* Book: FROM CAPITAL TO COMMONS Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. Hannes Gerhardt. Bristol University Press, 2023.

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Excerpts

From the introduction, by Hannes Gerhardt:

"This book builds on these approaches while also addressing their current shortcomings by providing a more holistic analysis of the many technological, economic, and political shifts that would necessarily be involved in a commons-centred trajectory out of capitalism. Hence, the starting point for this endeavour is to home in on the four most fundamental and difficult to crack obstacles that stand in the way of such a commons-based transition.

These are:

1) capital’s cooptation and subsequent prevention of a fully freed, digitally empowered general intellect;

2) capital’s continued control and exploitation of the material basis of the economy;

3) the difficulty of establishing commons-based social relations and forms of production given that value is monopolized by markets and money; and

4) the lack of a coherent political framework and mobilization that could succeed in bringing about positive systemic change.

It is worth reviewing these, and the perceived inability of current commonsbased theorizations to deal with them, before summarizing compeerism’s own particular positionality.

The hurdles facing a capital to commons trajectory:

To begin, the digital revolution’s promise of liberating a turbocharged, commons-based general intellect must be acknowledged as far from inevitable. In fact, while the abundance associated with crowdsourced and freely accessible digital knowledge/code/data poses a potential threat to the mediation of scarcity on which capitalism largely depends, it appears that capital as a whole has effectively adapted to the new technological environment and, indeed, has turned it to its benefit. This coup has been achieved in a variety of ways.

For one, capital has engaged in a fierce battle to keep its own digital productions artificially scarce through intellectual-property protections while increasingly making use of the digital commons for free, valuable content and inspiration. Additionally, capital has managed to corral digitized, proprietary and volunteered material through internet platforms that act as rent-seeking gatekeepers. These platforms, furthermore, have become a critical source of data extraction, offering an entirely new realm of highly profitable marketing information. Not least, the decentralization and modularization of work enabled by digital networks, heralded as a way to foster geographically distributed collaboration, has been tapped by capital to acquire a pliable and easily exploitable pool of labour, as is well documented in the so-called gig economy (Woodcock, 2021).

Looking to the future, capital is already engaged in shaping and subverting the next wave of digital technologies to open further profit frontiers. This is most clearly seen in the embrace of encrypted ledger technologies, such as blockchain, which enable secure and theoretically infallible digitally-logged records of ownership and transactions. Blockchain can hence be used to digitally capture and monetize activities and productions that were previously outside the reach of commodification (Swan, 2015). One example is the proliferation of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which allow for the secure marketization of a broad range of digital media by making these into artificially scarce ‘property’ managed on the blockchain. Thus, in short, while the digital revolution may have changed the way capitalism works, it has not made it weaker – if anything, the opposite appears to be true.

The second major obstruction to a digitally-empowered usurpation of capitalism pertains to the fact that the underlying materiality of the economy is still primarily in private, profit-seeking hands. Hence, even if a liberated general intellect mediated through the digital commons is accepted as a possible challenge to capital in some areas, it is fair to doubt that this would be enough to precipitate the demise of the entire capitalist ‘mode of production’, that is, the overarching organization of our labour and resources (Marx and Engels, 1965). This is because the assumption of potential abundance linked to digital value, which is the cornerstone of the argument that commons-based peer production maintains an advantage over capital, does not apply to the material realm, which is characterized by clear physical limitations and, indeed, scarcity.

In the absence of a commons-oriented takeover of material assets and resources, therefore, these will go on being employed in the pursuit of extractive and exploitative profits. In the digital economy, this means capital will resume leveraging its ownership of the undergirding material infrastructure to control and limit access to what could theoretically be infinitely reproducible information/knowledge. Capital will also retain control over the physical resources and added value entailed in the unending amount of material things we want and need, from food and clothing to all the electronic devices that enable and harness the internet’s value. Not least, due to this control, capitalist actors and their interests will continue to define humanity’s currently dysfunctional relationship to the environment. The overarching question when faced with these realities, then, is how commonsbased rationales and values could break through and become dominant not only within the digital realm, but also in areas such as infrastructure, manufacturing, and resource/environmental management.

This brings us to the third foundational challenge, which gets to the very heart of why both the digital and material commons struggle to assert themselves, namely, capitalism’s ability to reduce almost everything of value to a market-based, money-denominated good or service. With money here becoming a stand-in for value, it also becomes the de facto means for accessing almost anything tangible that is worth having. In other words, as long as access to the goods and services required for living are denominated in tokens that can generally only be acquired through work, people will continue to depend on remunerated (paid) employment to live. Indeed, this is how labour is so easily coopted and exploited by capital, and, subsequently, disallowed from significantly contributing to the commons. For instance, in terms of the promise of freeing digital abundance (the general intellect), we are reminded of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s well-known statement at the first Hacker Conference of 1984, where he opined that ‘information should be free but your time should not’ (Brand, 1985, p 49). In other words, digital producers also want to be paid (and software companies want to make profits).

Faced with the underlying reality of the monopolization of marketcentred value, a natural conclusion could be that actors seeking to expand the commons and commons-forms of governance have no choice but to engage markets in order to fund the labour and resources needed for their activities. This approach, however, comes with a host of additional difficulties and conundrums, such as dealing with the apparent contradiction involved in striving to provide something as a commons-based good that is, at the same time, intended to generate revenue. Additionally, the commonsoriented entrepreneur must compete within a price-oriented marketplace that can clash with their adopted principles of production, such as sharing innovations, investing in the community, and worker-empowerment. Some even argue that engaging in commodity exchange and money leads to an inevitable condition in which the worth of resources and labour can only be understood through the lens of markets, hence making a path out of capitalist rationales and actions impossible (Pitts, 2018a).

Lastly, turning to the final major obstacle facing a capital-to-commons trajectory, there is the overarching question of what political action would be required for the needed shift in social relations to become dominant, and if successful whether the subsequent governance regimes would be preferable to what is being replaced. Regarding this latter issue, for instance, critics like to point out the haphazard and sometimes autocratic managerial cultures evident in the production of the digital commons (Pentzold, 2021). Additionally, and focusing on commons-based peer production in particular, some scholars have pointed to the lack of intentional, bureaucratic governance structures in these endeavours, making them unqualified for handling complex, long-term and inherently political projects involving multiple external stakeholders (Kreiss et al, 2010). In other words, it is one thing to crowdsource an encyclopedia for the commons, but it is a very different thing , for example, to organize universal access to the internet. Even if an effective and just commons-centred form of governance can be achieved at scale and across economic sectors, however, we are still left with the question of how to get there. In other words, how would a mass, commons-based transition out of capitalism unfold politically, and, more to the point, what role would the state, as a bulwark of the current mode of production, play in such a process? The question of a countercapitalist movement’s relation to the state finds multiple, divergent answers by proponents of a commons-centred systemic transition, ranging on a spectrum from calls to ignore, engage, and capture the state. Neither of these, however, has proven to be broadly convincing for the politically left-leaning populace as a whole."

From Capital To Commons

Contents

Contents

PART I Contemporary Capitalism and the Promise of the Digital Revolution

PART II The Material Economy and Commons

PART III Money and Value

PART IV In Pursuit of a Post-Capitalist Future

Excerpts

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