URL = www.Re­Aligned.net

Description

“A State of Pre­” is a pluridisciplinary investigation into the conditions, subjectivities and agencies provoking a realignment of art, thought and politics in the 21st century.

Drawing on its diverse participants while inviting new contributors this anthology gathers together essays, theory and art related to the past three years of the Re­Aligned Project.

As a thematic umbrella­ project dedicated to art and political movements advocating change, resistance, rebellion or revolution in their respective societies, the Re­Aligned Project has been defined by an ongoing series of workshops, exhibitions, artist­in­residencies, seminars, conferences, street and public art festivals. An interactive map of the project is found at www.Re­Aligned.net, which documents three years of engagement across Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Future historians will judge whether the wave of revolts of our time bear comparison to 1640, 1789, 1848, 1968, or perhaps, following further major convulsions, will be seen as the capitalist antipode to the communist collapse of 1989. What is clear today, is that we live in a time of worldwide instability, where hegemonic government by consent is under intense pressures due to the crises of transnational elites above, and the discontent of vast majorities below, which are forced to bear the brunt of the ensuing problems. Next to the economic and ecological crises of mondial scale, there are political conflicts being played out in widely differing arenas which show remarkable structural similarities.

The notion of a non-­aligned ?positionality, which invokes the refusal of multiple mainstream positions, describes one such common structural feature. An Egyptian, Russian, Chinese or Cuban oppositional intellectual, for example, will reject (local) authoritarianism while often simultaneously maintaining a highly critical stance vis­ a vis (global) western forms of historical and/or current expansion and oppression. A European or US Occupy activist, as much as an African or Latin American intellectual, will similarly reject an authoritarian conception of communism while fighting the rapacious logic of neoliberal capitalism. In all cases, concomitant with a clear non­alignment with the outmoded mainstream social paradigms of the 20th century, we see what we call re­alignments. Although a term kept deliberately open to multiple readings, re­aligned ?initially describes a re­engagement with and re­merging of activist and intellectual currents that are replacing the apathy and disillusionment, apolitical irony, particularism, single­issue and identity politics of the previous epoch. It describes the “third”, “fourth” or “fifth” ways being sought between vertical and horizontal forms of organization, between particularist identities and unarticulated hybridities, between difference and universalism, and so on.

The period preceding our current era, sometimes called postmodernity, saw a sustained focus on cultural­ethnic issues, post­colonial and national­independence narratives, post-­communist nation­building and religious revivals, gender related liberation movements and also numerous new ways of reading popular and commercial culture and society. While subverting and superimposing and making these configurations clash, many power relations which postmodernist theory and art engaged with and critiqued, however, were often paradoxically strengthened and reproduced in this same period, rather than overcome.

Explanations for this require a re­orientation of perspectives. It has been argued that precisely postmodernism’s aversion to “meta­narratives”, the “universal”, “reality” and similar overarching conceptions, furnished the atomizing “conditions of ignorance”, so to speak, for the macroeconomic neoliberal depredations of the past decades. Discussion of general social and political structural movements remained out of fashion, suspect, even unspeakable, in an environment where collective convictions and ideals were ridiculed as simplistic, dangerous and antiquated, often forced to be couched in obscure jargon, while the power­relations they decried took their heavy toll.

Over the past years, the clarity of the need for common agency has led us to speak of the re­aligned approach as engaged in multilectic?thinking. Careful to avoid reversions to single­issue, single­culture, single­tradition thinking, that is, abandoning diversity or falling into undifferentiated universalism, this likewise multivalent term describes the aim, amidst the maddening multiplicity of our times, to redevelop models for holistic worldviews. The plethora of currents and movements which constitute re­alignments we speak of, are a type of globalisation ‘from below’. Due to their undeveloped, still­localised nature, we hence describe them as having a pre­mondial?agency?. This is an agency for which politics, art and thought are only now beginning to imagine structures for and give a language to.Following the near­collapse of global markets in 2007-8, multiple waves of resistance and rebellion against diverse forms of oppression, enslavement and injustice have washed the world. From dramatic battles for basic freedoms and human rights, to forceful anti­corruption movements, to rising rejection of corporate and state control and disenfranchisement, to angry demands for advanced forms of equality and justice, not dissimilar grievances and claims have been brought to “the square” in a wide range of societies. Although nothing is certain, the chances are these grievances, and bold proposals for solutions to them, will again cross critical thresholds with the amplitude of ongoing ecological, financial, social and cultural crises.

In short, we wish to investigate the horizon which lies before us. We are in a state of “pre­”. Contrary to the fin de siècle pessimism of what may be called the non­aligned generation of the “post­”, re­aligned movements are part of a quest for a wider mondial commons. Going beyond the ubiquitous “post­” of the outgoing epoch (post­war, post­modern, post­Soviet, post­communist, post­ideological, post­history, post­colonial, post­human, etc.) what may be called a re­aligned generation of the “pre­” ­ naturally defined not by age but vision ­ seeks the proliferation of common orientations, desirables and initiatives in face of mondial crises. The Re­Aligned Project has set its focus on these currents of antecedent, not to say antediluvian predicament.”

The post Book of the Day: 21st Century Re­Alignments in Art and Politics appeared first on P2P Foundation.

URL = http://www.versobooks.com/books/1737-state-of-insecurity

Description

“Years of remodelling the welfare state, the rise of technology, and the growing power of neoliberal government apparatuses have established a society of the precarious. In this new reality, productivity is no longer just a matter of labour, but affects the formation of the self, blurring the division between personal and professional lives. Encouraged to believe ourselves flexible and autonomous, we experience a creeping isolation that has both social and political impacts, and serves the purposes of capital accumulation and social control.

In State of Insecurity, Isabell Lorey explores the possibilities for organization and resistance under the contemporary status quo, and anticipates the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious.”

The post Book of the Day: Government of the Precarious appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Description

From the publisher:

“Digital Rebellion examines the impact of new media and communication technologies on the spatial, strategic, and organizational fabric of social movements.

Todd Wolfson begins with the rise of the Zapatistas in the mid-1990s, and how aspects of the movement–network organizational structure, participatory democratic governance, and the use of communication tools as a binding agent–became essential parts of Indymedia and all Cyber Left organizations. From there he uses oral interviews and other rich ethnographic data to chart the media-based think tanks and experiments that continued the Cyber Left’s evolution through the Independent Media Center’s birth around the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.

After examining the historical antecedents and rise of the global Indymedia network, Wolfson melds virtual and traditional ethnographic practice to explore the Cyber Left’s cultural logic, mapping the social, spatial and communicative structure of the Indymedia network and detailing its operations on the local, national and global level. He also looks at the participatory democracy that governs global social movements and the ways the movement’s twin ideologies, democracy and decentralization, have come into tension, and how what he calls the switchboard of struggle conducts stories of shared struggle from the hyper-local and dispersed worldwide. As Wolfson shows, understanding the intersection of Indymedia and the Global Social Justice Movement illuminates their foundational role in the Occupy struggle, Arab Spring uprising, and the other emergent movements that have in recent years re-energized radical politics.”

The post Book of the Day: Birth of the Cyber Left appeared first on P2P Foundation.

*Book: Fuchs, Christian. 2015. Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media. New York: Routledge. 424 pages.

URL = http://fuchs.uti.at/books/culture-and-economy-in-the-age-of-social-media/

Description

This book applies Raymond Williams’ approach of Cultural Materialism to critically analyse cultural labour, digital labour, ideology, politics, democracy, the public sphere, globalisation, social media in China, the international division of digital labour, productive labour, and social struggles in the age of digital capitalism.

Contents

1. Introduction

PART I: Theoretical Foundations

2. Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval: Culture and Work

3. Communication, Ideology, and Labour

PART II: Social Media?s Cultural Political Economy of Time

4. Social Media and Labour Time

5. Social Media and Productive Labour

PART III: Social Media?s Cultural Political Economy of Global Space

6. Social Media?s International Division of Digital Labour

7. Baidu, Weibo, and Renren: The Global Political Economy of Social Media in China

PART IV: Alternatives

8. Social Media and the Public Sphere

9. Conclusion

The post Book of the Day: Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Review

Paul Bernal:

“Nathaniel Tkacz … examines the entire Wikipedia project in the way that we as academics examine a Wikipedia article: questioning at every stage, digging deeper, looking through the project to its source, so as to apprehend its nature and come to a better understanding. Given the role and prominence of Wikipedia and those behind it, and how it has come to exemplify the internet itself, this is a critically important exercise – and Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness is an important book.

At one level it is a fascinating inside look at the operations of Wikipedia – from someone who clearly knows and understands it from the inside. It looks closely at three specific “incidents”: the deletion of “Wikipedia Art” (an attempt to compose conceptual art on Wikipedia itself), the process by which the controversial issue of whether to allow images of Muhammad to appear in Wikipedia was “resolved”, and the so-called Spanish Fork through which the question of whether Wikipedia should or could allow advertising was raised. Through a detailed examination of these issues, it gives us an insight into how Wikipedia works and tells us a great deal about the people involved – right up to Jimmy Wales himself, whom Tkacz at one point describes as “one of the most celebrated ‘benevolent dictators’ in open projects”.

At the next level, Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness is a critique not just of Wikipedia but of the whole idea of openness – one of the sacred cows of the internet, something considered almost beyond criticism. At times that critique is devastating. Tkacz takes apart some of the most fundamental assumptions of openness – and challenges the idealism behind them, the seemingly sincere belief by the advocates of openness in the near-perfection of their approach to consensus and decision-making.

To exemplify this, Tkacz uses “forking”, the idea that at any point in a truly open project, people who disagree with where things are going can “fork”, creating their own alternative version of the project and taking it with them, to compete with the original. As he describes it, forking is viewed with almost religious reverence: “(the threat of) forking is [seen as] a defense against tyranny and guarantor of democracy, it produces a form of consensus, transfers power from leaders to followers, achieves practical meritocracies, de-monopolizes power, ensures maximum freedom, and brings about diversity and radical innovation”.

Tkacz writes with a commendable dryness and wit – so much so that at times it is hard to tell which side of the story he is trying to tell, but that is, I feel sure, entirely deliberate. Indeed, Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness reads as though every word has been carefully chosen – and every ambiguity intended to make the reader think. The discussion of the so-called neutral point of view (NPOV), one of the five “pillars” of Wikipedia, really hits home: it is in many ways the heart of the book and of Tkacz’s criticism of both Wikipedia and the concept of openness itself. The question of whether there is such a thing as a neutral point of view is a deep one – one that touches on the nature of truth.

As Tkacz puts it: “In fact, Wales’s take on Wikipedia and truth goes even further than [academic Joseph] Reagle’s. It is not particular battles for truth that are ‘abandoned’, but truth in general. It is this ‘philosophical side-stepping’ that paves the way for consensus-based collaboration. There is, however, a second relation to truth, what might be called the truth of the NPOV or the internal truth of the encyclopedia…while the NPOV doesn’t claim to tell the truth about a thing, there is nonetheless a truth about what is neutral.”

This may be the biggest point of all – and one with a wider application than just Wikipedia. It has implications for our whole relationship with the internet, with data, with the digital world. In some ways, Wales isn’t viewed merely as a benevolent dictator but almost as a saint – and is put on a pedestal and used in the way that saints are. His appointment, for example, to Google’s Advisory Council on the Right to be Forgotten attempts to give Google the benefit of Wikipedia’s sanctified “neutral point of view”. Google – and to a lesser extent Facebook and others – also wants to be seen as neutral in the way that Wikipedia is. That way Google can avoid awkward questions, escape scrutiny and even regulation – its search algorithms viewed as purely organic, its various functions seen as provided primarily in the public interest, serving the internet and those who use it through altruism, rather than as a business whose interests are essentially economic and self-serving.

This alleged “neutrality” is critical – and our acceptance of it without real question is something that Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness challenges. It is not an easy book to read: the language is often complex and intense. To understand all the details here, one would need to be a computer scientist, a philosopher, a political scientist, an expert on actor-network theory and more – but to grasp its themes and significance, one needs only to participate actively in the modern world. Tkacz challenges assumptions and forces you to question your own views, particularly about openness itself.

As he puts it in his conclusion: “The problem of openness isn’t that it isn’t open; it is that it conceives the world in terms of this question. My task therefore wasn’t to show that Wikipedia is actually closed, hierarchical, centralized, bureaucratic, or totalitarian, but rather to try to think politically differently.”

Tkacz does think differently – and he challenges his readers to think differently. Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness made me do that. For an academic book, that might be the highest praise of all.” (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/wikipedia-and-the-politics-of-openness-by-nathaniel-tkacz/2017640.article)

The post Book of the Day: Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness appeared first on P2P Foundation.

URL =http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/alternatives_to_capitalism_proposals_for_a_democratic_economy

Description

“New Left Project’s new e-book, Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy, is now available for download.

In it the leading radical thinkers Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright take on the crucial but all-too neglected question: what kind of society should we be fighting for instead of capitalism?

Hahnel favours ‘participatory economics’. Wright advocates ‘real utopian socialism’. Alternatives to Capitalism puts these practical proposals through their paces in an in-depth, frank and extremely instructive debate about the central question of our time.” (http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/alternatives_to_capitalism_proposals_for_a_democratic_economy)

The post Book of the Day: Proposals for a Democratic Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

* Book: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. Gabriella Coleman.

URL: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_04/13908

Review

Astra Taylor:

“But as an anthropologist deeply embedded in the Anonymous community, Coleman could discern things that were invisible to casual observers. These other facets of Anonymous only began to come into focus for me on the first day of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. As I mingled with a small group in Zuccotti Park, I was surprised to see Anonymous vigorously promoting the encampment. Whatever you thought of the protests, Occupy was hardly a cause that a bunch of nihilists (a common view of Anonymous) or die-hard libertarians (a common computer-nerd stereotype) would rally behind. I started to pay more attention.

As the subtitle of her epic and excellent new book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, suggests, Coleman’s subject is mercurial. The group’s ethos of “motherfuckery” (a commitment to mayhem) coexists alongside what some less politically engaged Anons derisively call “moral faggotry” (a devotion to social and political causes). As a result, Anonymous is a remarkable, if confounding—and yes, occasionally noxious—witches’ brew, into which a wide variety of human characteristics have been poured: cruelty, sexism, homophobia, racism, immaturity, and idiocy, but also intelligence, idealism, ingenuity, and even courage.

This perplexing concoction is conveyed in the definition of “lulz” Coleman quotes from the online Encyclopedia Dramatica (if you haven’t come across the site before, imagine a satirical and self-referential, meme-obsessed Wikipedia on acid). Like any subculture, Anonymous has its own jargon and value system, and lulz hold a central, and even paramount, position in its lexicon. “Lulz is a corruption of LOL . . . signifying laughter at someone else’s expense,” the encyclopedia helpfully explains. “Lulz is engaged in by Internet users who have witnessed one major economic/environmental/political disaster too many, and who thus view a state of voluntary, gleeful sociopathy over the world’s current apocalyptic state, as superior to being continually emo.” Some readers might get stuck on the phrase “gleeful sociopathy”—which emphasizes a terrifying lack of conscience—but, for me, what stands out is the sensitivity that contributes directly to this affect. Lulz are not purely aggressive and contemptuous; they are, perversely, rooted in disappointment and righteous indignation. Like the return of the repressed, the emo (short, of course, for “emotional”) element persists and resurfaces, suffusing much of the activity that has put Anonymous on the cultural map in recent years.

The story of Anonymous’s emergence and transformation into one of the most intriguing and, arguably, potent leaderless political collaborations of our time has been told before in books such as Parmy Olson’s We Are Anonymous; in the 2012 documentary We Are Legion; and in a spate of glossy magazine articles. Coleman’s history complements, and frequently corrects, these popular accounts, but the book’s comprehensive detail and deep analysis set it apart. She covers the history of hacking and trolling, revealing the various tech-savvy and humor-loving milieus that spawned Anonymous. She traces the group’s political turn, from the battle with Scientology to actions like “Operation Payback,” which targeted PayPal and other financial institutions for cutting off WikiLeaks, and OpTunisia, which assisted antigovernment protesters during the Arab Spring. Coleman continues her tale as Anonymous fragments, tracking the evolution of spin-off cadres such as LulzSec and AntiSec and the rise and fall of well-known figures like Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond, and the double-crossing Hector Monsegur, aka “Sabu.”

Through it all, Coleman charts her own conceptual course, breaking with the standard narratives, particularly the click-baity cautionary tales about the dangers of Anonymous. Her book offers its share of warnings, but ones more nuanced, compelling, and empathetic than the typical hand-wringing about online mobs and the conundrum of virtual vigilante justice. Coleman is no cheerleader: She questions the wisdom of the hive mind, registers her ambivalence about the supremacy of lulz, and is appropriately mortified by some of the queasier trolling exploits she recounts. But she also doesn’t wag her finger from some imagined high ground, in part because she could be considered an Anon herself. Coleman repeatedly crosses the line between observer and participant, engaging in conversations, helping with media outreach, and editing manifestos, and this inside view is part of what makes the book unique. By becoming part of the clan, Coleman provides evidence of another one of her key points: Anonymous is surprisingly diverse. While mostly male dominated (though some female Anons do rise to prominence), Anonymous is multigenerational and multiethnic. Some high-profile members were revealed to be teenagers, like eighteen-year-old Jake Davis, aka “Topiary,” and Mustafa al-Bassam, aka “tflow,” while others are grizzled social-movement veterans, like the colorful Christopher Doyon, aka “Commander X,” who is currently on the lam in Canada.

Instead of lingering on Anonymous’s ethical and tactical lapses, which have been thoroughly dissected in the press, Coleman focuses on the larger social and political context, rightfully raising red flags about the government’s overblown response to the purported hacker menace. An alarming double standard applies to digital protests: While offline civil disobedience or vandalism—think blocking an intersection or defacing a corporate billboard—often leads to nothing more than a slap on the wrist, felony charges are distressingly common for hackers due to the powers granted zealous state officials by ill-conceived legislation like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The ongoing crackdown has been called a “nerd scare,” with more than one hundred people arrested around the world in connection with Anonymous. Many of these individuals did nothing but partake in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks—in other words, they pressed a few buttons to help flood a website with traffic—which, as Coleman points out, hardly qualifies as hacking. And some didn’t even do that much.

But, you may be thinking, orchestrating a DDoS attack is nothing like a sit-in! And isn’t it ironic, you might continue, that a group known for fighting censorship impinges on the free speech of others by causing their websites to crash? Coleman reveals that these and countless related questions have already been debated at length within the Anonymous community. Indeed, one of the book’s most compelling revelations is that every common criticism of Anonymous has already been vigorously taken up by Anons: They have railed against the limitations of social media and affirmed the superiority of offline protests; they have complained about the puerile nature of specific operations; they have vehemently denounced “doxing”—i.e., outing—individuals in the absence of irrefutable evidence of their crimes. Anonymous, so one saying goes, is not unanimous. The group’s often raucous culture of dissension and debate, and the serial improvisations of democracy that grow out of it, all come to life here through extended chatlog excerpts elucidated by Coleman’s engrossing and convivial commentary.

As Coleman shows so well, Anons are irreverent and intelligent—and also impatient. And why shouldn’t they be? They want to provoke a response, this instant, and to play a part in exposing corruption and challenging power. That they do so by submerging their individuality in a collective identity is particularly notable in an age of personal branding and incessant self-promotion: Pursuing individual celebrity, Coleman writes, is the “ultimate taboo.” (Thus does Sabu rail against “those that want fame” and “infiltrators,” right before he’s exposed as an attention-seeking FBI informant.) They are, arguably, the last refuge of a hard-core, underground punk ethos. Coleman returns again and again to Anons’ penchant for heaping scorn on those who use collective endeavors to gain individual notoriety, yet she also acknowledges that a few highly visible characters often contribute disproportionately to the cause.

By examining these sorts of tensions, Coleman offers suggestive insight into the relationship between the networked-attention economy and political activism. Anonymous, like Occupy and various other grassroots campaigns, has been able to cast an enormous virtual shadow, but ubiquity can be a double-edged sword. What’s the true utility of clicks and retweets if people just get distracted and move on to the next thing? Does the emphasis on spectacle only tighten the media’s grip on activists and increase their dependence on both traditional news outlets and digital corporate platforms? How can a group capture online attention and transform it into sustained and effective political pressure? These issues keep my comrades and me up at night.

As honest as some Anons are about the limitations of their methods, the government and military-defense contractors are still committed to inflating the group’s prowess and the danger it poses, propping up an enemy to justify their ever-expanding budgets and purview. How threatening are these Anons, actually? Not very, it might seem, but that’s not the point. Government and corporate outcry against hackers is really about mind games and maintaining power not cybersecurity. In 2011, Anonymous obtained PowerPoint slides from the security firm HBGary detailing a plan not just to spy on and disrupt WikiLeaks but also, crucially, to defame and intimidate supporters and journalists. These allies have a “liberal bent,” the firm noted, but “ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause.”

In the end, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy offers an extended and persuasive argument for defying HBGary’s cynical assessment and siding with the hackers, professional preservation be damned. While most Internet users are busy looking at cat videos or porn or frittering away time stalking their frenemies on Facebook, some young people might be logging on, debating right and wrong, and getting hooked on political action thanks to Anonymous. Maybe such experimenters will become lifelong activists, or maybe they’re just looking for lulz. Sure, their operations haven’t always been pretty, but no social movement is perfect or pure. Few, however, have been as unpredictable, outrageous, and entertaining as Anonymous. To my mind, that’s reason enough to join Coleman in rooting for them.” (http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_04/13908)

The post Book of the Day: Many Faces of Anonymous appeared first on P2P Foundation.

URL=http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/alternatives_to_capitalism_proposals_for_a_democratic_economy

Description

“New Left Project’s new e-book, Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy, is now available for download.

In it the leading radical thinkers Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright take on the crucial but all-too neglected question: what kind of society should we be fighting for instead of capitalism?

Hahnel favours ‘participatory economics’. Wright advocates ‘real utopian socialism’. Alternatives to Capitalism puts these practical proposals through their paces in an in-depth, frank and extremely instructive debate about the central question of our time.” (http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/alternatives_to_capitalism_proposals_for_a_democratic_economy)

The post Book of the Day: Proposals For A Democratic Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There are any number of areas where emergence is occurring such as in nanotechnology, micromanufacturing (not to be confused with molecular manufacturing which is about 15 years away), economics, politics, and thus the term emergence takes on near metaphysical force, though I do not intend something on the order of the dialectical materialism which Bertrand Russell put to rest in his essay by the same name.

Here I want to add that I think what is emerging in the current or near future time, which is a peerist synergism which comes right out of P2P and the hackers of the 1980s and 1990s, and the tremendous development in information-communication technologies and then the 3D printers which were proprietary at the time. The astounding achievement of hacker communities was to make horizontal knowledge systems emergent due to connectivity, open design, open hardware and on up to the present more sophisticated forms such as Arduino, the Maker Movement, Occupy, and Wikispeed. These were peerist systems almost completely outside of the official system and have developed to include three major points: free association or the honor of human liberty, peer review which maintains excellence, and commons-based peer production particularly in micromanufacturing, design, knowledge, and code.

The combination of vertical knowledge systems, or what are recognized as professional expert systems and horizontal hacker knowledge systems (which I also call expert), is leading, I think to peerist synergistic structures guided out of Michel Bauwen’s work on theory and pluralistic productive systems and then that of Primavera di Fillipi on next generation blockchains and commons based peer production. I use the term combination above because these systems are not yet integrated or integral, such as what theorists like David Long or Frank Visser might agree with. These emergent aspects of civil society are allowing a wider expanse from the general political work of the past to the deeper productive capacity facilitated by ICT. Until this point in history, civil society has not had much of a productive capacity. Bauwen’s 2005 paper on the Political Economy of Peer Production was an observation of the early phenomenon. The next step, I believe, is the necessity for globalized, federated productive communities in the form of commons-based peer production in order for the actual emergence of peerist synergism to reach a threshold or momentum to integrate the entire system which is literally being built daily in all areas of the globe and within the current system.

The argument: Therefore, here is a major, potential bridge between the Global North and Global South as matter of Global Justice.

 

Photo ref.: from the website of educator Debi Keyte-Hartland, Digital Aesthetics

The post The Emergence of Peerist Synergism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Interview

Conducted by Mark Carlin:
“Your latest book, Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy, returns – as you almost always do in your writing – to the issue of how the concentration of capital and corporate behemoths stifle democracy. Do you have any expectation – given how the internet offered so much promise of being a tool to invigorate a robust democracy and then was co-opted – that the course of unbridled capitalism can be reversed?

How the tension between really existing capitalism and democracy plays out in the United States is impossible to predict, but it is the definitional issue of our times and will be until it is resolved. Every other issue of note – from militarism and the environment to the quality of our lives and the status of our liberties – runs through it. In the book, I address the pessimism that pervades our times because of the sense that the powers-that-be are all-powerful, and resistance is therefore futile. Although understandable, and a safe position to take, it is also absurdly ahistorical. Humans invariably think that tomorrow will be an extension of today. Change is impossible to anticipate in a precise sense. Then once it happens everyone acts like they saw it coming. What we can do is understand the problems in our system and be prepared to resolve them in a humane and equitable manner when they grow so severe as to create crisis points. We do not have the luxury of giving up, because pessimism is self-fulfilling. And, as I discuss in the book, those in power are obsessed with depoliticizing society because they know we have the numbers on our side and they cannot win a fair fight. When people tune out politics, they are not being hip or cool or ironic. They are being played.
* How do two of your chapters, “The US Imperial Triangle and Military Spending” and “The Penal State in an Age of Crisis,” illustrate the degeneration of capitalism in the US?

US capitalism is fundamentally flawed, and has a strong tendency toward stagnation. Left to its own devises, without exogenous factors, the private economy cannot generate sufficient jobs and incomes for full employment. That means low growth rates, rising poverty and growing inequality. Due to popular pressure, government politics can arrest these tendencies, with public works programs, progressive taxation, support for unions and the like. Capitalists generally oppose these measures as an impingement on their prerogatives and their control over the economy. Even in Scandinavia, where working-class victories created a much-admired social democracy (unless you are a FOX News fan), capitalists lie in wait always keen to reverse the victories and turn back the clock. In the United States, military spending became the one form of government stimulus spending that faced no serious opposition from capitalists coming out of World War II, and instead it created an army of corporate supporters: Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. Militarism is now so hard-wired into really existing capitalism in the United States that the call to reduce it to a level approaching sanity becomes a demand to rethink the entire structure of the economy.

Civilian spending remained constant because a significant portion of what had been social spending was converted to prison spending, which is included in the civilian (non-military) spending category.

Since the 1970s, the far right has come to dominate American politics and both political parties have become more preoccupied with serving large corporations and billionaire investors – and much less concerned with the needs of the general population. In doing research on the matter of whether Obama might launch a new “New Deal” upon his election in 2008, my friend John Bellamy Foster and I wrote an essay that is in the book arguing that the key determinant of a new New Deal will be if the amount of government spending for civilian (non-military) purposes increases as a percentage of GDP above the level it had been stuck at since the New Deal raised it in the late 1930s. We argued that it was highly unlikely because of the strong corporate political pressures that exist, and we have been proven right.

But we were also struck by the fact that civilian spending at all levels of government had not changed much as a percentage of GDP for decades, despite all the right-wing attacks on social spending that have dominated the past three or four decades. How could that be? The answer became clear: Civilian spending remained constant because a significant portion of what had been social spending was converted to prison spending, which is included in the civilian (non-military) spending category. Factoring this in, the actual provision of social services had declined as a percentage of GDP. And now, as with the military, there is a huge private sector that benefits from the prison-industrial complex and lobbies for its expansion at every turn, while no major corporate interests oppose the expansion of prisons.

What does this illustrate about the degeneration of US capitalism? As a system, it requires extensive government spending, but it tends toward military and police spending as the preferred option, and that creates all sorts of spectacular problems for anything remotely close to democracy. This point was well understood by the [constitutional] framers who wanted to eliminate as much as possible the scourge of militarism from coming into existence. As Madison and Jefferson repeatedly wrote, a nation that is permanently at war cannot remain free. Militarism generated secrecy, inequality, corruption and what we would call jingoism that in combination would overwhelm democratic institutions and practices.

* What do you mean by the term “post-capitalist” democracy?

If one believes, as I do, that the evidence points squarely to the conclusion that really existing capitalism is fundamentally flawed and increasingly incompatible with democracy and possibly human existence, then establishing an alternative is of paramount importance. I should qualify this immediately. I use the term “really existing capitalism” to describe what actually exists in the United States (and, to varying degrees, worldwide): massive corporations, unfettered greed, corrupt governance, hollowed-out democracy, endless corporate propaganda, obscene inequality, crumbling physical and social infrastructure, crappy, dead-end jobs and a mindless, narcissistic culture. I do not refer to the PR pabulum spewed by politicians and pundits about free markets, entrepreneurs, upward mobility, meritocracy and the invisible hand. That has as much to do with capitalism in the United States today as paeans to workers democracy did to describing the Soviet experience.

The problem with capitalism is ultimately that it radically increases the productive capacity of society but it keeps control over the wealth in the hands of profit-driven individuals and firms. Why not call the alternative socialism? Well, I am a socialist and I understand that [socialism] to be a system where the vast wealth of society is controlled democratically and put to social purposes; it is not controlled by a narrow sliver of society to do with as suits them. I think the general Marxist assessment of capitalism’s fatal flaw applies today more than ever: The problem with capitalism is ultimately that it radically increases the productive capacity of society but it keeps control over the wealth in the hands of profit-driven individuals and firms, who control how this potential will be developed to suit their own interests. So it is that the productivity of the average worker is many times greater today than is was 50 years ago. But that increase in productivity has not translated into higher living standards, a shorter working week and/or a huge buildout of the infrastructure. Instead we see living standards in decline, inequality mushrooming and infrastructure in varying states of collapse, while there is a record number of gazillionaires. These are clear signs of an economic system that no longer plays a productive role and needs to be replaced.

But the term socialism begs as many questions as it answers and from my experience tends to get people off-track. I think we have to begin tangible discussions and debates over how to take important aspects of our society where capitalist control is clearly dangerous and inimical to democratic practices and values and eliminate it there. For example, take the profit out of militarism and prisons. No one should have a vested interest in war. Take the profit out of financial speculation, that serves no public good. Take the profit out of energy, if we agree that we have a handful of mega-corporations flossing their teeth with politicians’ underpants while the earth gets flame-broiled like a marshmallow. Let’s create nonprofit, accountable alternatives. The point is to replace profit-driven institutions with democratically run alternatives in key sectors, all the while extending democratic freedoms and practices. I could go on and on.

I have no particular antagonism to small business, and a great deal of respect for the people who launch and run them. I started two concerns in my life, one a for-profit rock magazine in Seattle and another a nonprofit public interest group called Free Press. Both succeeded not by exploiting the labor of its workers as much as exploiting the labor of its owners and management. We worked our butts off. I see small business as an extension of labor as much as an extension of capital. In this sense, I am influenced by Lincoln.

So to me the debate should not concern whether some dude selling falafel sandwiches out of his van near a football game should have his enterprise nationalized. That is idiotic. The debate has to be whether we can afford to have so much of the commanding heights of our economy under the control of billionaires and monopolists who use their immense power to enrich themselves but impoverish the rest of us. Until we start having that debate we will not make much headway on the great problems we face.” (http://truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/28294-robert-mcchesney-we-need-to-advocate-radical-solutions-to-systemic-problems)

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