Interesting contribution which appeared on the Oekonux mailing list, by Stefan Meretz:

“To me the term “antagonist” seems to be an holy term of traditional working class movement, at least a religious term (Marx: “fetish”). It says, that the struggle can only be “solved” by transcending capitalism. So if you fight inside capitalism, say for higher wages, then there is a tiny seed of transcendence in it. It describes a picture of hope, and I understand this very well, because I followed this hope for some time.

However, it is not real. Workers and capitalists are opposed to each other, but not antagonistic. They fulfill (of course: opposite) roles inside a common framework of self-valualisation of capital (“making more money from money”). A free society is a society, were this “framework” (based on the alienated cybernetic self-valualisation) has qualitatively changed. — This btw. was one of the important insights the Krisis-Group gave me.

And if you look in history, it was never the case, that the suppressed and fighting classes gain the power, but those classes, who changed the “framework” by bringing a new mode of production into live practically. There were class struggles, but for example the new bourgois class in feudalism instrumentally used the fights of farmers and craftsmen and the need of the ruling feudal class for weapons for their wars. Both, farmers/craftsmen and feudalists, lost, capitalists prevailed.

The “new” never came into live by purely overtake the power, but the other way around: by bringing a new mode of production they overtook finally the power.

Thus, the “new” was never simply “subversive” to the “old”, it always was functional for the “old” at the same time. This is the basic idea of a “germ form” or “seed” of a new.

This brings me to some more philosophical thinking.

It helps a lot, when we don’t think in opposites excluding each other (“Hey, decide: which side is true?”), but think the opposites as a source of the real movement. Peer production is at the same time subversive and functional for capitalism. The state at the same time supports and suppresses free software etc. This must be (and is) the case, otherwise it cannot be a germ form.

To me it seems clear, that peer production is not by itself a final form of a new production mode, it is only a contradictory form of the movement between the new and the old. This raises the question, what the “new” is, what the core determinants of the new are, but I put it in the background for a while, to bring the attention to a second import point.

When two antagonists fight, then the solution seldom is, that one prevails and the other vanishes. Moreover, this is never the case, when the two antagonists are moments of one common, thus being not arbitrarily opposed, but necessarily. The new qualitative step includes both “contents” of the antagonists in a new form, where they are at the same time present and vanished. Present means, that their “sense” was kept, vanished means, that they don’t exist any more (in german we have the term “aufheben”, I don’t know the english one).

So, my questions are:

– what is the new (mode of production)?

– what are moments of this new?

– where do we find these moments inside the old?

– how does these moments of the new support the old?

– where are the limits in supporting the old?

– in which way show the moments of the new their potence inside the old?