[P2P-F] p2p and marxism debate, first 'real' reply to Jean Lievens

[Michel Bauwens]

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 <ldxar1 at gmail.com> 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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