[P2P-F] autocracy as most efficient governance?

Wed Jul 20 00:33:21 CEST 2011

hey michel,

i'm afraid there are no links this time; although the research literature on free software and open source is continuously growing, i've yet to see a study focusing on perl (with the exception of steven weber's brief discussion in 'the success of open source'). as for freebsd, you'll have to wait a few more months for the official release of my dissertation:)

regarding soviets and whether more generally there is a tendency in council-based forms of organisation to contravene individual autonomy of action and become totalitarian, i suppose it depends on 'what we make of them'. if our idea of councils is modeled upon the gerontocracy of village elders in traditional rural communities or on the mechanism of domination that soviets became in the hands of the bolsheviks, then it will no doubt appear as if the sperm of fascism is latent in councils. but the term 'council' could equally well be used to describe antiauthoriatarian and bottom-up forms of organisation: for example, strike and occupation committees in worker-occupied factories. to say that councils have a tendency toward totalitarianism is not that much different than saying that all forms of collective organisation have a tendency toward totalitarianism. i know some people would find this to be a fairly tenable argument over a pint of beer at the pub (especially some of my social psychologists-friends who like to explain everything by reference to the diachronic struggle of the individual against the collectivity) but the problem with this view is that it cannot account for the existence of anti-hierarchical organisations which champion the individual autonomy of their members.

x.
g.

________________________________
From: p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org [p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org] on behalf of Michel Bauwens [michelsub2004 at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, July 18, 2011 10:34 AM
To: P2P Foundation mailing list
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] autocracy as most efficient governance?

hi George,

thanks for both the details on perl and freebsd, any links on this, to document in the wiki?

as for the soviets, as I was indeed talking on the situation 'before' they were turned into administrative organs of the bolcheviks, but so did rosa luxemburg when she wrote about it; her point was I think that without checks and balances coming from multiple governance, there would be an inherent tendency for this councils to degenerate into a single power mechanism ... Your argument is that the bolcheviks were the proximate cause of that, and it is indeed difficult to know what would have happened without them, but the reality was also that the councils were not strong enough an independent power to actually oppose that transformation, and that once they submitted, no other power in society could counter-balance the power of the bolchevik regime, which is a good argument for the rosa luxemburg position.

My conclusion from that is that it is better to take into account antagonisms and to have institutional self-rule within a pluralism of institutions and social logics.

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 6:41 AM, George Dafermos <G.N.Dafermos at tudelft.nl<mailto:G.N.Dafermos at tudelft.nl>> wrote:
hey michel,

no doubt, some open source projects - linux being the most famous - have a 'benevolent dictator'. in the case of linux, that's linus torvalds who ultimately decides what code (contributed by other linux developers) goes into the mainline kernel release. however, as you know, this model is by no means the only governance model encountered in the realm of free software development. for instance, *perl* uses rotation so that for every new version of the software a different perl developer is responsible. other projects diverge even more radically from the benevolent dictator model: in *freebsd* decisions are made collectively by consensus. freebsd has an element of 'representation', or more precisely, it has a formal means of representing its few hundreds of developers (known as committers because of their ability to 'commit' changes to the code repository) in project leadership. the so-called core team - the administrative organ of the project - consists of 9 committers elected biennially by and amongst committers, and is responsible for (a) granting/revoking commit privileges and (b) mediating in serious conflicts between committers. it is obvious that this type of representation and modern parliamentary representation are markedly different. in freebsd core members are revocable and accountable: they have to defer to the wishes of the base of committers, making decisions that receive their consensual backing. core team membership is not accompanied by any special privileges, nor by the mandate to tell others what to do. many sociologists, following max weber, view such 'instructed representation as inherent in direct-democratic/antiauthoritarian types of government and hence as the opposite of the enlightened dictator model.

as for soviets in russia, in my last email to the list i spoke of 'self-rule' referring to individual autonomy of action, using the term as a property of the individual. you, on the other hand, use it to refer basically to a circumstance in which the administrative organ (by appropriating or monopolising the means of administration?) becomes independent from the collectivity and starts to act as a distinct social stratum with its own goals and interests. this is a syllogism that i can understand: it warns against vesting authority bearers with unlimited powers and advises in favour of employing checks and balances to ensure that administrative organs don't turn into mechanisms of domination of the many by the few. but i still don't see the connection between self-rule and totalitarianism.

in any case, what transformed soviets into administrative organs of the openly totalitarian regime of the bolsheviks was not their own internal tendency toward totalitarianism but the fact that the bolsheviks stripped them of their autonomy and turned them into extensions of the bolshevik party. that's what i've gathered from my readings on that period.

x,
g.

________________________________
From: p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org<mailto:p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org> [p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org<mailto:p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org>] on behalf of Michel Bauwens [michelsub2004 at gmail.com<mailto:michelsub2004 at gmail.com>]
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2011 2:47 PM

To: P2P Foundation mailing list
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] autocracy as most efficient governance?

hi george,

don't you agree that a lot of open source projects have some degree of autocratic rule (the so-called benevolent dictator phenomenum), in order to insure productivity .. .(though this does not involve command and control over labour, nor over the allocation of resources, but rather over the post-hoc quality control mechanisms)

now, regarding " self-rule leads to totalitarianism"

this was the debate between rosa luxemburg and lenin, discussed in the poulantzas books which I have been reading this year (p. agrees with rl). Basically, Rosa Luxemburg warned that a total reliance on self-rule through soviets, could lead to authoritarianism, so she urged the bolcheviks to retain representational parliaments in a structure of dual power ... I tend to agree that we need plurarchic forms of governance keeping each other in check, to avoid the degeneracy of any form of self-rule that may be the 'only game in town' ..

I'm also warming up more and more to greek sortition mechanisms .. interestingly, this is now also being discussed by the new Anonymous Party I believe ..

Michel

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 12:22 AM, George Dafermos <G.N.Dafermos at tudelft.nl<mailto:G.N.Dafermos at tudelft.nl>> wrote:
Yes, you're right: the interviewee (MT) uses the word - erroneously - in both senses, without realising he's contradicting himself by saying first that social conduct in his world is based on players' self-rule and then going on to say that his authority is fast becoming 'autocratic' (i.e. totalitarian).

the point he's apparently making is that self-rule is the norm for vast sections of eve space that remain free from 'policing' but authority inside the big corporations/alliances of eve tends to be autocratic (i.e. centralised in the hands of one person). yet, there is no logical connection between the two: there's no proof - neither in the real world nor in eve - that self-rule leads to totalitarianism.

g.

________________________________
From: p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org<mailto:p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org> [p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org<mailto:p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org>] on behalf of Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis [xekoukou at gmail.com<mailto:xekoukou at gmail.com>]
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2011 6:09 PM
To: P2P Foundation mailing list
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] autocracy as most efficient governance?

I think that what he is saying is that he is the ultimate ruler, ie an autocracy.

2011/7/13 George Dafermos <G.N.Dafermos at tudelft.nl<mailto:G.N.Dafermos at tudelft.nl>>
Hi Michel,

there's a basic misunderstanding here. the passage conflates *autocracy* with *autarchy* (i understand that greek words can be confusing..). the author uses the former term to refer to a situation 'where players rule themselves'. That is, what he means to say is 'self-rule', self-government. that being the case, (s)he should have used the word autarchy instead; or even better: self-rule or self-management. in light of this correction, the subject line of your email should read: 'self-government as the most efficient governance?'

x,
g.

________________________________
From: p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org<mailto:p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org> [p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org<mailto:p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org>] on behalf of Michel Bauwens [michelsub2004 at gmail.com<mailto:michelsub2004 at gmail.com>]
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2011 10:53 AM
To: p2p-foundation
Cc: John Robb; Robert Steele
Subject: [P2P-F] autocracy as most efficient governance?

see http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/04/07/eve-online-audience-with-the-king-of-space/

Autocracy is the most effective form of government in null sec [the enormous sections of space within Eve Online with no AI police, where players rule themselves]. Council systems don’t work very well. Goonswarm is very lucky in that we have one large corporation, Goonwaffe, which used to be Goonfleet, which is mostly Something Awful members and has over 2,000 people. Since I’m the CEO of that corporation all the other ancillary corporations in the alliance are relatively powerless, and that works towards an autocracy. Council-based alliances typically have corporations of roughly the same size.

(I actually agree with this, in case of warfare, even egalitarian tribes had warchiefs for the duration of hostilities; or does anyone want to challenge thi?)

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