Peer Production Patterns

Introduction

Stefan Meretz:

"Taken from a weekly series of articles to appear in the journal Critical Studies in Peer Production (CSPP). In the series I try to describe analytical patterns developed by the Oekonux Project since over ten years of research on Free Software and commons-based peer production.

In this text I will try to give some introduction to the main ideas which have been developed since the foundation of the Oekonux project in 1999. There is no fixed set of thoughts and personally I have my own perspective on Oekonux ideas.

Why is the Oekonux project so relevant for debates around commons-based peer production? There are two reasons. First, Oekonux developed many of the ideas many researchers are so familiar with many years before they reached a wider audience. Oekonux was founded as a project of reflection around Free Software, but from the beginning the question of generalizing observations about Free Software to other realms of immaterial as well as material goods was present. When Yochai Benkler (2006) coined the term commons-based peer production it only condensed a debate years old into a catchy notion, but the insights itself were not very new and sound very familiar to Oekonux participants. Consequently the term has been adopted by the Oekonux project.

Second, Oekonux participants have gone much further than others in questioning the accepted way of thinking. New theses have been developed which did not only reject traditional discourse patterns in computer sciences, sociology, and economics, but also in emancipatory political and theoretical approaches. Stefan Merten, the founder of Oekonux who comes from an anarchist-marxist background, provocatively rejects “leftist and other capitalist ideologies” (Merten 2011) for the analysis of peer production. This sounds quite post-modern, but was meant differently: All means of emancipation are going to be developed right in front of our eyes, but we also have to grasp them theoretically. Traditional leftist patterns are not able to do that, because they adhere to the given mode of production for whose analysis they are made.

This was an enormous provocation to many people, traditionalists on all sides. And there have been many cultural and political clashes within the project. But there also have been a core of people, who continuously drove the Oekonux approach further. In the following I try to describe some Oekonux patterns, which of course represent my interpretation of the Oekonux debate. When I use the past when talking about Oekonux, it is not because the project does no longer exists. It still exists, and the Critical Studies in Peer Production journal is not the only spin-off of the project, there have been many others, so that the focus decentralizes to diverse projects inspired by Oekonux.

In an interview with Joanne Richardson Stefan Merten (2001) described Oekonux as a project to evaluate Free Software with respect to its “potential for a different society beyond labor, money, exchange”. Here, he gives the keywords Oekonux thinking was built around. I will take and extend them to illustrate why and how the main ideas contradict traditional leftist thinking so much, especially when Oekonux started in 1999 (Merten 1999)." (http://keimform.de/2011/peer-production-and-societal-transformation/)

Abstract

"The Oekonux project seeks to establish a new basis for analyzing a new historical phenomenon: the emergence of peer production, starting with the creation of Free Software. If the initial hypotheses of Free Software being the germ form of a new mode of production beyond capitalism is valid, it would be necessary to develop new epistemological patterns to be able to analyze it adequately. This requires understanding and criticizing old analytical notions as historical products of the outlived capitalist way of producing our livelihood, including those which aim to be in opposition to capitalism. In this paper I present ten patterns which have emerged from the debates of the Oekonux Project. They demonstrate what it means to go beyond traditional affirmative and traditional oppositional or “leftist” patterns of analysis. Although taken from the debates in the Oekonux Project, these have never yet been presented in such a condensed way. Obviously not all patterns will be shared by all the participants of these debates, because in the end these are my personal conclusions drawn from over ten years of discussion."

Contents

Pattern 1: Beyond Exchange

Pattern 2: Beyond Scarcity

Pattern 3: Beyond Commodity

Pattern 4: Beyond Money

Pattern 5: Beyond Labor

Pattern 6: Beyond Classes

Pattern 7: Beyond Exclusion

Pattern 8: Beyond Socialism

Pattern 9: Beyond Politics

Pattern 10: Germ Form

The Ten Patterns

Pattern 1: Beyond Exchange

Stefan Meretz:

"Free Software, or more generally, commons-based peer production is not about exchange. Giving and taking are not coupled with each other. From today’s perspective this might not be surprising, but at the beginning of the Oekonux project it was. Still today traditional Leftist approaches are based on the assumption that someone is only allowed to get something, if s/he is willing and able to give something back, because if everybody is only taking then society would perish. This position could reference to a painful Socialist (and Christian) tradition saying that the one who does not want to work, should not eat. However, Free Software clearly showed that developers do not need to be forced to do what they love to do (cf. pattern 5).

One important approach which tried to grasp the new developments of Free Software, although sticking with old thinking, was the “gift economy” approach. However it is not coincidental that the correct term should be “gift exchange economy”: The giver can expect to get something back, because it is a moral duty in societies based on the exchange of gifts. This kind of personal reciprocal duty does not exist in Free Software. Even if a developer says that s/he wants to “give something back”, then this giving is not a precondition to receive something. In general, commons-based peer production is based on unconditional voluntary contributions.

From a Leftist perspective, uncoupled giving and taking could only be possible in a mythical land in a distant future called Communism – if at all. But never today, because before communism is possible, an unfriendly interphase called Socialism sticking with the exchange dogma is necessary (cf. pattern 8). Historically, “real existing Socialism” trying to implement this necessity failed, which will happen with all Socialist approaches accepting the exchange dogma.

If one does not want to give up exchange, then capitalism is the only option." (http://keimform.de/2011/pattern-1-beyond-exchange/)

Pattern 2: Beyond Scarcity

Stefan Meretz:

"It is a common misconception that material things are scarce while immaterial things are not. It seems justified to keep material goods as commodities while immaterial goods are required to be free. However, this assumption turns a social property into a natural one. No produced good is scarce by nature. Scarcity is a result of goods being produced as commodities, thus scarcity is a social aspect of a commodity created for a market. In the digital era this is obvious for immaterial goods, as we can clearly see the measures to artificially make the good scarce. Such measures include laws (based on so-called “intellectual property”) and technical barriers to prevent free access to the good. It seems to be less obvious for material goods, because we are used to the non-accessibility of material goods unless we have paid for them. But the measures are the same: law and technical barriers, accompanied by continuous destruction of goods to keep the commodities rare enough to obtain a suitable price on markets.

Furthermore it seems obvious that we all depend on material goods which may not be available in sufficient amount. Even immaterial goods depend on a material infrastructure, at least our brains (in the case of knowledge), which also need to be fed. This is definitely true, however, it has nothing to do with a “natural scarcity”. Since all goods we need are to be produced, the only question is, how they are to be produced in a societal sense. The commodity form is one option, the commons form another. Commodities must be produced in a scarce manner to realize their price on the market. The commons good can be produced according to the needs of the people using the given productive capacity. There might be current limitations, but limits always have been subject to human creativity to overcome them.

Maybe some limitations may never be overcome, but this again is no reason to make goods artificially scarce. In these rare cases social agreements can be used to organize responsible use of the limited resource or good. The commons movement learned that both rival as well as non-rival goods can be produced as commons, but they require different social treatment. While non-rival goods are agreed to be freely accessible to prevent under-use, it makes sense to avoid over-use for rival goods by finding appropriate rules or measures either to organize sustainable use or to extend collective production and thus availability of the rival good.

Scarcity is a social phenomenon which is unavoidable if goods are produced as commodities. Often scarcity is confused with limitations which can be overcome by human efforts and creativity." (http://keimform.de/2011/pattern-2-beyond-scarcity/)

Pattern 3: Beyond Commodity

Stefan Meretz:

"In her studies Elinor Ostrom found, that “neither the state nor the market” is a successful means for commons management (1990). Based on traditional economics she analyzed the practices of natural commons and finally simply proved liberal dogmatics wrong. Markets are not a good way to allocate resources, and the State is not a good way to re-distribute wealth and manage the destructive results of markets. Best results occur if the people organize themselves according to their needs, experiences and creativity and treat resources and goods not as commodities, but as common pool resources.

This is exactly what happens in Free Software. Interestingly it took many years to understand that Free Software is a commons and that it is basically identical to what Elinor Ostrom and others were talking about much earlier. One weak aspect of the traditional commons research and the early phase of Free Software was that a clear notion of a commodity and a non-commodity did not exist. It was the Oekonux Project which clearly said: Free Software is not a commodity. This dictum is closely related to the insight that Free Software is not exchanged (cf. pattern 1).

Critics from the left argued that being a non-commodity is limited to the realm of immaterial goods like software. From their viewpoint Free Software is only an “anomaly” (Nuss, Heinrich 2002), while “normal” goods in capitalism have to be commodities. This assumption, however, is closely linked to the acceptance of the scarcity dogma (cf. pattern 2). Moreover, it treats capitalism as a kind of normal or natural mode of production under conditions of “natural scarcity” (as they think). This view completely turns real relations upside down. Capitalism could only establish itself by enclosing the commons, by depriving the people from their traditional access to resources in order to transform them into workers. This enclosure of the commons is an ongoing process. Capitalism can only exist if it continuously separates people from resources by making them artificially scarce. A commodity – as nice as it may appear in the shopping malls – is a result of an ongoing violent process of enclosure and dispossession.

The same process occurs in software. Proprietary software is a way of dispossessing the scientific and development community from their knowledge, experiences, and creativity. Free Software was first a defensive act of maintaining common goods common. However, since software is at the forefront of the development of productive forces it quickly turned into a creative process of overcoming the limitations and alienations of proprietary software. In a special field Free Software established a new mode of production which is going to spread into other realms (cf. pattern 10).

Goods which are not made artificially scarce and are not subject to exchange are not commodities, but commons." (http://keimform.de/2011/pattern-3-beyond-commodity/)

Pattern 4: Beyond Money

Stefan Meretz:

Pattern 5: Beyond Labor

Stefan Meretz:

Pattern 6: Beyond Classes

Stefan Meretz:

Pattern 7: Beyond Exclusion

Stefan Meretz:

Pattern 8: Beyond Socialism

Stefan Meretz:

Pattern 9: Beyond Politics

Stefan Meretz:

Pattern 10: Germ Form

Stefan Meretz:

More Information

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