Michel Bauwens: As far as I’m concerned, the Immaterial Labour Conference organized by Ed Emery in Cambridge University’s Keynes Hall, was a landmark event, bringing together various efforts to understand cognitive capitalism in general, and peer processes in particular. The essays are clickable from the conference home page. The presentation that especially struck me as important was Nick Dyer-Witheford’s contribution.

There are in my opinion, 3 people who really ‘get’ peer production and its importance for the political economy (as separate from any enthousiasm for the Commons or Open paradigms). The first is Yochai Benkler, who operates from within an American ‘left-liberal’ tradition and sees peer production as operating within the bounds of the market economy; the second would be my own work; and the third I only recently discovered during the Immaterial Labour Conference in Cambridge. (An add-on approach would be Oekonux.org’s focus on free software, an approach which I consider as too narrow.)Both Nick and I concur, and I think that makes the essential difference with Benkler, that peer production has both immanent aspects, it indeed operates within the market economy; but it has also transcendent aspects. It points to the new system where the core would be the networked commons. My own approach uses another conceptual scheme, and differs in some details (I’m not yet sure I agree with the non-P2P statist-planner commons as part of the same trend), but this is definitely a new foundational essay announcing the P2P era.

Two excerpts, the introduction and the definition of the ‘circulation of the common’

Introduction
This paper makes theoretical propositions to assist conceive an emergent communism, a “coming community� that is neither capitalist, socialist nor anarchic, and the place within it of “immaterial labor.� [1] Its argument, in brief, is as follows. Marx deemed the cellular form of capitalism to be the commodity, a good produced for exchange between private owners. His model of the circulation of capital traced the metamorphosis of the commodity into money, which commands the acquisition of further resources to be transformed into more commodities. The theorists of autonomist Marxism demonstrated how this circulation of capital is also a circulation of struggles, meeting resistances at every point. But although this concept proved important for understanding the multiplicity of contemporary anti-capital, it says very little about the kind of society towards which these struggles move, a point on which the autonomist tradition has mainly been mute. Today, new theorizations about multitude and biopolitics should to reconsider this silence.

I suggest that the cellular form of communism is the common, a good produced to be shared in association. The circuit of the common traces how shared resources generate forms of social cooperation—associations– that coordinate the conversion of further resources into expanded commons. On the basis of the circuit of capital, Marx identified different kinds of capital—mercantile, industrial and financial—unfolding at different historical moments yet together contributing to an overall societal subsumption. By analogy, we should recognise differing moments in the circulation of the common. These include terrestrial commons (the customary sharing of natural resources in traditional societies); planner commons (for example, command socialism and the liberal democratic welfare state); and networked commons, (the free associations open source software, peer-to-peer networks, grid computing and the numerous other socializations of technoscience). Capital today operates as a systemic unity of mercantile, industrial and financial moments, but the commanding point in its contemporary, neoliberal, phase is financial capital. A twenty-first century communism can, again by analogy, be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons. These must however, also be seen in their dependency on, and even potential contradiction, with the other commons sectors. The concept of a complex, composite communism based on the circulation between multiple but commons forms is opens possibilities for new combinations of convivial custom, planetary planning and autonomous association. What follows expand on these cryptic observations.

The Circulation of the Common
Because the practical struggles of a multiplicitous movement, and the theoretical reflections that arise in tandem with them, have over the last decade and a half reached quite a high level, we might now be able to take another step. Having gone from the circulation of capital to the circulation of struggles, we can proceed from the circulation of struggles to the circulation of the common.The common, and the commons, are terms that have amongst activists recently become, well, common. The usual point of reference is the lands collectively used for subsistence purposes by pre-capitalist agricultural communities and destroyed by enclosure in the process of primitive accumulation.[9] Although enclosure was resisted by overt and clandestine insurrections whose full dimensions were only recently disclosed by Peter Linebaugh and Maurice Rediker’s account of a “hydra-headed� rebellion, these struggles were lost.[10] But interest in the commons has been revived by opponents of global capital seeking a vantage from which to criticise the “new enclosures� privatizing of natural and social resources across the planet.[11] Some accounts romanticise the historical commons as a pre-capitalist utopia, rather than a marginal supplement to a hierarchic feudal order. Others invoke the commons only the better to plan their commercialization. But the concept remain an important lever for rethinking issues of collective production and ownership, and it is to this end, and with a profound debt to theorists such as John McMurtry and Massimo de Angelis who have already thought along these lines, that it is deployed here.[12] If the cellular form of capitalism is the commodity, the cellular form of communism is the common. A commodity is a good produced for exchange. A common is a good produced for shared use. Capital is an immense heap of commodities. Communism is a multiplication of commons. The commodity, a good produced for exchange, presupposes private owners between whom such exchange occurs. The common presupposes collectivities within which sharing occurs, collectivities that coordinate, organise and plan this sharing. I will call these collectivities Associations.We can thus postulate a circulation of the common. This traces how associations of various types, from tribal assemblies to socialist cooperatives or open source networks organise shared resources into productive ensembles that create more shared resources which in turn provide the basis for the formation of new associations.