irrelevant to certain of these accounts. If, for instance, the state simply decided to reorient to the global market, or the bureaucracy's self-unfolding as a nascent bourgeoisie was completed, this has nothing to do with peer-to-peer. So it depends how the process is understood.

It's possible, BTW, that a similar process is now unfolding in Syria, which has many attributes of the Soviet-type model, and is clearly finding it difficult to handle the impact of (for instance) social media.

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