Commons as a Mode of Production

Discussion

Carlo Vercellone:

< " have digital commons, despite themselves, prepared the conditions for an even more predatory and extractive capitalism? " >

Samourai Coop:

'Against approaches that reduce commons to the nature of goods or legal devices, Vercellone claims a materialist conception of operaist inspiration: the commons is defined neither by access nor by local governance, but by historical forms of organization of production founded on collective intelligence. This dynamic traverses all productive sectors and opens the possibility of a communalization of the public — that is, an internal transformation of rules of management and property according to principles of self-governance.

He proposes to "think, in the sense of Marx, the commons as a genuine socio-economic system in the process of emerging, which develops within capitalism itself and from its contradictions — sometimes in complementarity, but also in subordination, dependence, and predation."

Vercellone then proposes a periodization that particularly interested me, in that it breaks with deterministic readings of digital capitalism conceived as a "subject-less" process, entirely shaped by the logic of capital. He recalls that the informational revolution was first built on a synergy between counter-cultures and open science, outside market hegemony: "in the beginning, the logic or spirit of the commons preceded, and in a certain sense pushed, the development of digital capitalism." It is this anteriority that explains, according to him, a certain naïveté, since the golden age of free software rested on a radicalization of inclusivity — "the absence of clauses discriminating against uses" — opening the way to three major flaws: the authorization of uses contradictory with social aims (up to DRM); extractivism with "the appropriation of free software as free resources put at the service of capital accumulation"; and the absence of mechanisms for social remuneration of labor, constraining commons to financial dependence. The rise of platform capitalism after 2000, then of AI, are thus not ruptures but a continuous and systematic exploitation of these flaws. This crystallizes the central critique discussed throughout the day: have digital commons, despite themselves, prepared the conditions for an even more predatory and extractive capitalism? "

(https://www.samourai.world/post/event-report-study-day-on-digital-commons-review-and-outlook)