Yihong Ding makes an interesting contribution to business strategy at the Semantic Report magazine, which I recommend reading in full.

Here is the main argument:

What is the most fundamental reason that drives normal people contributing to the Web? And my answer: People contribute to the Web so that they can be recognized at present and be remembered ever after. It is not because of money (Web evolution did not take a single pause when the dot-com bubble burst), and nor is it because of entertainment (the majority of people do not live with entertaining). Both money and entertainment are valuable additions to the fundamental reason. Both of them accelerate the progress of Web evolution. But neither is the most fundamental.

So, business strategy managers, what is the most fundamental service of your business? To help people make money, to bring entertainment to people, or to help people be recognized and be remembered?

* At last, if your answer is the third one, and your business also provides the facilities of the first and the second choices, you must let me know the name of your business so that I never miss the chance to buy your stocks.”

The following is both an extract from Johan’s book Hacking Capitalism, which we excerpted as Book of the Week, and a partial response to Adam Arvidsson’s contribution on the third circuit of ethical value creation. Johan gives an interesting historical overview of how this issue has been thought through.

Johan Soderbergh:

“Our observations on this start out from the convergence of producer and consumer roles, a fact that for the last two decades have been commented on and invested with hype by a great number of futurists, mainstream economists, innovation researchers etc. (A. Toffler: the prosumer, von Hippel: user-centred innovation models, the list goes on).

However, the goods produced by user-communities only has value in its relation to the value of waged labour working towards equivalent sollutions somewhere else in the economy. Hence, wage labour need still to be the norm in society (which goes some way explaining the expansion of intellectual property). Just as the invisible, gratis and (re?)productive labour of women in the feudal household creates value to capital only due to the wage relation in which the man is entangled. Simplifying a bit, it is the wages of Microsoft’s programmers that determine the value of Red Hat’s GNU/Linux products. Gratis audience-labour organised in user-communities create value for capital in the same way as Marx described that a product found laying on the street has value to the finder-keeper, i.e. its value exist in relation to the same product being produced for sale elsewhere.”

In keeping with the recent focus on Johan Söderberg’s Hacking Capitalism as well as Clay Shirky’s recent “Here Comes Everybody” blog and book , I would like to call attention to what I think is an important venture, and, moreover, what I hope is merely one of many similar initiatives to come.

Not An Employee

Now we are everywhere, and independent.
But not alone.

…

We do not work for you. You do not work for us.
We choose to work together.

…

We are diverse.
We are labor, but we are also capital.

….

I have long contended that a key transformation to p2p culture rests in the reclamation of the operationalization of “work” by the workers themselves: everything from self-selection (volunteerism) like we see on Wikipedia to widespread freelancing made possible by sites that match individuals’ skillsets to others’ needs. Now, Not An Employee celebrates the individual’s freedom to choose a self-directed work life “unencumbered by employers and better without bosses.”

(thx, Bill Tozier)

“In this special interview Rick Falkvinge, the founder and the leader of Swedish Pirate Party, gives his own views on the wildly heated political filesharing debate in Sweden, evaluates the political and technological prospects of P2P and talks about the dangers of citizen surveillance and Big Brother society….”

Read the rest of this article here at P2P Consortium.

Johan Soderbergh’s new book is out and available via Amazon. While very pricey, which is really contradictory for such a topic, I have no doubt that this will be a significant book, as I’ve had the chance to read and hear Johan before. We hope to feature excerpts in our P2P Book of the Week program soon.

Here’s the blurb:

The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement demonstrates how labour can self-organise production, and, as is shown by the free operating system GNU/Linux, even compete with some of the worlds largest firms. The book examines the hopes of such thinkers as Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Negri, in the light of the recent achievements of the hacker movement. This book is the first to examine a different kind of political activism that consists in the development of technology from below.

Johan send us the following additional excerpt with information on the concept of ‘politics as play’:

“In Linus Torvald’s book about the invention of the Linux kernel, he states that hackers have become revolutionaries ‘just for fun’. The word ‘fun’ is here meant to smooth over any leftist conotations from the word ‘revolution’. However, the notion of hackers becoming revolutionaries just for fun would have appealed to the eighteenth century poet Friedrich Schiller. Disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution, he sat down to ponder over how to make revolution work better the next time. Friedrich Schiller saw the ‘aesthetic play-drive’ as the primary force which could foster a more wholesome human being, whose maturing would also carry forth and be able to sustain a post-revolutionary aesthetic state. Schiller meant that the aesthetic education of man was necessary to heal the rift within man caused by specialisation:

“[. . .] If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.�

Both adherers and critics of Schiller have pigeonholed him in the tradition of romanticism. It would do Schiller more justice if his words were recovered from the fine arts scene and instead applied to the politics that flow from the ‘beauty of the baud’ and the play with source code in the computer underground. It was this kind of poet that Herbert Marcuse encountered when he begun his investigations into the liberating potential of art and play. Already back in the 1930s Marcuse contrasted aesthetics and play with the instrumentality and drudgery of labour. The argument in Hacking Capitalism is that hackers have invented a new mode of developing technology and organising labour that is subjected to the play-drive in Schiller’s and Marcuse’s sense. The politics of hackers has only partly to do with resisting copyright, censorship and Digital Rights Management. At its heart, the joyful revolution of free software development consists in the distance it places between doing and the wage labour relation.”

This was the very first academic conference exclusively devoted to peer production, and to my mind, it has therefore a ‘historic’ importance. We already know that it will be held again next year, though at a different place, so this will also be the start of a peer to peer research movement that will likely grow in the future.

Stefan Merten already wrote up his personal experience on the Oekonux mailing list:

“I’m just returning from this nice workshop in Nottingham which has been organized by Andreas Wittel and Michel / P2PFoundation.

This time I will not tell much about the single contributions because Michel will set up a page on P2PFoundation where all the slides will be put (though most probably are PowerPoint ). I think in many cases the slides or papers will suffice to get an idea. However, a couple of interesting questions came up which I will pose here on this list in a series of additional postings.

The workshop itself was really nice. There were a very good atmosphere and since Andreas arranged the location and food and so on the framework was set up for a really nice meeting. The people who have been there where very much interested in discussion, learning and understanding things - very similar to the atmosphere in Oekonux .

There were about 30 persons (all invited) but unfortunately the workshop was not public so for non-invited persons it was not possible to attend. Also there were in total 6 persons who are here on this list or closely associated .

There were only one track which had the advantage that the whole group was together all the time but had the disadvantage that there were a constant hurry during the presentations and the discussions - which I found quite disturbing.

In my presentation I used the term Selbstentfaltung - in it’s German spelling and pronunciation. It came quite unexpected that several people independent from each other approached me and found it very useful to use this term - because in English it doesn’t mean anything and you can fill it with meaning matching exactly the phenomenons we see.

At the end of the workshop there were some common understanding that

* peer production is an important issue,

* there is something like a special peer mode of production

* collaboration generally becomes more important

* individual improvement does not come on the expense of others

We were not able to find (sharp) disagreements.

Several issues have been identified which need further consideration /
research:

* Peer production

* Peer governance

* Peer practice

* Peer property

I had also a couple of talks with various persons and a 4th Oekonux Conference became more likely than ever .

A couple of small things I’m bringing back from the workshop I’d like to share here.

Michel told us that there is a quite vibrant Free Design community at

http://appropedia.com/

I were not able to check it myself but it contains designs for appropriate technology. Michel also mentioned that it is certainly not
dominated by Western people. Also the absolute quality and use value orientation of the designs has been emphasized - just what we analyzed here for this type of production process.

Another Free Project was pointed to by Paul B. Hertzog. He told us that the science fiction community has an interesting project
producing lots of texts. Unfortunately I have no URL for it .

The last thing I want to put in this mail is the clear distinction Adam Arvidsson made between a capitalist economy and what he called “ethical economy” (I put it in quotes because I think “ethical” is one of the worst attributes one can choose - it has not much to do with ethics…). His base finding is that the capitalist economy valorizes what is produced in the “ethical economy”. This is probably what also has happened in many sectors of culture since the beginning of capitalism. He also remarked that the problem for the “ethical economy” is not talent - there is much of it. It is more the problem of organizing and maintaining communities around that talent.

1. The three business models

In P2P theory, I distinguish at least 3 business models that are emerging through peer production.

One is precisely that: there is now a sharing economy, where people share value, but mostly from motivations of individual expression and recognition, for which they need platforms, which are proprietary, and fund themselves precisely through such an attention economy.

The other format is commons-oriented peer production, where it is communities that create value, and because they are cooperating, they have stronger links, and have their own platforms, usually managed by for-benefit institutions such as the Mozilla Foundation, and around them, evolve a number of businesses.

In Crowdsourcing, companies integrate distributed production in their value chain, without giving up control.

Alternatively, platforms may be create as a vehicle for direct user production to occur. This is also the domain of Desktop Manufacturing and the ecology of companies gravitating around minipreneurs and Networked Micro Agencies . Note that in terms of the hierarchy of engagement between companies and peer communities, both models are quite different.

Of such a model, David Bollier writes:

“One of the best ways to stimulate competition, innovation and lower prices is for participants in a market to honor the commons (a shared pool of resources, a minimal set of safety or performance standards) and then to compete “on top” of the commons. Instead of being able to reap easy profits from monopoly control over something everyone needs — say, a computer operating system like Windows — a company must work harder to “add value” in more specialized ways.”

2. The Direct Economy model led by User Innovation

So, what we have now is a polarity between communities (commons-based or sharing-based) and institutions such as for-profit companies.

This is why Xavier Comtesse coined the term of the Direct Economy:

“In a system of direct democracy, sovereignty is lodged with the citizens - or at least, with those among them that choose to actively participate in the system. They can not only pick among prepackaged options (vote) or candidates (election) but they also can deeply co-shape the policy process. Switzerland is probably the strongest case: here new laws can be put forth, and even the Constitution modified, by citizens’ initiative.

Translate that into business terms and we have a description of a system where consumers have a direct influence on what companies develop and produce for them. The more informed, opinionated and wired (socially connected) they are, the more they are likely to make use of this influence and to try to organize it - exactly as in a direct democracy system. “

The direct economy’s conclusions are beyond doubt:

1) Users are becoming a dominant factor

2) Corporations need to adopt new practices to involve the users.

The Law of Asymmetric Competition , which posits that companies that use open/free, participatory, and commons-oriented tactics and strategies will function better.

For this to work, companies will have to adopt Edge Competencies (on how to deal with their edge, i.e. surrounding customers and communities) as well as Open Innovation , not just internally, but to be able to co-evolve with diffuse innovation processes, driven by Lead User communities. However, please note that the Open Innovation concept is often used in a much too limited way, as opening up innovation between companies only.

There is now an increasingly important field of study, which had been pioneered by Erik von Hippel’s the Democratization of Innovation, which is centered on such User-centered Innovation and it is developing User Innovation Theory in order to understand the User-Generated Ecosystem, and its important expressions such as the explosion in User-Generated Content.

To be continued!

Time for an overview of the material we have collated for our Encyclopedia.

As a reminder, we have a special section for business-oriented material where we focus on the manyfold implications of the emergence of peer production.

Our first argument is that there are in fact two economic realms, a sphere for the direct production of social value, co-existing with our normal ‘monetary’ economy.

As quoted by Erik Kluitenberg:

“… the quest for self-determination and meaningful and memorable experiences ultimately will hinge on people’s understanding that they are not merely consuming a product, but that they are actually participating in a meaningful social process not guided by an extrinsic logic (profit), something that rather has intrinsic, or ’sovereign’ value. I don’t believe that these two can be fused into one.”

This first economy is getting different names.

1. The point of view of the ethical economy

Adam Arvidsson calls it an Ethical Economy

However, it would seem that Adam stresses how both are intertwined, yet at the same time he writes that social cooperation is now the most important productive factor:

“That a generalized, technology-enhanced capacity for manifold cooperation has become the main productive force means that there is no longer any contradiction between ethics and economics. On the contrary, the ethical ability to open up to and share with others has become the most fundamental quality of a successful economic agent.”

At the same time, he also stresses that there is a crisis of value between both the ethical economy and the monetary economy.

So recapitulating Adam’s points and adding them to the original two economies points of view gives this:

1) There are two economies and ethical and a monetary one

2) The ethical economy is already overshadowing the monetary economy, which in turn has to become ethical

3) Nevertheless, the interface between both is problematic

Adam has started a book on the topic, with an introduction to the ethical economy.

The political implications are that as people are producing an ethical surplus, they have an interest in not being expropriated from it. In other words, if it is the interconnected community that produces an ethical surplus, and it is only partially monetized by corporations who do not return any of it to the producers, then we have an ethical exploitation.

2. The point of view of the attention economy

Another approach is that of Michael Goldhaber, who uses the concept of the Attention Economy , which he says is an economy driven by the exchange of attention . The Implicit Goal of Attention Economy is: to tightly intertwine everyone at the level of mind

He even proposes a metric, the TPI coefficient, to calculate how much value is created in the attention economy.

Now here is where it gets confusing. The concept of an attention economy is also used in another sense, nl. that the attention itself becomes a scarce good that can be monetized in a market for attention. This is not what Goldhaber has in mind as his own priority, but is nevertheless also true.

So again we are recapitulating Michael Goldhaber’s conclusion, fusing them with the more narrower interpretation of the monetary attention economy:

1) We are moving to a economy where attention which is dominant

2) However, that new economy cannot be reduced to the monetary economy

3) Nevertheless, there is an interface between both, which means that attention can also be partially, but not totally, monetized

4) The part that operates outside of the monetary economy is of a dramatically higher level. Ultimately attention cannot be reduced to money and therefore the attention economy is different from the capitalist economy.

As we can see there is a substantial agreement on the key problematic.

3. The attention economy as a field of action

The attention economy is also a pragmatic field of action. There is a movement afoot that aims to develop an attention architecture so that we can have open attention standards.

Examples are the Attention Trust, and they are developing technical means such as the Attention Recorder and the Attention Profiling Mark-up Language. Their aim is that every user of digital media would be the owner and controller of his own Attention and Attention Data. The community of users would then not be expropriated of its own Attention Curve.

4. Some further approaches

There is also another approach, which stresses that we are living in a Conversation Economy, and that Markets are Conversations .

Most of the conversation around this theme is much more narrow and stresses the changes in behaviour for businesses engaging in such conversation. It is a field most open to manipulative abuse.

For more information, listen or watch the following podcasts and webcasts:

1) http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Supernova_2005_Attention_Panel

2) http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Doc_Searls_on_the_Attention_and_Intention_Economy

3) http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Linda_Stone_on_Attention_in_an_Always-on-World

And read this print interview with Michael Goldhaber.

I’m reproducing here my monthly column for the Amsterdam-based Center for the Experience Economy:

To avoid misunderstandings at the outset, let me clearly state that I distinguish markets from the system of infinite accumulation of capital that we call capitalism. Markets have always existed, and are a mechanism to deal with and allocate scarce rival resources through the mechanism of price. Under capitalism this mode of exchange has become dominant, but has also been coupled to something else, a system that is based on continuous growth.

This system is now facing serious barriers that are a function of the finiteness of the natural resource base that is our planet, and global warming is one example of it. One of the meanings of global warming, coupled with the general trend of globalization, is that our growth-system now covers the whole planet, there is no more outside. What this means is that the limits of an extensive development are being reached. If China and India would reach the current level of the West, we would need four planets instead of the two we are already using up, and this seems a logical impossibility.

This is no trivial affair, as the failure of extensive development is what brought down earlier civilizations and modes of production. For example, slavery was not only marked by low productivity, but could not extend this productivity as that would require making the slaves more autonomous, so slave-based empires had to grow in space, but at a certain point in that growth, the cost of expansion exceeded the benefits. This is why feudalism finally emerged, a system which refocused on the local, and allowed productivity growth as serfs had a self-interest in growing and ameliorating the tools of production.

The alternative to extensive development is intensive development, as happened in the transition from slavery to feudalism. But notice that to do this, the system had to change, the core logic was no longer the same. The dream of our current economy is therefore one of intensive development, to grow in the immaterial field, and this is basically what the experience economy means. The hope that it expresses is that business can simply continue to grow in the immaterial field of experience.

But is that really so? I have a set of arguments and observations that argue against that hope. First of all, in the field of the immaterial, we are no longer dealing with scarce goods, but with marginal reproduction costs and non-rival goods. With such goods, sharing does not diminish the enjoyment of the good, since all parties retain their ability to use them. The emergence of peer production shows a new form of creating value, that is in fundamental aspects ‘outside the market’. Typically, in commons-based production we have a common pool, accessible to everyone (Linux, Wikipedia), around which an ecology of business can form to create and sell scarcities (usually services and experiences). In sharing-oriented production (YouTube, Google documents), we have proprietary platforms that enable and empower the sharing, but at the same time, sell the aggregated attention (a scarcity), to the advertising market. Finally, in the third crowdsourcing mode, companies try to integrate participation in their own value chain and framework.

So the good news is that indeed business is possible. But I would like the readers to entertain the following proposition, nl. That:

1) The creation of non-monetary value is exponential

2) The monetization of such value is linear

In other words, we have a growing discrepancy between the direct creation of use value through social relationships and collective intelligence (open platforms create near infinite value through the operations of the laws of Metcalfe and Reed), but only a fraction of that value can actually be captured by business and money. Innovation is becoming social and diffuse, an emergent property of the networks rather than an internal R & D affair within corporations; capital is becoming an a posteriori intervention in the realization of innovation, rather than a condition for its occurrence; more and more positive externalizations are created from the social field.

What this announces is a crisis of value, most such value is ‘beyond measure’, but also essentially a crisis of accumulation of capital. Furthermore, we lack a mechanism for the existing institutional world to re-fund what it receives from the social world. So on top of all of that, we have a crisis of social reproduction: peer production is collective sustainable, but not individually.
For all of this, we will need new policies, major reforms and restructurations in our economy and society.

But one thing is sure: we will have markets, but the core logic of the emerging experience economy, operating as it does in the world of non-rival exchange, is unlikely to have capitalism as its core logic.

It can no longer grow extensively, but it cannot replace it by intensive growth. The history of slave empires and their transition to feudal structures is about to repeat itself, but in a different form.

David Laibman’s Deep History, which has already inspired me to a previous editorial comparing the peer to peer transition to that from slavery to feudalism, offers an innovative interpretation into the stadial (= by stages) evolution of capitalism. It is an abstract theory, but compatible with the historical record. I will first describe his vision, then inquire into its compatibility with our vision on the peer to peer transformation.

I urge anyone interested in peer to peer theory to read the following carefully, as I see it as a major new integrative moment and achievement in the understanding of the change dynamics of the coming era.

David Laibman’s theory goes like this, and my apologies for the simplifications.

He distinguishes two axes with each two polarities, which gives four quandrants. The logic of evolution, goes per column, from the top down (this gives: top left, bottom left, top right, bottom right).

The vertical axis divides up diffusion vs. accumulation. Accumulation is the well-known process of adding up capital through intensive development, i.e. “locally�. Diffusion is the lesser known process of the extensive spread of capitalist relations in a precapitalist environment, say the McDonaldisation of the Third World.

The horizontal access divides internally oriented phases, from external oriented phases. This gives four quadrants, i.e. four phases, and three transitions between them.

DL also importantly distinguishes low-interventionist ‘passive states’ and ‘high-interventionist’ active state forms.

He also introduces ‘long cycles of balance of social power’, with an upswing of workers power, and a long period of downswing. I’ll leave this mostly out of the picture, but it is not difficult to see the downswing starting in the 1980’s and picking up speed after 1989.

I. Explaining the phases of capitalism

Let’s start.

Phase 1: internal diffusion of capitalist relations.

This is the first mercantile phase of capitalism, marked by the enclosures and forced proletarianisation of the English peasants, and outside the process was fed through the colonial expansion, slave trade, etc… The era is marked by active absolutist monarchies.

Transition I: nation-state start to coalesce, and passive states emerge.

Phase 2: internal accumulation with passive state: the liberal era of the 19th century.

Intensive but ‘spontaneous’ accumulation within nation states, is combined with a fairly passive “laisser faire� state approach.

Transition II: capital starts to transgress national boundaries, but national capital starts demanding protection from their states, while emerging social movements start making their demands.

Phase 3: external diffusion, active national states

The imperialist era which is marked by a formation of a world market, and the hardening of strong states, both for international competition, and for internal regulation and responding to the demands of social movements. DL divides up this ‘long 20th’ century, into a pre-Soviet era of classic imperialism; 2) the Soviet interregnum period marked by American hegemony; 3) the post Soviet era marked by an erosion of that central power of the U.S. and increasing problems leading to a transition to the fourth stage of globalism.

Transition III: capital starts transcending national boundaries but in a way that can no longer be contained by nation-states; diffusion completes but at the same times also fails to go very deep, causing deep cultural strains in the developing world; lack of global state power renders inoperable any solution to deep social divisions

Phase 4: external accumulation with a global passive state

(of course in this stage, external becomes internal, because it becomes the whole world, or in other words, the internal/external distinction looses currency)

This phase of globalism, of which we are already observing many signs in this transition period, would mean a full realization of global accumulation on a world scale; the key problem of a global passive state is that there is no internal/external contradiction that can create a “we�, and therefore, says DL, it will be marked by a hole in the hegemony layer.

In other words, we are now in a dysfunctional ‘transitional’ phase of proto-globalism, and need to transit to a full-blown form which needs its own state form.

II. Comments

A few initial comments:

1) I think this scenario is believable on the whole, and one of its implications is that capitalism has not yet fulfilled its full role, that it still has to initiate and complete this full fourth cycle. Concluding to its obsoleteness or even ‘death’ may be premature.

2) In his story, though I’m still missing the last chapters of the book, there is very little recognition of the key role of ecological disasters, and resource depletion; he also ignores everything we are talking about in our blog. (that of course doesn’t mean the author ignores these but they are not very prominent in the book at all).

What kind of problems does his vision create for peer to peer theory:

1) His theory highlights the question of timing. Before we may see a shift to a successor civilization that is geared around the peer to peer logic, we may first expect a global strengthening of the capitalist system on a world scale

2) It poses the question of what kinds of structural reforms are needed to achieve this fourth stage

According to DL it is only this fourth stage that will create a global abstract citizenry with a global consciousness. (as a socialist he calls this a global proletariat).

Some possible conclusions:

1) Many of the peer to peer developments that we describe and try to integrate in our theory are indeed emergent and small, they will take decades to play out, especially the expansion to the physical field

2) Carrying out the reforms that the rise of p2p-participatory movements (openness, commons-orientation) and the sustainability movements suggests are part of the key reforms which may make such a transformation to globalism possible; it is pretty clear that neither neoliberalism nor neoconservatism can successfully solve the transition problems

3) It gives sense to many of the reforms-within-capitalism movement that we see arising such as sustainability, social entrepreneurship, base-of-the-pyramid approaches, blended value; indeed, we see at present no serious social force calling for its abolition, while at the same time many of its main principles are contested. I suspect that the new social compact will have elements of a kind of global Keynesianism as proposed by Soros, and also reflect many participative developments; what we describe as the forces of netarchical capitalism may play a great role in it. Note that a key issue in this transition is solving the ecology/sustainability issues without which the transition is not possible.

A global passive state might appear strong compared to the weak global institutions that are operating now, but it is correct to call it passive as it would have relatively limited powers.

4) But this emergent globalism will then itself set the stage for a further transition to a full peer to peer mode, as more and more world citizens have the skills and consciousness and access to technology that makes a peer to peer style of social relationship a natural thing to do. The present minority of peer-ready knowledge workers need to become a massive social phenomena in the whole world.

So the above gives us a clear view of the ….

III. The Stadiality of Peer to Peer

Crucial is the question of timing: do we have the time to go through two such transitions (the global and the P2P one), before the ecological “sh..t� hits the fan? It is likely that we do as all of the different problems and trends will take several decades to fully play out.

This gives us the following stadiality for peer to peer:

1) The current emergent phase, where all new realities are emerging as seeds

2) The phase were participation becomes a highly visible part of a new global compact. The society is capitalist, but it has integrated the major reforms without which it cannot endure

3) This allows participation to become mainstream and to become the main alternative solution for a system which cannot structurally solve the problems of nature and equity.

Again we find the double and contradictory conclusion that P2P is both immanent and transcendent to the present system. It is the very condition of its survival and reform, and it is the seed of its overcoming, AT THE SAME TIME.

(for comparison purposes: the absolutist monarchy was needed for the next stage of what was still in many ways a precapitalist regime, combining both mercantile-capitalist and strong feudal elements, but at the same time, it planted the seeds for its own overcoming by parliamentary democracies in the hands of the new emerging class which it allowed to strengthen; similarly, the new global regime will be capitalist, but with very strong participative features that are the seed of a new dominant production/governance and property mode that will eventually overcome it)