P2P Foundation

We continue our exploration of ethics and peer production, with further and concluding excerpts from our contribution to the conference of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The full essay was entitled: Par cum pari: Notes on the horizontality of peer to peer relationships in the context of the verticality of a hierarchy of values..

Today, we specifically tackle the four principles of the social doctrine: personhood, common good, solidarity, and subsidiary, which we explained elsewhere.

Michel Bauwens:

“Let us briefly review the four pillars of the social doctrine, and make a preliminary examination of how the emergence of peer to peer modes may affect them.

Regarding personhood, there is no doubt that peer to peer modes respect personhood, and represent a ‘relational augmentation’ of individuality. Equipotentiality as ethical and metaphysical principle underlying peer to peer, does not endanger any concept of personhood. We would argue that it represents a deepening of personhood and the possibilities of self-realization and autonomy-in-cooperation.

Regarding the common good, the peer production of common value is more respectful of the common good than market relations, which are genetically unable to take into account the necessary social externalities. Constitutively, peer to peer includes the convergence of individual and collective interest, so that individual effort strengthens the commons, which is universally available to all who need it. Some would suggests that forms of giving and sharing that do not require reciprocity would be ethically inferior to reciprocal giving, but I would suggest that the kind of giving and receiving that occurs in peer to peer, is related to the common, and represents an extension of the circle of care. But rather than rely on altruism, it relies on designing social systems so that individual and collective interests are aligned. Peer to peer dynamics do create strong personalized relationships amongst the core producers, but also allow for impersonal collaboration, while crucially enabling cooperation amongst strangers.

Peer to peer modes strengthen subsidiarity, in the sense that civil society organizations, in the new more ‘informal’ form that it takes in the p2p context, increase their ability to create common value, and decrease the necessity for both the market and the state to intervene. Both market and state remain complementary, and can play a substantial role in enabling and empowering the direct production of social value, through open business models that include benefit-sharing practices, and Partner State policies which strengthen the infrastructure of social cooperation. However, we would argue that peer production truly ‘realizes’ subsidiarity, as it enables all types of value creation which were hitherto monopolized by private entities and subject to commodificaiton and market relations.

The challenge of peer to peer lies in the fourth pillar of the social doctrine: solidarity. It’s an issue which peer production cannot solve on its own.

Peer to peer modes, because they rely on voluntary contributions are sustainable collectively, but not on the individual level. Projects can sustain themselves if they maintain the level of volunteering, but no individual can permanently maintain him or herself outside of the monetary system. P2P projects are essentially ‘agnostic’ as to the individual situation of the volunteers, as they rely on the surplus and abundance that they are able to mobilize through self-aggegration. It has no answer to the individual who cannot mobilize such resources (though it does create vast wealth in a commons mode which is universally available); and it has no mechanisms to monetarily sustain the volunteers, beyond the creation of satellite economies around the commons.

This poses not just a problem for the individual, but for society, as it creates a ‘crisis of value’ for present market society. Indeed, as increasing numbers of individuals choose for passionate production, and the infrastructure for peer production continues to improve, the ability to directly create use value increases exponentially, but the ability of the market to monetize such social utility only rises linearly, creating a huge gap between the desire and potential for peer production, and the ability of individuals to sustain such choices. This is, in our opinion, one of the constitutive causes of precarity and precariousness amongst the new generations.

Society therefore needs a new mechanism of solidarity, but which cannot be a monetization based on profit-sharing, as this would simply ‘crowd out’ the willingness for non-reciprocal contributions. The solution then, would seem to be very similar to the one familiar to the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, when nearly one quarter of the male population was supported in their spiritual production, through gifts to the Church. In contempary terms this would mean a unconditional form of support in the form of a basic income.

Such a basic income should not be seen as welfare, but as recognition by society and the market that social innovation has become the primary vehicle for value creation, and it would, in a transitory period, allow citizens to move more easily in and out of the market sphere, and manage their careers over the longer term, so that periods of peer production can be more easily inserted. Europe is already moving in that direction, through transitional labour market policies being developed in various countries, but it is still based on the premise that transitional periods are less productive than formal labour, while the new emerging realities point to the opposite, namely that value creation is highest through peer production, and not in the market sphere, which is becoming increasingly derivate vis a vis social innovation in the P2P sphere.

Before such basic income becomes a reality, open business models based on benefit sharing, and partner state policies should be supported.

In the longer term we have to ask the question about moving from a political economy where peer to peer is a subset of market relations in a context of infinite-growth capitalism, to a political economy where the market for scarce goods is a subset of a peer to peer economy and a civilization centered around the notions of the commons and direct value creation through civil society.

If infinite growth is indeed a logical and physical impossibility in the context of finite natural resources; and when the artificial scarcities currently impeding social cooperation and innovation will be increasingly seen as counterproductive, then such a shift might be seen as a conditional inevitability.
If we find a solution for the solidarity issue, and the right interface and combination between non-reciprocal peer production in the immaterial field; and cost-recovery mechanisms for the production of scarce rival goods, then the resulting society would be seen to be a more adequate expression of the value system expressed by the social doctrine.