An excerpt from the thesis of J. Martin Pedersen: Property, Commoning and the Politics of Free Software.

J. Martin Pedersen:

““We have seen how Benkler’s work contributes to an expansion of the economistic framework that enables it to better capture the dynamics of social production. These social relations he defines as outside the market and property, which he otherwise considers very important institutions:

“The rules of property are circumscribed and intended to elicit a particular datum— willingness and ability to pay for exclusive control over a resource. They constrain what one person or another can do with regard to a resource; that is, use it in some ways but not others, reveal or hide information with regard to it, and so forth. These constraints are necessary so that people must transact with each other through markets, rather than through force or social networks, but they do so at the expense of constraining action outside of the market to the extent that it depends on access to these resources” (Benkler 2006: 24).

Social production for Benkler, then, is the kind of social relations that are currently not captured within “the market”, as that institution is traditionally understood. Moreover, social production should not be subjected to the private property and contract mechanisms that define the market, because these mechanisms are considered unfit for the intangible realm of information. Instead the economistic framework – the language of marketeers, essentially – must be enlarged to be able to systematically capture the dynamics of social production, while, and this is the crux of the matter, private property and all the wealth concentrated on that basis remains unquestioned. In other words, the power amassed through the private property regime in the tangible realm is left untouched, but as an organisational mode is rejected from the realm of ideas; because the operation of existing powers in the tangible realm needs a free flowing virtual commons in order to continually have access to ideas, knowledge and information. The organisational mode of the tangible realm, however, remains. That is to say that Benkler is developing a framework with which to capture social production without destroying it. It is the construction of “capitalist commonism”, to use an oxymoron, that we see in the work of Benkler.

Capitalist commonism recognises that existing economic powers cannot sustain themselves without a minimal degree of commonalty in the intangible realm. In order for the operation of the industrial apparatus to sustain itself it must refrain from enclosing in a traditional sense the intangible realm, because it needs this realm of ideas to feed its increasingly information dependent, but heavy, physical machinery of electronic commodity production.

The dynamics of social production, however, are captured through incorporation in the economistic framework. That permits those institutions that organise themselves with such means – corporations, states and many NGOs and PGOs (Pseudo-Governmental Organisations) – to scientifically grasp those dynamics and thus extract the surplus value that arises from the excess capacity embodied in relations between citizens.

The excess capacity, as we saw, is capacity in excess of basic requirements, such as housing, food, time and skills. Housing and food are tangible matters, while skills are transmitted most often through tangible means in physical spaces, most of which is organised by means of private property and thus – largely – remain in the hands of the few. Excess capacity, then, by a small stretch of the imagination, can be understood as positive externalities that cannot be internalised on the basis of the usual mechanisms of enclosure, because these mechanisms would destroy the commons once and for all. By analogy, such enclosure is like overfishing: if you land all the fish they cannot reproduce themselves and you have nothing to fish for any more. The virtual commons must be defended, but ways to reap its positive externalities – the economic potential inherent in the pooling and extraction of its productive forces – are required for capital interest, confined to the tangible realm, to be able to carry on its expansionary movement. The information commons, therefore, becomes a capitalist commons and it is Benkler’s great achievement that he has begun to establish a framework from within which tangible powers can extract wealth from the intangible realm without destroying that realm. From a capitalist perspective this is genius, because it resembles a sustainable fishing policy: we can keep fishing, but the fish will remain available. From an anti-capitalist perspective it is a domestication of the virtual commons and consequently a separation of the virtual commons from the real commons, conceptualised in terms that relies upon state power and in turn justifies state power.

It is similar concerns that have led to Tiziana Terranova (2000) to argue that in the phenomena that Benkler calls “social production” we rather see an emergence of “free labor” that offer new ways for capital to consolidate itself through extracting wealth from social relations hitherto external to direct market relations. Not only is it free labour, we may venture, but resistance-free labour. In her later work she sees Benkler’s conceptualisation of social production as offering “liberal and neoliberal economics a refinement of its logic that does not significantly break with its overall political rationality” (Terranova 2009: 251-252). That reflects the argument I am making here.

In Benkler’s presentation she finds that “[n]on-market production, in fact, is based in social cooperation, but it becomes economically effective, that is it achieves the status of an economic phenomenon” (2009: 252), because, as Benkler says “it increases the overall productivity in the sectors where it is effective … and presents new sources of competition to incumbents that produce information goods for which there are now socially produced substitutes’ (Benkler 2006: 122). In the networked information economy “[s]ocial life and economic life would thus find a point of convergence where the former would no longer find its expression exclusively within the reproductive sphere of civil society but would become directly productive in the economic domain” (Terranova 2009: 251). It is this economistic perspective that domesticates social production – ties it to capital – and funnels the wealth created through these non-market relations back into capital. I am arguing in this essay for a social analysis of property relations for exactly the reason that Terranova criticises Benkler’s account.”