[P2P-F] new capitalism and commoning

Tue Feb 8 08:51:26 CET 2011

I got this from Pat Kane, an initiative that resonates with Umair Haque's
Capitalist Manifesto

See: http://fearlessrevolution.com/blog/introducing-common.html

"Benefiting people, communities, society, the environment and future
generations is the new advantage in business. Our *new capitalist* brand is
about transitioning from competitive advantage to collaborative advantage.
COMMON is a brand that is community designed, community owned, and community
directed. It is a single open source brand — a living network — for rapidly
prototyping many progressive businesses that unleash creativity to solve
social problems."

Michel's comments:

why is this interesting, well, in the context of the stress that our friends
like Massimo and Silvia Federico place on opposing 'capitalist commons'

my question is the following, generally, as I don't know much about this
particular initiative:

- are these people 'enemies' simply because they are 'pro-capitalist'

- or are they friends because their heart is in the right place, and they
want to create and share value, and have generally progressive social goals

This is not just a matter of analysis, but also of language, and it poses a
key question: should a new 'hegemony' (not the right word, I know, but even
in a distributed world, something like that does exist) for a progressive
commons approach, not necessarily include progressive social and other
enterpreneurs ?

My answer would tend to be yes, as many young people in the West, but even
outside the West, especially here in East Asia, think that way; they want to
see progress, don't believe in old-style socialism, believe in cooperation
and sharing, but believe only free enterpreneurship offers progress and
dynamism for their society and their own projects.

Such an approach would require an analysis that distinguished exploitative
commons approaches, from genuine commons; but also in a language that
doesn't construct such people as enemies, and a pragmatic openness.

To come back to the notion of capitalist/anticapitalist commons, through an
example.

Take the free software movement, a movement of a particular labour
aristocracy, that has resulted in the creation of a strong commons, strong
relatively autonomous communities, but also with a strong ecology of
supportive corporate entities, that both profit from those commons, but
also, pay wages to free software developers, practice various forms of
benefit sharing, and support the communities and commons in various ways.
(this of course needs to be problematized, but nevertheless, this is an
important side of the equation)

So here we have a commons that is both instrumental to corporate entities
and 'capitalism', but also beneficial in substantial ways to a particular
type of knowledge workers. In this scenario, both sides have both concurring
and antagonistic interests.

The model of the free software movement is not unique, as it is now largely
replicated in many other open knowledge, open design and open manufacturing
projects, for whom it served as a successfull template

I'm  not advocating either uncritical support of the model, nor a pure
antagonistic approach, but rather an approach that starts with the interests
of the peer producing communities and their commons, and looks at how they
can optimally reproduce within current economic and power structures, and
advance their goals, step by step, until they are stronger to achieve more
fundamental transformations,

In many cases, the creation of a successful ecology of corporate entities,
and the attraction of progressive young enterpreneurs who may be willing to
create non profit maximisation market-operating entitities, will be a sine
qua non for the social reproduction and growth of the concrete commons and
their contributors/users

Michel

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