What This Essay is About

Context

Draft introductory chapter of a book in progress , with the provisional title of Towards Post-Capitalism

Text

Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis:

1. What is this essay about?

This essay attempts to tie together at least four different major aspects of an emerging relational dynamic (or “mode of exchange”) which we call “peer-to-peer” (P2P). We believe that these P2P dynamics will deeply change human society. There is a window of opportunity for transition to an economy that would combine three key characteristics: fairness, i.e., a fairer distribution of the created value; sustainability, i.e., a mode of value creation compatible with a thriving living and natural environment of which humanity is a part; and openness, i.e., sharing vital productive knowledge and even the use of material resources. P2P means a system in which any human being can contribute to the creation, construction and maintenance of a shared resource, while at the same time benefit from it.

So P2P is first of all a relational dynamic, a capacity of human beings to allocate resources through permissionless collaboration. Permissionless means that, unlike in a hierarchical system, you do not need any other person’s permission in order to contribute; the system is open to all contributors and contributions. P2P is therefore a specific “mode of exchange”, a way to allocate resources, that does not involve any specific reciprocity between individuals, but only between the individuals and the collective resource. In our understanding, P2P is synonymous with “commoning”, in the sense that it describes the capacity to contribute to the creation of a shared resource. It is important to understand that ‘peer to peer’ is not the totality of society, but a part of it. However, the thesis of this book is that this mode of relating is moving from the periphery of the social system of humanity, to its very core, thereby transforming also the other types of relationships, such as the market dynamics, state dynamics, and reciprocity dynamics.

The notion of “commons” has been defined in a manifold manner. The commons is a general term for shared resources where each stakeholder has an equal interest (Ostrom, 1990) and “no single person has exclusive control over the use and disposition of any particular resource” (Benkler, 2006, p. 61). The commons sphere may contain either rivalrous (you and I cannot have it both at the same time) or non-rival (use does not deplete it) goods and resources. These have either been inherited or are man-made and may be governed by humanity as a whole or by a specific community. For example, a commons may include natural gifts, such as the air, water, and land, and shared assets or creative work like cultural and knowledge artifacts. What is crucial to understand is that today P2P relations can effectively scale at the global level mainly because of the emergence of Internet-enabled P2P technologies. In this essay, we are mostly interested in the digital commons of knowledge, software and design, because they are the “new commons” (Benkler, 2014). Our key question will be: how do these commons relate to the other aspects of human society, especially all the physical production we need to insure our well-being.

In this context though, we attempt to avoid techno-determinism by not claiming that a certain technology means that there is just one inevitable social outcome. Of course, at the same time we recognize the key role that technologies do play in societal evolution, because of the new possibilities they create if certain human groups successfully appropriate such tools. So indeed, technology makes things possible, but not just one thing in a simple, single or univocal way.

Different social forces invest in this potential and use it to their advantage and struggle to benefit from its use. Technology is therefore best understood as a focus of social struggle and influence, and not as a predetermined given that creates just one technologically determined future. But when social groups appropriate a particular technology for their own purposes, then social, political and economic systems can effectively change. A good example is the role that the invention of the printing press, associated with other inventions, played in changing European society (Eisenstein, 2012). What we investigate is how a specific group of people, i.e. the commoners or peer producers, that part of humanity that contributes to shared resources without exploiting them, can use the networked technology to its benefit, and change society for the better. As humanity successfully defends the physical commons still being used by a majority of the population of the globe, and combines it with digital commons that impact the lives of already three billion people, it constitutes the commoners as the majoritarian human group in the world. If we successfully move beyond the extractive system that is global capitalism, as we move from the labor-capital system to a commons-centric system of value creation and distribution, then this becomes effectively the new social condition and form that civlization takes.

So what is the central thesis of this essay?

We argue that the fast-growing availability of a relatively cheap technology that enables many-to-many communications, enables an increasing number of humans not only to communicate in ways that were not technically possible before, but also to self-organize and create value together. Many-to-many digital technologies allow not just for massive self-organization up to a global scale, but the creation of a new mode of production, a new mode of exchange, and new types of relations of production, outside of the market-state nexus which has dominated industrial modernity.

In fact, we reckon that the Internet effectively creates a potential break in human history, which we have called elsewhere as “Peak Hierarchy”. This is the historical moment in which networked and relatively horizontal forms of organization are able to produce artefacts that are more complex that what can be achieved through state and market mechanisms alone. These new hybrid forms of organization do not primarily rely on either hierarchical decisions or market pricing signals, but on generalized mutual coordination. Examples of this are how the peer-produced encyclopedia Wikipedia displaced the corporate-organized encyclopedia Britannica, how peer-produced free and open source software displaces proprietary software, or how Wikileaks survived the assaults of the world’s mightiest state.

We do not claim that the new forms of collaborative production, which rely on these mechanisms, do not have hierarchies at all, though we do claim that they generally lack a command hierarchy for the production process itself. We reckon that peer production has introduced the capacity to organize complex global projects through massive mutual coordination. We argue that what decision-making and planning is to hierarchical forms of producing value, and what pricing is to a capitalist market economy, that is mutual coordination as the organizing principle to an emerging commons-based economy. P2P will be the central and core mechanism for organizing societies and the economy.

Hence, the emergence and scaling of these P2P dynamics point to a potential shift or transition in the main modality in which humanity allocates resources, from a market-state system that uses hierarchical decision-making (in firms and in the state) and pricing (between companies and between companies and consumers), towards a system that uses mutual coordination. This does not mean that the market and the state will disappear, but that the configuration of different modalities, and the balance between them, will change.

This does not in any way imply that this P2P transition will lead to an utopia, nor that it will be easy. More likely, the transition will be messy, if the history of previous transitions is any guide, and just as likely, while P2P will solve a number of problems of our current society, it will undoubtedly create others. But it remains a worthwhile social evolution to strive for, and even if it does not become the dominant form, it will profoundly influence the human future.

Summarizing the relationship between the relational and technological aspects, we claim that this relational dynamic, strengthened by particular forms of technological capacities, is slated to become the dominant way of allocating the necessary resources for human self-reproduction, and that it will likely replace market capitalism as the dominant form. This will require a stronger expansion of these modalities not just for the production of “immaterial goods”, but also for the production of physical goods. We emphasize that while P2P is emerging as the main form of technological organization for all social forces, the way it is actually implemented (and owned and governed), makes all the difference. Not all P2P is equal in its effect, and we offer a framework of analysis that allow to distinguish at least four different forms of P2P technological infrastructures, which lead to different forms of political and social organization. Adopting this or that specific form of P2P technological organization is the locus of intense social conflict, because it has enormous consequences on what is possible or not.

P2P is potentially a new mode of production, characterized by new relations of production. In commons-based peer production, contributors create shared value and resources through open contributory systems (peer production proper), participatorily govern the common work (peer governance), and create shared resources that can in turn be used in new iterations (peer property, or, “the commons”). This cycle of open input, participatory process, and commons-oriented output, is a cycle of accumulation of the commons, which parallels the accumulation of capital. P2P is also a new mode of exchange, in which an individual who contributes to that common resource, or in the digital environment, simply has access to the resource, and can also use this resource, without equal market exchange or the obligation for a reciprocal gift. At this stage, peer production should be more correctly seen as a prefigurative prototype of what could become a full new mode of production and a new form of society. We argue that this emerging modality of peer production is hyper-productive in its capacity to solve some of the structural problems that have been generated by the capitalist mode of production.

Paradoxically, it is also hyperproductive within the context of capitalist competition, and we argue that this is not a negative thing in itself, but rather a condition that increases the societal investment in a P2P-based transition. In other words, it is precisely because P2P solves the structural issues of the current system, that both productive and managerial classes moves towards it. This means that capital flows towards P2P projects, and that even as they distort it to make it work to continue the dominance of the old economy, it simultaneously creates new logics in society that undermine that dominance.

At the same time, the new class of peer producers or commoners, i.e. the part of humanity that contributes to common resources, cannot rely on capitalist investment and practices, but must use skillful means to render peer production more autonomous from the dominant political economy. Eventually we may arrive at a position where the balance of power is reversed: the commons and its social forces become the dominant force in society, which allows them to force the state and market forms to adapt to its own requirements. So, we should strive from a situation in which capitalist co-opts the commons, to a situation in which the commons captures capital, and makes it work for its own development. This proposed strategy has been called ‘transvestment’ by Dmytri Kleiner and Baruch Gottlieb, i.e. the transfer of value from one modality of exchange, to another, i.e. from capital and capitalism, to the commons. Transvestment strategies are already being developed and practiced succesfully by emerging commons-centric entrepreneurial coalitions such as Enspiral.

At that point, if the move from microeconomic peer production communities to a new dominant modality of value creation and distribution is successful, a phase transition towards a commons-centric economy and society may have occurred. In our view, this is the revolution of our times, and a fundamental shift in the rules and norms that decide what value is and how it is produced and distributed in society. In short: a shift to a new post-capitalist value regime. Being successful in this will require a particular and optimal new configuration between the processes of self-allocation in commons; new forms of non-capitalist market allocation for the creation of livelihoods around those commons; and enabling/empowering forms of collective social or civic power that increase the capacities of every citizen to contribute to these commons.

Essentially, we consider P2P simultaneously as a social relation and mode of exchange, as a technological infrastructure and as a mode of production, and all aspects combined contribute to the creation of a new post-capitalist model, a new phase in the evolution of the organization of human societies. This will necessitate an extensive discussion on what we call the “phase transition” in the political and social sense. In other words, how do we envisage this predicted transition to a new form of social organization?

We attempt to show that P2P dynamics are already creating the seed-form institutions (at the micro- and intermediary scale) that prefigure a new societal model. In a nutshell, P2P is leading to a model of society in which:

Civil society has become productive through the participation of citizens in the common creation of value through commons. We observe a shift from a society where the commons is marginal, to a society in which the commons institutions form the core of social and economic organization. The market has become “ethical” through the emergence of generative economic practices. We refer to the emergence of cooperative and solidarity-based economic forms for the allocation of financial and physical resources for the reproduction of life; this means a shift from a extractive to a generative economy. The “partner state” is a facilitating and enabling state, which creates the general capacities for a contributory economy and society. This is a shift from a form of state which is at the service of the ruling elites and their extractive value practices, to a form of state that is thoroughly participatory and creates the conditions for maximal personal and social autonomy.

In this pluralistic commonwealth, multiple forms of value creation and distribution will co-exist, but most likely around the common attractor that is the commons. The aim of this text is not to create a “totalitarianism” of the commons, the equivalent of those social forces which aim for a total state or a total market, but to make the commons a core institution which “disciplines” all other social forms towards obtaining the maximal common good and the maximum individual freedom.