Dear Andy,<br><br>thank you so much for these clarifications, which I'm adding to Ning,<br><br>I will only respond later as I'm on the road starting today,<br><br>Michel<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 6:00 AM, Andy Robinson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ldxar1@gmail.com">ldxar1@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The following, in
contrast, are very much answerable questions:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">1) how does
peer-to-peer production relate to autonomist Marxism</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">2) how does
peer-to-peer production relate to world-systems analysis</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">3) how does
peer-to-peer production relate to 60s-wave neo-Marxism</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">4) how does
peer-to-peer production relate to the ostensibly Marxist regimes of
the USSR, Eastern Europe and China</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">5) how does
peer-to-peer production relate to analysis of the labour process</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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).</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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).
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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).
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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).
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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);</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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);</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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);</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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);</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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);</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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);</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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).</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The accounts of why it
collapsed would vary with the theory:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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;
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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;</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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;</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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);</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">4) or 5): The
bureaucracy gradually turned into, or unfolded over time its desire
to become, a new bourgeoisie;</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">5), 6) or 7): It was
defeated by external 'siege' by the world-system (e.g. US-imposed
costs of the arms race);</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">5), 6) or 7): The
bureaucracy has been 'overthrown' by a nascent capitalist class which
has developed in its interstices.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.
</p>
<div></div>
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