View source for 7.1.B. P2P, Postmodernity, Cognitive Capitalism: within and beyond


'''7.1.B. P2P, Postmodernity, Cognitive Capitalism: within and beyond'''

Peer to peer has clearly a dual nature. As we have showed, it is the very technological infrastructure of cognitive capitalism, the very organizational mode it needs to implement in its global teams. P2P exemplifies many of the flexible and fluid aspects characteristic of fluid modernity (or postmodernity): it disintegrates boundaries and binary oppositions, blurs the inside and the outside.  Just as post- or late feudal society and its absolutist kings needed the bourgeoisie, late capitalist society cannot survive without knowledge workers and their P2P practices. It can be argued that the adoption of P2P processes is in fact essential for competitiveness: a strong foundation of P2P technologies, the use of free or open source software, processes for collective intelligence building, free and fluid cooperation, are now all necessary facets of the contemporary corporation. The old format of  'pyramidal intelligence', i.e. a hierarchy of command and control, in its old bureaucratic format, or even as 'management by objectives', based on the assumption of information scarcity, is increasingly counter-productive.

At the same time, it cannot cope with it very well, and often P2P is seen as a threat. The entertainment industry for example, wishes to destroy P2P technology. In general, corporations are in constant tension between the logic of self-unfolding peer groups and the profit-driven logic of the feudally-structured management-by-objectives system, and by the tension between the cooperative production of innovation and its private appropriation. The dot.com crisis of 2001 showed how difficult it is for the present system to convert the new use value into exchange value, and created an important rift between the affected knowledge workers and the financial capital, which had taken them on that ride. After the short-term flourishing of the hope for instant riches in the dotcom economy, many of them turned their energies to the social sphere, where internet-based innovation not only continued, but thrived even more, but now based on explicit P2P modes of cooperation.

Thus, while being part and parcel of the capitalist and postmodern logics, it also already points beyond it. From the point of view of capital, it annoys it, but it also needs it to thrive and survive itself. From the point of view of its practitioners, they like it above all else, they know it is more productive and creates more value, as well as meaning in their life and a dense interconnected social life, but at the same time, they have to make a living and feed their families. The not-for-profit nature of P2P is at the heart of this paradox.

This is the great difficulty, and is why its opponents will not fail to point out the so-called parasitical nature of P2P. P2P creates massive use-value, but no automatic exchange value, and thus, it cannot fund itself. It exists on the basis of the vast material wealth created by the presently existing system. Peer to peer practitioners generally thrive in the interstices of the system: programmers in between jobs, workers in bureaucratic organizations with time on their hand; students and recipients of social aid; private sector professionals during paid for sabbaticals, academics who integrate it into their research projects; beneficiaries of corporate or ‘foundation-based’ patronage. However, in terms of open source software, this is increasingly seen as essential for technological infrastructure, favored by an increasing numbers of governments who want an open standard, and also by rivals to Microsoft, who see it as a means of decreasing their dependency. It is more and more seen as an efficient means of production, and therefore, increasingly funded by the private sphere.

Apart from being an objective trend in society, it is also becoming a subjective demand, because it reflects a desired mode of working and being. P2P becomes, as it is for  this author, part of a positive P2P ethos.

Therefore, a P2P advocacy emerges, which turns the tables around, and it becomes a political and social movement. What is the main message of this emergent movement? I'll try to paraphrase the emerging message, which is being increasingly clearly formulated:

It says: "it is us knowledge workers who are creating the value in the monetary system; the present system privately appropriates the results of a vast cooperative network of value creation (as we argued in our section about the cooperative nature of cognitive capitalism). Most value is not created in the formal procedures of the enterprise, but despite it, because, despite impediments, we remain creative and cooperative, against all odds. We come to the job, no longer as workers just renting our bodies, but as total subjectivities, with all we have learned in our lives, through our myriad social interactions, and solve present problems through our personal social networks. It is not us knowledge workers living off on you, but you ‘vectoralists’ living off on us! We are the ones creating infinite use value, which you want to render scarce to transform it into tradable intellectual property, but you cannot do it without us. Even as we struggle to create a commons of information, in the meantime, while we lack the strength to totally transform the system, perhaps we will be strong enough to impose important transitory demands. Therefore, in your own interest, if you want innovation to continue, instead of ever larger number of us collapsing from stress-related diseases, you have to give us time and money. You cannot just use the information commons as an externality, you have to fund it. Establishing such a system, culminating in the instauration of a universal wage divorced from work, is in fact the very condition of your survival as an economic system, and at the same time, allows us to thrive as knowledge workers, by creating use value, meaning in our lives, time for learning and renewal, that we will bring back to your money-making enterprise."

The demand for a universal wage, increasingly debated, subject of academic research and government reports, and implemented for the first time in a ‘seed form’ in Brazil by President Lula, may well be the next great reform of the system, the wise course of action, awaiting its P2P “neo-Keynes�?, a collective able to translate the needs of the cooperative ethos in a set of political and ethical measures in the form of a commons-based political economy. Paradoxically, through the strengthening of cooperation, it will also re-invigorate cognitive capitalism (much like the welfare system create mass consumers), allowing the two logics to co-exist, in cooperation, and in relative independence from one another, installing a true competition in solving world problems.

The world system undoubtedly needs a number of important reforms. Amongst those I can think of is 1) the shift of the monopoly of violence from the nation-state, to an international cooperative body in charge of protecting human rights and avoid genocides and ethnic cleansings; it is no longer acceptable that any nation-state exerts illegitimate violence; 2) the setting up of regulatory bodies for the world economy, so that a through world society can emerge, in the sense of those proposed by George Soros, David Held and others; 3) changes in the nature of the system of capital in the sense described by Paul Hawken, David Korten, Hazel Henderson, i.e. a form of natural capitalism that can no longer appropriate the commons and externalize its environmental costs; 4) a new integral ‘international account’ systems no longer focused on the endless growth of material production, but on well-being indicators; 5) changes in the structures of corporations so that it no longer exclusively reflects the interests of the shareholders, but of all the stakeholders affected by its operations.

With historical hindsight, such a series of fundamental changes are only to be expected after major structural crises: they are probably still 20 to 50 years away . In the meantimes, as moles, P2P social forces are preparing the terrain for such a change.

Perhaps this is the place where I should explain my attitude to capitalism in a more explicit way. It is a force which has created material abundance for a part of the world population, but at an increasingly unacceptable cost. The growth paradigm, the usage without limit of natural resources, the pauperization of vast areas in the world, the ‘psychological unsustainability’ of the high stress model that affects even the elites in the Western states, disqualify its survival in its current form. The paradox is: the more successful it is , the more it destroyes the material and spiritual basis of life. But following Alan Page Fiske’s findings, I also believe that some form of market exchange will persist, that many people want it. This is why I think that we should develop strategies geared to the four intersubjective modes of being together and of making the world: 1) strengthening peer production and governance; 2) strengthening reciprocity-based gift economies on the local and regional scale, and fair trade on the international scale; 3) reforming the market, through monetary reform, natural capitalism measures, reform of the corporation, the introduction of multistakeholdership, etc.. 4) reforming the modes of hierarchy, in particular the state form; making it a supporter or at least a neutral arbiter in the balance between market exchange and the commons; introducting peer governance and multistakeholdership modes to offset bureaucratization.