Overview page to different related concepts.

Concepts

Also: Guild System

Podcasts and Webcasts

MacKenzie Wark on the Hacker Manifesto and Class

Richard Florida on the Creative Class

Immaterial Labour and the Class Composition of Cognitive Capitalism

Discussion

Michel Bauwens: The Social Web and its Antagonisms

Sam Rose disputes the relevance of class for understanding peer to peer practices

Sam Rose:

"I agree that it exists still, as do many components of the legacy of earlier eras. I also agree that people use the word "class" in more than one way. I understand the paradigms of emancipatory tradition. I agree that there are objective structural conditions in society. I agree it's possible to "classify" them, based on many different ways of measuring, including income, quality of life, etc. I tend to find some of the classification systems we employ, both in general discourse, and in more academic circles, limiting. Limiting to both our quest to understand the nature of humans, and limiting to the people who come to accept their classification.

Yet, I also try to understand human nature, not just through the world view of academic and philosophical viewpoints, but also equally through the complex adaptive, bio-psycho-social-systems active in the majority of people in the world, who are processing and acting from a viewpoint that is generally not literate of the concepts that you describe.

So, I ask "why are there objective, structural conditions in society? Why do some people end up in some 'class' in society? Why are some people reacting against the notion of being part of a class?"

My argument is that quite a significant amount of people do not even know, nor understand that they are adopting and adapting to external conditions by solving problems in a "peer production" fashion. Instead, these people are gravitating towards these ways of solving problems, because the pressure of the conditions of the existing social paradigm is compelling them towards it.

There are many more dimensions to the emergence of "p2p" human phenomenon than I've often seen or heard being discussed. These dynamics of shifts in human nature have, at the same time, at least a biological, a psychological, and a social/complex environmental component. Integral theory is useful, but often unfortunately not understood. I think integral theory was successful in accurately packaging multiple complexities, and emergent patterns into useful shorthand terms before very many people outside of a small circle of academics were able to understand and comprehend how it all is inter-related.

I am starting to outline a "Literacy of Human Nature" here: http://communitywiki.org/en/LiteracyOfHumanNature that attempts to explore how these dimensions and factors fit together.

Those different factors combine to affect the emergence of humans who solve their problems of existence by carrying out activities in a "peer production" fashion. I think that many of those very people actually intuit the confining nature of being regarded as being part of a "class". So, some of them seek and find ways of solving existential problems in ways that seem to them to obsolete the dominance of the "class" paradigm. Not abolish "class", but to make it irrelevant and obsolete, and impotent in their own lives, and the lives of those connected with them. A quaint, old-fashioned notion, like the dusty old books about eugenics that you can find in the basement archive of our local university library.

The need to frame and define an emerging new phenomenon as the "Rise of a new class" is especially ironic to me, when the people under consideration in the case of "p2p" phenomena appear to me to be rejecting "class", and that rejection, in my observation and estimation, is one of their core fundamental assumptions about how to solve their problems of existence. The definition of people as part of a "class" is too limiting, even if it originates in widely accepted academic roots. It confines the "view" too narrowly, and even when employed from academic/critical/emancipatory tradition, tends to confine understanding to a very few people.

My observation is that the need or desire to frame emerging human phenomenon in terms of "class" is actually more often than not employed *because* of it's confining properties. Because it reinforces the limited concepts it refers to. Plus, it's a headline component that is guaranteed to grab some readers :)

I also don't see Marx as the penultimate go-to filter through which to understand p2p phenomena. I see Marx as one man who thought about this a while ago, and articulated his thoughts very well. Yet, I see that many people are able to intuit and act upon their conditions of existence, and their existential problems in ways that I have never seen described by Marx, nor very many other people. The best way that I have found to date understand "why" these people are doing this, "what is in it for them?", "who is doing what to whom, and why?" is to look at the bio-psycho-social conditions of existence, and to think about how this human bio-psycho-social system fits into larger complex systems. Looking at it this way immediately reveals to me that this is *not* a "mass-culture" phenomenon. It is not the rise of a "class" of people in society. Instead it is a simultaneous localized emergence of ways of solving problems that is a reaction to the breakdown, corrosion, and failure of existing mass culture social, economic, political, and other infrastructure. Many of these failures and breakdowns are rooted in the fundamental need to establish caste, class, and other stratified barriers among people, so as to establish "one-up/one-down" relationships with people, for the purposes of control of people and resources." (p2presearch mailing list, January 2008)

Books to Read

Richard Barbrook. The Class of the New
Cyberlords as a rentier class

More Information

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P2P Class Theories

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