Communism of Capital

Discussion

Rachel O’Dwyer:

"Today we are witnessing the reconfiguration of pre-capitalist forms of social coordination in the computational-informational space. This includes a range of nonmarket and non-proprietary activities such as open source software and open standards, peer-to-peer economies, and distributed forms of production over networks. As the informational network migrates from a traditional desktop model, becoming invested in everyday spaces through mobile and pervasive platforms, such activities are thought to be capable of inflecting not only social and juridical processes, but material economies (Rheingold, 2002; Kluitenberg, 2007). This ideology of the digital commons has many advocates in both the communities of digital activism and the core apparatuses of neoliberal power.

Traditional economic theories and the new schemes proposed by the advocates of the digital commons provide only a partial understanding of this burgeoning economy. Proceeding from a dialectical perspective, the range of cooperative activities taking place over digital networks appear to transcend the traditional enclosures of capital, operating over gift economies and forms of social capital. At the same time, recent conditions point to a conflictive terrain in which these very activities emerge at the centre of the valorisation process. Such conflicts include the growing centrality of open source to the corporate value chain and the new streams of revenue based around user-generated content. Specular to these activities are the new enclosures applied over communications ‘infrastructure’ such as bandwidth, consumer devices and network architectures. This is not to say that value is not communally held and produced, but that the apparatuses that leverage its extraction are not held in common. The combination of these two circumstances is significant, transforming the qualities of both. On one hand, the commons moves from a pre-capitalist legacy towards the centre of the market, and on the other, the value of property becomes less a question of a rent over infrastructure alone, and more one of leveraging a title to extract value from commons-based peer-production (O’Dwyer and Doyle, 2012). The traditional dichotomies of socialism vs. capitalism or property vs. the commons would not seem adequate to sketch such a system.

Recent critical activity is about learning a new political vocabulary to attend to these conditions. Post-Operaismo theorists have sketched an outline of the fundamental transformations underlying Post-Fordist capitalism (Virno, 2004; Marazzi, 2007; Hardt and Negri, 2009; Hardt, 2010; Vercellone, 2010). These include changes to the conditions and products of capitalist accumulation, structural alterations to the property relations under which labour produces and changes to the technical composition of labour (Hardt, 2010).

A full rehearsal of these is beyond the scope of this paper, but as they relate to the digital commons they include:

• A shift from the hegemony of material goods to immaterial goods such as knowledge, cultural capital and social/affective relations. Though material goods like cars and houses continue to play a significant role in the economy, these are supplemented by a range of commodities previously cast as external to the market, and typically held and produced in common.

• Transformations from productive capital and strict property regimes typical of the industrial era towards the parasitic extraction of rent over common outputs.

• Consequentially new models of labour have also come to the fore. In the context of the network economy, waged labour and capitalist intervention in production is replaced by ‘precarity’ and a variety of automated apparatuses for the extraction of surplus. (Virno, 2004)

It should be clear that the key to understanding economic production today lies with the commons. Capitalism needs the commons and consequently a range of systems to regulate and enclose its products. Where once these enclosures operated over land, today they operate over the entirety of human knowledge. We witness this where neoliberal enterprise converges on the natural resources and productive capacities of societies. The extraction of tertiary outputs, the rent extracted by real estate from local cultural injections and the enclosure of local knowledge under intellectual property regimes are key instances of this process.

Hardt and Negri (2009) outline two different types of commons: firstly, the natural, describing material and finite resources such as common land, agricultural and mineral resources and, secondly, the cultural or ‘artificial’ commons, describing intangible products such as common knowledge, language and shared culture. While this second commons still operates through very material channels, their outputs may not be subject to the same logics of scarcity as a natural resource. In turn the range of different forms of the commons are also subject to different forms of enclosure and systems of accumulation. In an information economy, it is readily accepted that a degree of freedom is essential to productivity, where access to common knowledge, codes and standards are essential for innovation and economic growth. Privatisation through intellectual property or other forms of enclosure destroys the productive potential of the commons. In the communism of capital, therefore, and particularly in the digital commons, we increasingly encounter a condition that inverts the standard narrative of economic freedom, where openness as opposed to private control is the locus of accumulation (Von Hippel, 2005). Examples of this include the commercial development of Android, an ‘open’ and ‘free’ mobile platform by the Open Handset Alliance or the role of open source systems such as Linux to IT corporations like IBM.

All that said, an economy centred on the reproduction and distribution of digital commodities must still account for their translation into exchange value, which occurs outside of the commons (Pasquinelli, 2008). The digital commons stands against private control exerted by property, legal structures and market forces, and yet these economic barriers prevail in the substrate of the system, regulated by a temporary monopoly of exploitation conferred by licenses, patents, trademarks and copyright, capturing value before the true potential of the commons can be realised.

The digital commons is traditionally framed in a tiered structure that echoes the models commonly employed by network architecture. Different layers of contingent logical and physical strata form an assemblage concerned with the interoperation of terminal devices and the circulation of content through communication channels. This network comprises the content itself and the layers of software-defined protocols that proceed from the user down to the physical resources underpinning the network: storage and processing technologies, terminal devices, transmitters, routers, spectrum, real estate, man power and energy. Together these form the substrate architecture over which the digital commons is produced. New streams of value are increasingly identified within this space, from the transmissions channels that form part of the telecommunications value chain, through to the attention economy that underscores monopolies such as Google and Facebook. Rights governing access to communications are at the heart of this economy, as the core infrastructure that underscores digital labour. Any reforms, therefore, need to look to the architectures that flank the digital commons, to the policies, property regimes, protocols and technological standards that structure this conflictive space[2]. This paper explores the property regimes surrounding the underlying architecture of mobile and wireless networks – electromagnetic spectrum." (http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/spectre-commons-spectrum-regulation-communism-capital)

More Information

• Essay: From the Communism of Capital to a Capital for the Commons. Michel Bauwens