Excerpted from Toni Prug:
“p2p entirely depends on those economic activities that pay for the housing, clothes, food and other living costs of all contributors (wages, studentships, parents’ funds, inheritances … all earned or created in capitalist or other existing systems based on commodities, exchange, labour, money, value) and those activities determine the overall mode of production.
P2p is an incredibly thin, though important, way of producing voluntarily and collectively that ought be researched. However, due to its binding with and dependence on the existing capitalist and state mode of production, it seems entirely inappropriate to call p2p a ‘mode of production’.
To put in simple terms (without entering economics or marxist terminology): on its own, p2p can not build, maintain and develop a city, nor can it organize the division of labour and allocation of overall produced wealth necessary for such achievements. While slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism all could/can.
It is not a surprise that p2p theorists have not been able so far to produce a plausible vision of how a p2p society might perhaps one day deliver the cities, etc that other modes of production delivered so far, and that we wish to improve on. Producing such visions is a task too difficult for anyone or any group of humans – this is one important thing to learn from social sciences (equally from Marx, or Keynes, or neoclassical economics and political theorists): there are too many complexities involved to create such visions in theory. Only through practice can any such ambitious goals be envisioned theoretically.
Hence the need to stick with analysing existing p2p practices, and to recognize material conditions in which those practices exist – the above-mentioned total dependence on other dominant modes of production being the starting point.
Yes, you may rightly say, new starts its existence in the old. You may also say that there are new phenomena which are able to boot-strap themselves out of the old and create a new totality on their own. The problem is, nothing so far points in the direction of p2p being such a new phenomenon able to become an overall logic of organizing the entire society (mode of production, if you wish) – I’m speaking here as a p2p fan and as a former and occasional p2p practitioner who would gladly assess any evidence to the contrary.
Any social phenomenon that is loaded with claims of being a new mode of production, or being beyond ‘left’ and ‘capitalist’ ideologies has to demonstrate its claims in the core theoretical fields where those analytical and ideological battles are fought: political economy, economics and politics.
If a social phenomenon makes claims on improving on emancipatory and egalitarian advances in society, it has to demonstrate the plausibility of those claims in direct comparison with the centuries of egalitarian battles organized and executed through mass political movements and ideas firmly based in the above-mentioned core theoretical fields. When entering those fields, as eclectic as it is, the p2p Foundation seems to me by far the best place to draw the inspiration from, for the analytical work that ought to be done to give p2p phenomena a chance to be evaluated according to the criteria it deserves.”
Source: A note on evaluation processes for social phenomena with ambitious claims. A response to Stefan Meretz by Toni Prug. Journal of Peer Production, Issue 1, 2012.
This is from wikipedia and there is a consensus on this definition.
“In the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production (in German: Produktionsweise, meaning ‘the way of producing’) is a specific combination of:
1. productive forces: these include human labour power and available knowledge given the level of technology in the means of production (e.g. tools, equipment, buildings and technologies, materials, and improved land).
2. social and technical relations of production: these include the property, power and control relations governing society’s productive assets, often codified in law, cooperative work relations and forms of association, relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations between social classes.
Marx regarded productive ability and participation in social relations as two essential characteristics of human beings and that the particular modality of these relations in capitalist production are inherently in conflict with the increasing development of human productive capacities.”
and because of this embedded contradiction capitalism has been crises prone.
In my opinion, similar to Toni’s claim, one could not be able claim that capitalism was a ‘mode of production’ until the 19th century. It did not build cities, yet it transformed the existing ones radically in a relatively short time. It evolved through political/class act of disembedding and centralization of ‘the market’ via state power. As well as subordination of society and man to it. There is nothing like ‘state mode of production’ therefore, but instead state capitalism and capitalist state / as part of production relations. The relationships of ownership, production, and distribution are mediated through the capitalist state within the capitalist mode of production. [i am not trying to tech but remind to open up the discussion]. Form a historical materialist point of view, once you look at the forces of production and relations of production in conflict, and the development of p2p social relationships within capitalist mode, one also need to look at all these domains at the same time. Instead of looking for cities or factories built by peer production, one needs to see what social relationships of peer production does to and in comparison with capitalist relations of production. Like scaling down the production and distributing the factory, while connecting the workers. Or to ownership, or distribution, these are being socialized and the core contradiction in capitalism is in question. Of course we still rely on capitalists’ norm, but not more than capitalists relied on aristocracy for centuries.
Another way to think of, or theorize p2p is seeing it as the relational dynamic of the new mode rising, as Michel does. Qnd to see it, from a historical materialist perspective, as the relational dynamic of the communal mode of production, which might be rising within the capitalist mode. Than we have p2p relationships spreading rapidly and dissolving the ‘client-servant’ relational dynamics of the capitalist mode [as Kleiner puts it]. We are now also observing a political struggle over state [crack capitalism Halloway – Reclaim the state (Wainright) discussion] and capitalists -Occupy/15M/anonymous/wikileaks/ searches coalitions to do the revolution that is necessary to replace the existing mode in decline with the new mode rising. I see my self for example a communal worker, who is striving to get rid of the burden of the capitalist norms to which I am not relying on, but instead enslaved by it. The new wave of revolutionary uprisings are in need and searching for such clear description of a new mode, in order to define a clear vision and strategy. If p2p is not the new mode of production or its relational core, I think then we need to try to make it so!
?Toni wrote: “It is not a surprise that p2p theorists have not been able so far to produce a plausible vision of how a p2p society might perhaps one day deliver the cities, etc…”
I understand the argument but disagree with the premise. I am a p2p theorist with a plausible vision. Free software, though somewhat p2p in nature, is not a suitable poster child for a p2p movement. Coops, unions, and guilds are more modal and perfectly suitable for p2p values, relations and process with a hybrid of open, direct democracy and relatively flat meritocracy. For much of history guilds built *everything*, educated many, and elevated the worker higher in society than ever before.
PR
Put together p2p and “peer firms”, firms constituted only by partners or peers, no employees, (known as worker co-ops at our time) and the trick is done.