Patrick S. had an interesting reaction to an earlier posting by Kevin Carson:

“As usual, Kevin makes some very strong points, but as usual, I feel he also tends to overstate his anarcho-libertarian case in a few places in a way that I feel deserves a (hopefully not over-long) response.

I do agree with aspects of his core proposition, in line with P2P thinking more generally, that new tech and modes of production both supports and makes feasible a more decentralised, open, resource-efficient economy :- and we should change both ‘the state’ and ‘the corporation’ as a result to speed and encourage this.

But to imply that once the big bad State is out of the way, it’ll all be rosy and market competition will produce things effectively and efficiently is a big over-simplification in my view. A few aspects:-

First: a more realistic critique of the political-economy of high technology:- yes, the internet infrastructure, and existing software tools (many of them open source) as a large networked society-wide investment, reduces the cost and delays of startup companies to individuals. And yes, theoretically anyone around the world, and in some cases innovation has happened from developing countries, can take advantage of it. But this ignores 2 things :- ‘agglomeration economies’, whereby even with the internet, innovation still happens often in prosperous regions, with stable governance and idea exchanges, large universities, critical masses of educated, ambitious, and sufficiently economically secure people to take risks and think big.

And second:- all the criticism of monopoly IP does tend to hide the fact that good ideas and systems do need time and hard work, funded _somehow_, to bring them into existence. This may not cost a lot of _physical_ capital, but to turn a software project from a cool startup idea with a few users, to a real big workable platform in our current economy with a polished UI and stability :- takes the _time_ of smart, well-fed, well-paid engineers. Yes, Twitter, Facebook etc may employ way less than General Motors, but they all employ now 10K+ smart IT people, and that costs real dough. I’m keen on Open Source and can see how it challenges these economics, in some cases very successfully :- but in others not, as Nokia’s loss of the Phone OS wars with their more genuinely open-source Maemo showed.

My point here?

(a) The state is very big in funding high-tech innovation historically. Even if it doesn’t appear so in the case of the innovative garage programmer, they got to that point via an education, food, transport, communication system that was at least in part state funded, in all developed countries in the world today.

(b) If we want to help shift the balance from the Googles and FBs of the world to small-scale distributed production and still keep a decent standard of living, I think it’ll take more than fighting over-reaching IP laws and state complicity in monopolies. It’ll also require supporting a strong and explicit _commons_ of health, food, transport to support the self-provisioning of groups using new tech etc.

I guess an anarchist-libertarian P2P-ist like Kevin would argue that this necessary ‘commons’ of sustenance and re-producion would still manifest in his desired stateless future. Perhaps because people would probably all have some share of the surplus via small-scale local cooperatives earning value in a market economy? And secondly, that any necessary extra coordination and commons provisioning (which he would probably see as small) would occur via non-coercive, democratically agreed local arrangements?

Whereas, as a more social-democratic P2P-ist, I have a problem with this and see several flaws.

1) I’m less convinced than the market always does a better job than collective (state) approaches to provisioning of services, both in terms of social justice and economic efficiency. I see flaws in all approaches, but it seems in areas like healthcare and education, given the history of the 20th C and relatively good performance of scandinavian welfare states in particular, and the bad outcomes of neoliberalism on the working class in so many countries, the burden of proof is on the ‘marketeers’, of whatever stripe, that their system can be both better and acceptably just.

2) While appreciating the value and effectiveness of markets in certain ways, I’m a lot more concerned with ‘market failures’ than a libertarian P2P-ist. For example, even without state support of monopolies, isn’t there always an interest in a strongly market-based society to grow businesses and destroy competitors, leading to oligopolies over time? Even with periodic tech disruption, I think this is a problem and will lead to strong inequalities etc, unless opposed/regulated by some counter-force.

3) From a moral-ecological view, a too strong “market society” also concerns me. I.E. I align markets with continual aggressive competition, accumulation of goods & status. I’d admit that these are all fundamental parts of human nature and can’t be wished away, but my point is that unlike Adam Smith, I disagree that if a market society constantly encourages these traits, then it’ll always redound to the public good. In fact, as per Polanyi, I think we still need a strong counter-movement to the Market Culture, and in at least the medium term see a more democratised state, with some level of Commons-provision via taxation, as a necessary part of this.

4) A particular version of the above issue is a deep concern with markets’ abilities to deal with pressing global environmental issues. Both because of their failure to “price” abstract yet crucial issues of water use from aquifers, atmosphere pollution etc – and because it seems any market-based business has an interest in fostering a culture of continuous consumption and status-competition not well suited to a need for greater modesty, constraint, and care for common goods and resources. How are these issues going to be dealt with without some kind of instrument of collective concern which actually has real power, I.E. some form of State?

Still, its always good to learn a new perspective and engage in respectful debates, and providing a venue for such is the great thing about this site. E.g., perhaps I’m missing that if the nature of Corporations was fundamentally transformed (as discussed by Tellus Institute), a market-libertarian P2P society would start to look something a lot more like I’d be happy with?

And I’d like to engage more with Elinor Ostrom’s later work arguing we need more multi-level commons regulation, and can’t rely on global government agreements.

On the other hand, perhaps Michel’s idea of a ‘Partner State’, once more decentralised, democratised and oriented more towards supporting space for P2P self-provisioning :- starts to look quite a bit like the kind of local town-hall participatory democracy of which a Kropotkin, Murray Bookchin or Kevin Carson would approve, or at least tolerate 😉 ?

I see Gar Alperovitz’s new book has just come out – whatthenmustwedo.org/ – and seems to explore this kind of ground quite a bit. Maybe a good one to feature an excerpt from or interview with on the blog soon?”