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P2P, THE COMMONS AND THE CRITIC OF GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

A. PEER PRODUCING A COMMONS KNOWLEDGE POOL FOR THE EMANCIPATORY TRANSITION

Since the previous global crisis, which had triggered the launch of global neoliberal restructuring known as Globalisation in the late 60s, there have been major contributions made from critical perspectives to understand the expansion of capitalist mode of production and the formation of the world market. Much of the insights were developed by political economy theorists from the West and the Center. Taken the first and second generation classical work of those like Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Hilferding, Vladimir I. Lenin, Bukharin, Peter Kropotkin, Karl Polanyi, Antonio Gramsci, third and forth generation classics came out in this period. Althusser, Foucoult, Lefebvre, Balibar, De Bord, Deleuze, Miliband, Poulantzas, Palloix, Murray, Hymer, Wallerstein, Amin, Arrighi, Baran, Sweezy, Breverman, Tronti, Negri, Verno, Cox, van der Pijl, Waterman among many others have re-worked on the state, classes, production, labour, capital, power, ideology, agency, and so forth, and have added new insights on our understanding of ever changing world historical structures and the possible vision for radical emancipatory change. In this post-war and New-Left era, both Gramsci and Polanyi had been rediscovered and their work stimulated -especially via Poulantzas’ analysis- the development of the analysis of the transnational dimension of the changing capitalism.

This fourth generation, and their students, have spent precious attention on the TNCs, internationalization of the capital, the state and the classes on the one hand, and the increasingly dominating role of information and knowledge in the current shifts in the world historical structures. Within the third generation theorists, Robert W. Cox was one of those who successfully synthesized the insights from first, second and third generation work theories. While he revalued Gramsci and Poulantzas’ concepts and ways of thinking of power and counter-power he developed a transnational and trans-level analysis of political economy from the level of production to inter-state system. After serving long time as an ILO expert, Cox became an academic in Colombia University and delivered his seminal articles which introduced the ‘Gramscian turn’ to the academic International discussion. These first articles published in Millennium Journal of International Studies in the early 80s, in a way opened a way also open the way for the ‘globalization of political economy’. These articles were successfully translating the basic concepts of Gramsci (like hegemony, historic bloc) to the international level. Such innovation broke a ground in realist IR dominated 'discipline'. Production, Power and World Orders: Social Forces in the Making of History came out in 1987. Cox has developed his original concepts like state-society complex, internationalization of production, internationalization of state, and international class formation, The implementation of historical materialist method to the analysis of transnational relations in the book has been a great contribution to the major debates on the state, classes and globalization. Cox work has later developed by theorists like Kees van der Pijl, Stephen Gill, Henk Overbeek, Otto Holman. This strand is known today as Neo-Gramscian global political economy perspective. Neo-Gramscian theorists have based their analysis of internationalization or transnationalization of production on the earlier and current theories of 'post-fordism' inspired by regulation school (Aglietta, Boyer, Lipietz, Jessop).

On the other hand, there has also been important analyses made by critical social theorists, most of them seen as neo-, open-, or post-Marxist, or post-structuralists, like Habermas, Touraine, Castells, Gorz, Hist & Thompson, as well as Autonomist and Workerist Marxists like Tronti, Verno, Negri, Bifo, so on have focused on the new developments in forces and relations of production, especially on the impact of communication, information and transportation technologies and networks. Castell's, Beck's, and Dickens', work on ICTs and network effect has broke a ground in the 90s. Then Hardt and Negri delivered their magnum opus ‘the Empire’, which was followed by the Multitude and the Commonwealth. This work constituted controversial and comprehensive post-disciplinary and post-structural 'global political economy' analysis, and when studying the changes currently taking place at the production level, successfully identified the potential and actual power of the emerging new productive forces, as well as the future tendencies, towards rising of networked power relationships within the production processes and beyond, over power structures at state and world order levels. In this sense the work of Hardt and Negri was producing an analysis similar to that of Cox', yet without being informed by the accumulated work in the field now called critical global political economy. Probably because of the controversies emerged around the post-modernity of the Empire, the research and the theory at the critical global political economy front remained immune to the innovation and insights coming from this latter strand. Thus while Empire perspectives has included very limited empirical analysis of the relationship between networkisation, transnationalization of production, capital, state and class formation processes and more importantly inter and intra-class struggles re-emerged in the 90s. The ‘Empire’ however has accelerated an intriguing theory of peer production, p2p social relationships, and commons thinking and practice. This theorisation we think, sheds much better and detailed lights on the post-fordist, infornational and cognitive aspects of the late 20th, and early 21st. century capitalism and its systemic crisis. How informatics has been transforming the key relationships of capitalist mode mode of production, from production to ownership, from distribution to consumption. That provides deeper understanding than Post-fordism based theories, like of the role of informatics and cybernetics based structural power of the ruling classes, how emerging mode of informational production, via its role as the base of global financial architecture, and transnational modular commodity-production networks subordinated agriculture, trade, industry and services at regional, national and local levels all across the world. However empirically and theoretically thin understanding of the trans-formation of social classes, states and inter-state system, in this front, or a historical and materialist understanding of transnational social relations, and global systemic change, creates an important gap.

Therefore, global political economy theory started with Cox, Gill and van der Pijl, and p2p-commons theories catalised by the work of Negri, Bifo and Casstells, would benefit from a fruitful exchange. Potentially a p2p update on the understanding of the 'transnationalization of production', which as process overlaps with the informatization of economy, networkisation of societies, and neoliberal globalization offensive, or vice versa; a global political economy upgrade for p2p theory, in our opinion is urgent and necessary. Such an exchange would provide much more clear understanding over the complexity of global power structures, states, classes, the power and weaknesses of partnerships and alliances between capital and the state elite which creates divisions & scarcities among masses, using the structural power they hols, to rule and take advantage of the human societies. Such clear understanding would help to level the field at least for a bit, opening up broader possibilities to build up more efficient alternatives, creative and assertive counter strategies that would eventually mobilize more people to take initiative of their own lives, diminish all sort of alienation in and between their societies, and favor themselves and other peoples globally.

From the above departure point, we create the below as an peer produced commons resource, that will include text books, articles, audio and video materials addressing and broadening such dialogue mentioned to fill in the gap identified. In a historical context of deepening systemic crisis of human civilization, under serious threats of global wars, natural and human disasters caused by the current mode of production, as well as the emerging new reality and understanding of p2p and the commons which has, it is clear by now, the potential of what Marx called 'associated mode of production' more then one and a half century; and promising what Kropotkin called 'communal mutual aid society' earlier in the previous century. Therefore we invite and encourage those all who is interested to collaborate with us on this project. In order to be able to make any entry please register to the P2P-Foundation wiki first. Please make your entries under the relevant section by copying the similar format used for the items already on the list. Let us enrich a common pool of emancipatory knowledge and analyses, as a base for commons action and alternatives, to realize commons transitions towards fair, just, peaceful and beautiful worlds.

B. UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD

1. World Historical Structures

• Transnational Capitalism

• Cognitive Capitalism

• Informational Capitalism

• Empire

• Global Capitalism

• New Imperialism

• The Capitalist World System

• Uneven and Combined Development of Capitalism

• Exchange, polemic and critics

2. The State and the Inter-State System

• Internationalization and Transnationalsiation of the State

• Global Governance

• Transnational State

• Empire

• Center, Periphery, and Semi-periphery

• Exchange, polemic and critics

3. The Value and the Capital

• Internationalization and Transnationalisation of Capital

• Informational Financial Architecture

• Global Production Networks

• Transnational Modular Production-Commodity Networks

• Commonwealth and the Commons

• Exchange, polemic and critics

4. The Production and the Labour

• Internationalization and Transnationalsiation of Production

• Peer production

• Immaterial Labour

• Affective Labour

• Digital Labor

• Free Labour

• Precarious Labour

• Networked Labour

5. The Agency

• Transnational Capitalist Class

• Netarchical Class

• Vectoral Class

• Multitude

• Precariat

• New Labour and Global Working Class

• New Social Network Movements

• New Social Network Movement Unionism

• New Cooperativism

• New Internationalism

• Exchange, polemic and critics

6. Other Categories

• Power

• Civil Society

• Culture and Ideology

• Media and Communication

• Science and Technology

B. CHANGING THE WORLD

1. Future Scenarios

• P2P Theory

• Neo-Gramscian

• Accelerationist

2. Commons-P2P Based Transition Perspectives

• Global Collaborative Commons

• Bio-regional Governance of the Commons

• Commune of Europe: Post-Autonomous, Post-Workerist and Euro-Communist Perspective

• Commons Strategy Group, P2P Foundation and Commons Transition

• Global Villages, resilient communities vision (transition towns,...)

3. Community projects, networks and alternative building

• Open knowledge, self-learning and science communities

• Floss projects

• Online creation communities

• Peer production, distribution and consumption networks

• Co-working spaces

• Co-living spaces

• Fab-labs

• Maker Spaces

• Democratic self-governance

• Workers owned cooperative communities

4. Movements, NGOs, unions, parties: Putting alternatives in global action

• Uprisings, Forums and assemblies

- Arab Spring

- Occupy

- 15M

- Gezi

• Autonomous networks

- Squatters net

- Transition towns

• Political Parties

- European Left (Transform Europe, Podemos, Syriza, De Link, Communist Re-foundation,

• Progressive NGOs

- P2P Foundation

- Corporate Europe Observatory

- Transnational Institute

• NGO Networks

- ATTAC

- Seattle to Brussels

- Our World is Not for Sale

• Network Alliances

- Alter-Summit

- Blockupy

• Broader Convergence and Networking Spaces

- DeGrowth

- Economics and the Commons

- Chaos Computer Congress

- World Social Forum

Reading List

P2P and Commons

Social- Media theories:

M. Castells,

C. Fusch,

J. Rigi,

B. Holmes,

G. Lovink,

N. Rossiter,

M. Berlinguer,

P. Moore,

G. Dafermos,

P. Gerbaudo,

F. Stalder

B. van Apeldoorn

R. W. Cox,

S. Gill,

H. Overbeek,

O. Hollman

W.I. Robinson,

K. vd. Pijl

P. Waterman

B. Guiterrez

M.F. Morell

The Dramatic Rise of Peer-to-Peer Communication within the emancipatory movements Reflections of an International Labour, Social Justice and Cyber Activist [ https://www.academia.edu/7358045/The_Dramatic_Rise_of_Peer-to-Peer_Communication_within_the_emancipatory_movements_Reflections_of_an_International_Labour_Social_Justice_and_Cyber_Activist]

Transnational Networks of Radical Labour Research and (H)acktivism by Örsan Şenalp and Mehmet Gürsan Şenalp, forthcoming in 2015 [1]