[P2P-F] Responding to Stefan Meretz

Mon Mar 17 04:00:33 CET 2014

a cleaner version of my response, which will be published on march 20 on
the p2p blog:

Responding to Stefan Meretz's critique of the Peer Production
License<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=37660>
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]

Michel Bauwens
17th March 2014

*Stefan Meretz* produced a critique of the Peer Production
License<http://keimform.de/2014/socialist-licenses/>,
or more generically, Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses, in the Keimform
blog, to which I promised to respond.

Unfortunately, the critique is rather weak and misleading, so our responses
will be rather short and inserted inline. Our responses are in bold and
b-quote.

For context, I support the PPL, not in its full detail, but as a first of a
kind, Commons-Based Reciprocity License (the concept is from Primavera de
Filippi and Miguel Veira).

The key argument is the following: the present fully-sharing open licenses
which allow unrestricted commercial exploitation create a 'communism of
capital', i.e. a sphere of open knowledge, code and design, which is
subsumed to the present dominant political economy. But what we need is an
autonomous sphere of peer production, in which commoners and peer producers
can create their own livelyhood, while staying in the sphere of the
commons. In other words, we need a 'capital for the commons'. The best way
to achieve that is to converge the sphere of immaterial commons
contributions, with a sphere of cooperative accumulation through which the
surplus value can stay within the sphere of commons/cooperative production.

This is why we need a new type of licensing.

So, without further ado, Stefan Meretz writes:

"At first one has to understand the nature licenses have under the given
conditions. Licenses are permissions, thus contracts, "granted by a party
('licensor') to another party ('licensee') as an element of an agreement
between those parties". It bases on the precondition of excluding all other
people by the "rightholder". The power of exclusion given by law can be
converted into a "permission for all" by way of tricky constructions
combined with the obligation to put derived works under the GPL as well
(copyleft principle). Herein is nothing communist. The logic of exclusion
is partially reversed and therefore new spaces of commons oriented
practices can be created. Better than nothing. The license itself only
protects these practices against proprietary destructions. From my point of
view this can not be more under the given conditions. The outer world is
ruled by the logics of valuation and exclusion, and every free zone to
self-determine other practices has to be wrested from these dominant
logics. Embryonic forms, precisely."

*This first critique is rather weak. Indeed, I am not talking about the
legal, contractual basis of the GPL and similar licenses, but on the social
logic that they enable, which is: it allows anybody to contribute, and it
allows anybody to use. This is both consistent with Marx's defintion of
communism, and with the definition I use, that of communal shareholding by
Alan Page Fiske. This logic of course only exists in the realm of abundant
digital information, but it exists within the sphere of the political
economy of capital*. To deny this on the grounds of legal technicalities
seems to me a feeble argument.

The second part of the thesis "...the more capitalistic the practice" fails
as well. There is no comparative of "capitalistic". If you replace
"capitalistic" with "commodity-based", then is becomes even clearer:
Something is a commodity or not. Free software, for instance, isn't a
commodity. It can be appropriated and used by everyone, even by big
corporations. However, they cannot transform the free software into a
commodity, since this is prevented by the GPL. But they can use the
software in order to realize their business models in another fields. This
free use is a thorn in Bauwens side. He wants the commons to only be
commercially used by those who have contributed beforehand.

*This is also very weak, since I am not saying and never said, that the GPL
turns free sofrware into a commodity. But what I'm saying, and what nobody
can deny, is that non-commodified free software is subsumed to the
capitalist economy that uses it. There is a thriving commercial company of
products and services which is using and is based on GPL-generated code, as
there is on open design. 75% of Linux developers are paid by commercial
companies operating in the capitalist marketplace.*