[P2P-F] From the Communism of Capital to a Capital for the Commons

[Michel Bauwens]

I believe this is an important and crucial intervention for social change:

Michel Bauwens:

The labor/p2p/commons movements today are faced with a paradox.
[image: Michel Bauwens]<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/Michel-Bauwens.jpg>

Michel Bauwens

On the one hand we have a re-emergence of the cooperative movement and
worked-owned enterprises, but they suffer from structural weaknesses.
Cooperative entities work for their own members, are reluctant to accept
new cooperators that would share existing profits and benefits, and are
practitioners of the same proprietary knowledge and artificial scarcities
as their capitalist counterparts. Even though they are internally
democratic, they often participate in the same dynamics of capitalist
competition which undermines their own cooperative values.

On the other hand, we have an emergent field of open and commons-oriented
peer production in fields such as free software, open design and open
hardware, which do create common pools of knowledge for the whole of
humanity, but at the same time, are dominated by both start-ups and large
multinational enterprises using the same commons.

Thus, we need a new convergence or synthesis, a 'open cooperativism', that
combines both commons-oriented open peer production models, with common
ownership and governance models such as those of the cooperatives and the
solidarity economic models. What follows is a more detailed argument on how
such transition could be achieved.

*The Main Argument*

Today we have a paradox, the more communistic the sharing license we use in
the peer production of free software or open hardware, the more
capitalistic the practice, with for example the Linux commons becoming a
corporate commons enriching IBM and the like ... it works in a certain way,
and seems acceptable to most free software developers, but is it the only
way?

Indeed, the General Public License and its variants, allow anyone to use
and modify the software code (or design), as long as the changes are also
put back in the common pool under the same conditions for further users.
This is in fact technically 'communism' as defined by Marx: from each
according to his abilities, to each according to their needs, but which
then paradoxically allows multinationals to use the free software code for
profit and capital accumulation. The result is that we do have an
accumulation of immaterial commons, based on open input, participatory
process, and commons-oriented output, but that it is subsumed to capital
accumulation. It is at present not possible, or not easy, to have social
reproduction (i.e. livelihoods) within the sphere of the commons. Hence the
free software and culture movements, however important they are as new
social forces and expression new social demands, are also in essence
'liberal'. This is not only acknowledged by its leaders such as Richard
Stallman, but also by anthropological studies like those of Gabriella
Coleman. Not so tongue-in-cheek we could say they are liberal-communist and
communist-liberal movements, which create a 'communism of capital'.

Is there an alternative ? We believe there is, and this would be to replace
non-reciprocal licenses, i.e. they do not demand a direct reciprocity from
its users, to one based on reciprocity. Call it a switch from 'communist',
to 'socialist' licenses'.

This is the choice of the Peer Production
License<http://p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License> as
designed and proposed by Dmytri Kleiner; it is not to be confused with the
Creative Commons non commercial license, as the logic is different.

The logic of the CC-NC is to offer protection to individuals reluctant to
share, as they do not wish a commercialization of their work that would not
reward them for their labor. Thus the Creative Commons 'non-commercial'
license stops the further economic development based on this open and
shared knowledge, and keeps it entirely in the not-for-profit sphere.
[image: dmytri_kleiner2]<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/dmytri_kleiner2.jpg>

Dmytri Kleiner

The logic of the PPL is to allow commercialization, but on the basis of a
demand for reciprocity. It is designed to enable and empower a
counter-hegemonic reciprocal economy that combines commons that are open to
all that contribute, while charging a license fee for the the for-profit
companies who want to use without contributing. Not that much changes for
the multinationals in practice, they can still use the code if they
contribute, as IBM does with Linux, and for those who don't , they would
pay a license fee, a practice they are used to. It's practical effect would
be to direct a stream of income from capital to the commons, but its main
effect would be ideological, or if you like, value-driven.

The entrepreneurial coalitions that are linked around a PPL commons would
be explicitly oriented towards their contributions to the commons, and the
alternative value system that it represents. From the point of view of the
peer producers or commoners, i.e. the communities of contributors to the
common pool, it would allow them to create their own cooperative entities,
in which profit would be subsumed to the social goal of sustaining the
commons and the commoners. Even the participating for-profit companies
would consciously contribute under a new logic. It links the commons to a
entrepreneurial coalition of ethical market entities (coops and other
models) and keeps the surplus value entirely within the sphere of
commoners/cooperators instead of leaking out to the multinationals. In
other words, through this convergence or rather combination of a commons
model for the abundant immaterial resources, and a reciprocity-based model
for the 'scarce' material resources, the issue of livelihoods and social
reproduction would be solved, and surplus value is kept inside the commons
sphere itself. It is the cooperatives that would, through their cooperative
accumulation, fund the production of immaterial commons, because they would
pay and reward the peer producers associated with them.

In this way, peer production would move from a proto-mode of production,
unable to perpetuate itself on its own outside capitalism, to a autonomous
and real mode of production. It creates a counter-economy that can be the
basis for reconstituting a 'counter-hegemony' with a for-benefit
circulation of value, which allied to pro-commons social movements, could
be the basis of the political and social transformation of the political
economy. Hence we move from a situation in which the communism of capital
is dominant, to a situation in which we have a 'capital for the commons',
increasingly insuring the self-reproduction of the peer production mode.

The PPL is used experimentally by Guerrilla Translation! and is being
discussed in various places, such as for example, in France, in the open
agricultural machining and design communities.

[image: PeerProduction]<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/PeerProduction2.png>

There is also a specific potential, inside the commons-oriented ethical
economy, such as the application of open book accounting and open supply
chains, would allow a different value circulation, whereby the stigmergic
mutual coordination that already works at scale for immaterial cooperation
and production, would move to the coordination of physical production,
creating post-market dynamics of allocation in the physical sphere.
Replacing both the market allocation through the price signal, and central
planning, this new system of material production would allow for massive
mutual coordination instead, enabling a new form of 'resource-based
economics'

Finally, this whole system can be strengthened by creating commons-based
venture funding, so as to create material commons, as proposed by Dmytri
Kleiner. In this way, the machine park itself is taken out of the sphere of
capital accumulation. In this proposed system, cooperatives needing capital
for machinery, would post a bond, and the other coops in the system would
fund the bond, and buy the machine for a commons in which both funders and
users would be members. The interest paid on these loans would create a
fund that would gradually be able to pay an increasing income to their
members, constituting a new kind of basis income.

The new open cooperativism is substantially different from the older form.
In the older form, internal economic democracy is accompanied by
participation in market dynamics on behalf of the members, using capitalist
competition. Hence a unwillingness to share profits and benefits with
outsiders. There is no creation of the commons. We need a different model
in which the cooperatives produce commons, and are statutorily oriented
towards the creation of the common good, with multi-stakeholders forms of
governance which include workers, users-consumers, investors and the
concerned communities.

Today we have a paradox that open communities of peer producers are
oriented towards the start-up model and are subsumed to the profit model,
while the cooperatives remain closed, use IP, and do not create commons. In
the new model of open cooperativism, a merger should occur between the open
peer production of commons, and the cooperative production of value. The
new open cooperativism integrates externalities, practices economic
democracy, produces commons for the common good, and socializes its
knowledge. The circulation of the common is combined with the process of
cooperative accumulation, on behalf of the commons and its contributors. In
the beginning, the immaterial commons field, following the logic of free
contributions and universal use for everyone who needs it, would co-exist
with a cooperative model for physical production, based on reciprocity. But
as the cooperative model becomes more and more hyper-productive and is able
to create sustainable abundance in material goods, the two logics would
merge.


http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/from-the-communism-of-capital-to-a-capital-for-the-commons/2014/03/22

-- 
*Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no
record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..*

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