The following is a revised transcript of a discussion that took place on May 3, 2012 between Michel Bauwens, Jonathan Clyne, Alex Dirmeier, Lena Hanno and Jean Lievens on peer-to-peer and Marxism.

For the full transcript go here.

This is the second part.

“Alex: And what about Android? It is a system that has been developed as an open source product, but Google is earning a lot of money on it. As long as this peer-to-peer approach is not able to accumulate wealth in capital themselves… I don’t think that whatever will collapse in the future, will lead to the possibility of the peer-to peer production.

Michel: I can give you an example of that. In Norway musicians are now earning more through peer-to-peer than before, while the industry has collapsed. So there has been a transfer of wealth from the middlemen to the direct cultural producers. There is a study that shows that their income has increased, even as the sales of CDs has collapsed or diminished.

Lena: But which ways?

Michel: Concerts, performances…

Lena: But that’s just pure work. Compared to going to a studio and record a CD…

Michel: There is no intellectual property right in peer-to-peer, so you get money from your work, that’s exactly true.

Jean: Take the concert season, it lasts six months now instead of only the summer period. In Brazil, bands give their music for free on the Internet. Street vendors make CDs from it and sell them in the streets for very little mine. But they are making a living out of it and at the same time they are making cheap propaganda for the artists… I read about a group that earns now far more money from their concerts than formerly from their CDs, as the bulk of the profit used to go to the music industry. It’s mainly the industry that profits from the CD sales, not the artists. But even small artists now have an audience that they didn’t have before, because they couldn’t reach them. Now they can build a fan basis because they can reach them through the Internet, and then they can make a living from their music.

Michel: There is a huge industry in Bollywood that doesn’t use any copyright. Nigeria, the third film industry in the world, does not use any copyright. Italian neo-melodica, a sort of narco music, is bigger than the biggest stars in official Italy: no copyright. There is a completely parallel system of money making.

Lena: There are also lots of those people who, since the cinema and the CD income collapsed, tour three times as much. The two guys in the band who have written the songs they perform get double as much money as the others. That means they are replaced all the time. They only do it for a short time because they don’t get equal pay. So it is still copyright based, as those who have written the songs are paid double as much, and they all work a hell of a lot more.

Alex: It is one thing to have peer production when it comes to artistic things like music or whatever, but this is not the basis for the wealth in society. The basis of the wealth of society is the energy production, it’s the infrastructure and the production of the means of production. Do you think that it is possible to also go into these sectors with peer-to-peer production?

Michel: Yes. The first successful industrial ecology is Arduino motherboards. This business is good for at least one million dollars, very small compared to the concentration, but still. Five years ago I was having the same arguments in a discussion with friends, who said that if there is one thing that open source cannot do, it’s these motherboards, because they are so complex. The other thing was cars, because for cars you need big factories. No. It’s all happening: local motors, crowd sourced cars, Wikispeed, there’s 24 of them. A few are driving, not many, but Arduino is… pretty much becoming the dominant thing in niche computing. Like balloon weather monitoring and all this specialised users. Garduino is for farmers, and this new way of seeing is really starting to develop. And you know, I thought Marcin Jakubowski was crazy when he said that he was going to develop fifty machines… His first machine is a bricklaying machine. If you want to buy it in the private sector it costs 25.000 dollar, 5.000 for the machine and 20.000 for the IP. So if you can have a system where you can sell those machines at cost plus profit, that’s pretty competitive.

Lena: I visited two mines in the North of Sweden, one mine, the bigger one, is state-owned, and the small one is privately owned. I went around, discussed with workers and representatives of the company, and interesting enough, in the state-owned company I think there is a peer-to-peer development, because every year they do something with actually 400 suggestions from the workforce. They have two or three people employed in just one mine, to develop and discuss the suggestions that are coming from the workforce. And that is a complete change from ten years ago. And that is within main production. So there are all kinds of things changing of how they are doing things… In the private company, they actually had closed down the suggestion box. I do think that this says something about industry in the hard-core production. I might be wrong about this, but isn’t this peer-to-peer in a way?

Michel: I give you my definition, which is the relational definition. Peer-to –peer is any relationship where the individual gives to the whole without direct reciprocity with another individual. Typical examples are Linux, Wikipedia: you give something to build the system, you can profit from the system, but there’s no direct link of reciprocity with any particular individual. So technically it’s communal shareholding. As a mode of production, I would say it’s a mode of production where anybody can contribute to a common project, which is available for anyone. But it’s enabled by technological infrastructure. What the infrastructure does is scaling that relational paradigm from the local to the global and that wasn’t possible before.

Jonathan: I want to talk about the car industry, which is something completely different. I checked out this scooter, this peer-to-peer car which is coming to production now. The brand usually is really just a front behind which lays a particular combination of things produced by different large parts companies that are unknown outside the business. The scooter is not different in that sense because it is a sort of Management Company, just like Volkswagen can be considered a management company. To what extent people from the outside can contribute to the scooter, I don’t know. But I can imagine that even Volkswagen is moving more and more into the field of open innovation. Because you have all those enthusiasts sitting at home in their garage, taking apart their Volkswagen and putting it together again to get an idea how it works. I think Volkswagen need really to exploit that too. So concerning open source, there’s all kinds of combinations and permutations whether it’s partially or not partially. But the less partial it is, the more there is an income, and the less partial it is, the less there is an income and the more it relies upon voluntary things, people who aren’t paid, and this makes it much more vulnerable to shocks and crises.

Jean: I think also we need to tackle the state. That is still a main issue. The non-political books I am reading now like “Abundance” or the “Third Industrial Revolution” make me optimistic, in the sense that they show that problems can be solved. But on the political front, I still don’t see how… I mean, traditional Marxism has more or less the following position: take state power and use the state to solve the problems. And then the only question remains: it must be a democratic state.

Michel: It’s amazing how the political system is totally gangrene. But there also technology may offer some solutions. The pirate party uses liquid voting, which is really interesting. So the way I understand it: every member can always vote or delegate, and can always take back his delegation. Everyone can make a proposal, but there is a filtering system because you cannot discuss everything all the time. So only the things that members really give weight to bubble up and become issues for the party. Slashdot is a newspaper for hackers. There are tons of articles every day, and if you join, you get karma points. You get for example four points and you can vote for articles, and then they go up. Then people can vote for you and say oh you have good judgement, then you get 8 points, and 16, 32… So you get gradually more points and more influence within the system. Then there is also counter-veiling: suddenly you can loose everything. It is like a lottery system aimed at keeping a balance of power.

Jean: Or Wikipedia where you have also a sort of self-regulating system for resolving problems. But then this has also its limitations because especially discussions on sensitive issues often do not reach a solution and then there is some upper –judge who will decide in last resort. So you still have a sort of hierarchy.

Michel: Yes but it is not a command and control hierarchy. It’s something different.”