Category:P2P Class Theory
Key Articles
From the P2P Foundation
- Class and Capital in Peer Production. Michel Bauwens. Capital & Class 97, Spring 2009 vol. 33 no. 1 121-141 [1]
- Bauwens, M. (2012) “From the theory of peer production to the production of peer production theory”. Journal of Peer Production 1. Available at: http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-1/invited-comments/from-the-theory-of-peer-production-to-the-production-of-peer-production-theory/ (accessed on 24 July 2013).
- Bauwens, M. and V. Kostakis (2014) “From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism”. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism and Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 12(1): 356–361.
Others
- A strategy for the commons in the context of social transformation: Massimo de Angelis, Crises, Movements and Commons. Borderlands e-journal, VOLUME 11 NUMBER 2, 2012. [2]
- The Real World of the Decentralized Autonomous Society. By J.Z. Garrod. Triple C, Vol 14, No 1 (2016) [3]
Bernard Stiegler
For the moment, the only specific p2p philosopher, using the concept of a contributive society, is Bernard Stiegler:
Read this interview on the New Desires of Post-Capitalism:
* Article: ‘THIS SYSTEM DOES NOT PRODUCE PLEASURE ANYMORE’. AN INTERVIEW WITH BERNARD STIEGLER. Pieter Lemmens. Krisis, 2011, Issue 1
URL = http://www.krisis.eu/content/2011-1/krisis-2011-1-05-lemmens.pdf
"Notwithstanding his rather bleak diagnosis of contemporary society, Stiegler is not pessimistic with regard to the future. Whereas today’s capitalism is headed for destruction, it is precisely in the digitalized networks through which it tries to control the populations that a new kind of economy is emerging, one that is not only inventing new modes of production like open source and peer-to-peer, but that is also slowly creating a new economy of desire that could lead to the invention of new ways of life, new modes of individual and collective existence. A new society could arise on the same technological base that is now still predominantly destroying the social bonds. The digital networks might be the prime catalysts in the transformation from today’s consumer society into what he calls a ‘society of contribution’. In this context he talks in this interview about technologies in terms of pharmaka (a term derived from Plato and from his teacher Derrida) that can act both as a poison, destroying sociality and proletarianizing human existence, as well as a medicine, producing social ties and deproletarianzing human existence."
Key Books
Historic
- The Creation of Inequality. How Our Prehistorical Ancestors set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire. by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus (Harvard University Press, 2012): "Flannery and Marcus want to the understand the hows and whys of major evolutionary transitions in human history: from egalitarian to achievement-based societies, from those to chiefdoms with hereditary inequality, and subsequently to states and empires."
- Christopher Boehm. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press. Google Bks version
- The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. by Kojin Karatani. Duke University Press, 2014 ; for details, see: Evolution of the Structure of World History Through Modes of Exchange
- Global Magic. Technologies of Appropriation from Ancient Rome to Wall Street. By Alf Hornborg. [4] : "This book reveals how our ideas about growth and progress ignore how money and machines throughout history have been used to exploit less affluent parts of world society."
Contemporary
- Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour. The Commonfare Hypothesis. By Andrea Fumagalli, Alfonso Giuliani, Stefano Lucarelli, Carlo Vercellone. Routledge, 2020 [5]
- Guy Standing. Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. Bloomsbury, 2014 [6]: discusses how rights - political, civil, social and economic - have been denied to the Precariat, and argues for the importance of redefining our social contract around notions of associational freedom, agency and the commons."
* The Bleeding Edge. Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World. By Bob Hughes. New Internationalist Books, 2016 [7]
Key Quotes
"The leftist milieus hold onto a notion of the working class that has become historically static, they refuse to see that a main condition of work today is a flexibility of contract, a form of generic working and a collapsing of the division between intellectual and manual labour. A decline in social struggles mirrors the decline of the workplace as the rooted-site where a working class identity, with its ‘shared assumptions’, was enabled to come into being. This decline in workplace struggles and the redefinition of the ‘factory’ may also be indicative of the ‘disaggregation’ of the working class, its being broken into components and work units of a much smaller scale. It could be said that the dichotomy between individual and collective is being played out in just such a zone where working class people are experiencing themselves as ‘working-class individuals’ severed from a wider class belonging. When this is coupled to the ways in which the content of work is changing - ‘the transformation of working class labour into a labour of control, of handling information, into a decision-making capacity’ - we see that what is being demanded from employees is an ‘investment of subjectivity’, the willingness to enter into a ‘vocational’ relationship to work. A crucial component of working class experience today is just this conflict around the production of subjectivity: ‘If production today is directly the production of social relations, then the raw material of immaterial labour is subjectivity and the ideological environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces’. (See Maurizio Lazzarato, Immaterial Labour in Radical Though in Italy (University of Minnesota, 1996).)
- Howard Slater [8]
Exploiting information is now key
""Rather than think of the commodity form philosophically, as a kind of eternal essence of capital, I think it is more interesting to think about how the information form comes into contact with the commodity form and forces it to mutate. What emerges is a commodity form far more abstract than anything hitherto, a derivative form, one that does not need any particular material being at all, even though it is in no sense immaterial. Rather, the fact that information can have an arbitrary relation to materiality infects the commodity form itself. Property is no longer a thing. Whole new relations of production have to be concocted to canalize information as a force of production into some new exploitative economy, one now based in the first instance on asymmetries of information. The “business model” of any contemporary corporation is to extract surplus information from both labor and non-labor."
- McKenzie Wark [9]
Non-extractive commons producers are the new political subject
The "potentially progressive political subject-in-itself is rather formed by all those whose labour produces the commons, but does not control, expropriate and dispossess the commons of nature, the social, knowledge, culture, technology, care, and education. The 1% are not part of this political subject, but rather form its dialectical opposite."
- Christian Fuchs (tripleC 14(1): 232-242, 2016)
Fighting for a piece of the pie is not the real struggle
"There can be nothing more fundamental to the understanding of society than the manner in which it organizes its metabolism with nature. How does our society meet our basic needs: clothing, food, shelter, warmth etc. And what is the character of wealth in our society? If wealth is money as more money, then really the satisfaction of human needs is a mere sideshow – in fact, this sideshow is what the class struggle is all about. It is struggle for the means of subsistence, the satisfaction of needs. Class struggle is not the struggle for socialism. It is a struggle for material security. The circumstance that the class tied to work has to struggle to make ends meet posits a devastating judgment about bourgeois society."
- Werner Bonefeld [10]
Emancipation of labor vs emancipation from labor
"At the moment, we find an abundance of research dedicated to building spaces of labor independence within the productive networks most invested in the capitalist mode of value extraction. This rebirth of mutualism and the growth of online cooperation are only the first steps in the struggle. With regard to breaking the sequence of desire-consumption (and its forced monetization), there are widespread efforts to create currencies like Bitcoin and to build autonomous communication networks and/or independent consumption networks, and these efforts are partial but significant. They cannot become decisive, however, without offensively seizing that crucial point where capitalist production transforms productive subjectification into the autocratic production of subjects.
It is clear that the strike against the extraction of value and the strike that operates at the level of the capitalist abstraction of social exploitation are not the same thing. In the first case, the struggle is directed at the appropriation of profit; in the second, at the overturning of models of the reproduction of society, of its capitalist rule, and of the contextual minting of functional currency. Today it is clear that these two levels of struggle are not identical, but they are nonetheless closely connected. The first one is horizontal; the second is vertical. The first is a struggle for the emancipation of labor; the second for liberation from labor. From the point of view of the struggles, it would be impossible to distinguish them. Nor, however, can they be conflated—because the one struggles and the other builds. They must do it separately; they must do it together."
- Antonio Negri [11]
Key Statistics
- Oxfam’s 2017 report: the eight richest men today have the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity [12]
Pages in category "P2P Class Theory"
The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 475 total.
(previous page) (next page)A
- Academic Proletariat
- Adolph Reed on Identity Politics and Inequality
- Against Oligarchy
- Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- Agrarian Class Structures and the Origins of Capitalism
- Alexander Bard on the Digital Class Struggle in the 21st Century
- Algo-Robotic Systems
- Algorithmic Economy
- Algorithmic Management
- Algorithms, Capital, and the Automation of the Common
- Alienation
- Anti-Fiat Strategies for the Denationalization of Money
- Anti-Politics
- Archaeology of Wealth Differences
- Art and the Working Class
- Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism
- Asset-Based Egalitarianism
- Associationism
- Automating Inequality
B
- Batshit Jobs
- Benjamin Shestakofsky on the Inegalitarianism of the Startup Economy
- Beyonders
- Bibliography of Hunter-Gatherers
- Bibliography of the Triple C Debate between P2P Theory and Marxist Critics
- Bifo on the Refusal of Work
- Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
- Biocommunism
- Bitcoin
- Bitcoin as the Successor to the Dollar as Global Reserve Currency
- Blockchain and the Distributed Reproduction of Capitalist Class Power
- Boy Kings
- Breadchain Crowdstaking Protocol
- Brett Christophers on the Power of Asset Managers and the Drive to Privatize the Public Sector
- Brutocracy
- Burning Man
C
- Cadre Capitalism
- Calculation Debate in the Age of Big Data
- Can Reducing Income Inequality Decouple Economic Growth from CO 2 Emissions
- Capital and Ideology
- Capital as Power
- Capitalism
- Capitalism as a Mode of Exchange
- Capitalism as a Transformation of Slavery
- Capitalism in the Web of Life
- Capturing Value Through Protocol Innovation
- Carlo Vercellone on Cognitive Capitalism
- Case Against Race Reductionism
- Catabolic Capitalism
- Center-Periphery Theories of Samir Amin
- Christian Parenti on Diversity as Ruling Class Ideology
- Circulation of Capital
- Circulation of Elites
- Citadel, Market and Altar
- Citizens to Lords
- Civilisational Complexity and Elite Decay
- Civilizational Complexity and Elite Decay
- Class
- Class Analysis of Identity Politics
- Class and Capital in Peer Production
- Class Struggle vs Status Struggle Politics
- Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation
- Claus Offe on the Displacement of Work
- Code Is Law and Modes of Coercion
- Cognitive Capitalism
- Collective Action
- Coming of Neo Feudalism
- Coming of the Global Working Class
- Commodifying Danish Housing Commons
- Common and Commons in the Contradictory Dynamics between Knowledge-based Economy and Cognitive Capitalism
- Commonfare Hypothesis
- Commons and Class Struggle
- Commons as Political Subject
- Commons Fund for the Precariat
- Commons Transition Strategies for Reform or Revolution
- Commons, Class Struggle and the World
- Communitarian Revolutionary Subject
- Community and Cooperative Renewable Energy Powershifts
- Complex Hegemony
- Concept of Rent Relevant to a Discussion of Surplus-Value in the Digital World
- Conflicts in the Knowledge Society
- Consumtariat
- Continuing Relevance of the Marxian Labor Theory
- Corporate Involvement in Free and Open Source Software
- Corvées
- Cost of Inequality
- Creation of Inequality
- Creation of Patriarchy
- Crises, Movements and Commons
- Critical Political Economic Framework for Peer Production’s Relation to Capitalism
- Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School
- Crowdslaving
- Cyber-Proletariat
- Cyberdeutocracy
- Cyberocracy
- Cycles of Accumulation and Hegemony Between Private Accumulating Classes and State Accumulating Classes
- Cycles of Violence in the United States
- Cyclical Theory of Elite Competition, Extraction and Exhaustion
D
- Daniel Bitton on Immediate Return Hunter-Gathering Societies
- Daniel Gortz on the Competitivity of the Commons within Capitalism
- Daniel Gortz on the Theory of Moral Revolutions as Rooted in Socio-Economic Transformations
- Data Capitalism
- Data Divide
- David DeGraw's Proposals for Common Ground for the 99 Percent Movement
- David Graeber on the History of the Military-Coinage-Slavery Complex
- Debt Obligations and Hierarchy
- Decentralization as a Means for Developers and other Stakeholders to Take Back Control from Centralized Platforms
- Deep History of the Earliest States
- Defunding the Police as a Luxury Belief
- Delinking
- Democracy Against Capitalism
- Dependent Accumulation and Unequal Exchange
- Destiny of Civilization
- Dictatorship of the Proletariat of Consumption
- Differential Commoning
- Digital Capitalism and Distributive Forces
- Digital Formations of the Powerful and the Powerless
- Digital Labor
- Digital Labour and Prosumer Capitalism
- Digital Socialism
- Digital Solidarity
- Direct vs Indirect Domination
- Dispositif
- Diversity As Ideology
- Dollar Economy vs Supermoney Economy
E
- Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital
- Ecology of Class
- Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America
- Economic Limitarianism
- Ecovillage Development as Socio-Economic Segregation
- Effimera
- Egalitarianism as the Economic Revolution of the 20th Cy
- Elite Overproduction
- Elite Replacement
- Elite Theory of Gaetano Mosca
- Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration
- Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration
- Emergence of the Modern Secular Clerisy
- Emergentsia
- End Times
- Energy and Labor
- Entrepreneurs as the New Labor Class
- Environmental Proletariat
- Epic Struggle for the Internet of Things
- Establishment
- Ethical Poverty Line
- European Corporate Elite
- Evolution of Statehood
- Evolution of the Modes of Exchange
- Exploitation and Rent-Seeking Models in Social Media and P2P Exchange Platforms
F
- Fabrication Divide
- Factory
- Failure of Liberal Capitalist Democracy
- Feminism, Labour and Digital Media
- Feudal Internet
- Feudal Origins of Capitalism
- Feudal Security
- Feudalism
- Firm Commitment
- Five Strategies To Improve the Conditions of Digital Labour
- Fordism
- Fossil Capital
- Four Basic Scenarios for the Future
- Four Futures
- Fragments on the Machines
- Framework for Critically Theorising and Analysing Digital Labour
- Frank Pasquale on the Shift from Territorial to Functional Sovereignty
- From Dot-com Capitalism to Cybernetic Communism
- From the Precariat to the Multitude
G
- General Theory of the Precariat
- George Caffentzis on the Crisis of Social Reproduction
- George Simondon
- Gift Economy as a Mode of Exchange
- Global Architecture of Wealth Extraction
- Global Carbon Budget
- Global Councils of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
- Global Inequality
- Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism
- Global Power Elite
- Global Worker
- Global Working Class
- Google Archipelago
- Governance by Numbers
- Governance By Plutocracy Is Simply Not a Sustainable Way of Running a DAO
- Government of the Precarious
- Guilds, the Gold Standard, and Modern International Cooperation as Vital Institutions
- Guy Standing on How the Precariat Should Be Reframing Social Protection for the 21st Century
- Guy Standing on Taskers in the Precariat as Expressions of Rentier Capitalism
H
- Hacker Movement as a Continuation of Labour Struggle
- Hacking Capitalism
- Haroon Sheikh on Who Has Power in a Platform Society
- Hegemonic Transition
- History and Development of the State
- History of Social Mobility
- History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
- How Land Property Is Tied To Inequality
- How Private Power Crushed Liberty
- How Technology Drives Inequality
- How the Capitalist Agrarian Revolution Affected the Commons and Property Regimes
- Human Capital Theory
- Hydrarchy