How to make sense of the emerging strands of the P2P movement? In my presentations and lectures, I use a threefold typology to explain the major choices.
1) transgressive:
this is what the young filesharers are doing. Based on the most obvious natural use of the technology and the naturalness of sharing, they simply ignore the old laws. Such a behaviour may lead to ignore some of the good qualities of existing legislation (if you believe that copyright does make some sense), but is also an important factor in raising political awareness, as they are then subjected to attempts to protect the old legislation. For the powers that be, wnen transgressions become too massive, it is a sign that the old way of doing things is losing legitimacy. Laws that are constantly transgressed are useless to protect interests of existing stakeholders.
2) constructive.
In this variant, the movement is actively building the new worlds already. Creative Commons and GPL licences are creating such new legal and institutional realities, not by contesting the existing framework, but by starting off in an altogether new direction. Whenever a group of people produce free software or a knowledge commons project, they are actively buidling a new world.
3) reform-oriented.
This approach works directly to change the existing institutions and legal realities, by participating in the existing frameworks, but in order to change them. Such an approach can be radical and revolutionary when it aims at the deep structures of the political economy.
Kevin Carson of Mutualist.org is an advocate of the second option, of vigorously building the new realities, and he explains the strategy in a long essay-posting, of which we are reproducing a rather substantial citation:
“Economic counter-institutions, unfortunately, work within the framework of a larger corporate capitalist economy. They compete in markets in which the institutional culture of the dominant firms is top-down and hierarchical, and are in great danger of absorbing this institutional culture themselves. That’s why you have a non-profit and cooperative sector whose management is indistinguishable from its capitalist counterparts: prestige salaries, middle management featherbedding, bureaucratic irrationality, and slavish adherence to the latest motivational/management theory dogma. The problem is exacerbated by a capitalist financial system, which extends positive reinforcement (in the form of credit) to firms following an orthodox organizational model (even when bottom-up organization is far more efficient). Paul Goodman described it this way, in The Community of Scholars:
In brief, …the inevitability of centralism will be self-proving. A system destroys its competitors by pre-empting the means and channels, and then proves that it is the only conceivable mode of operating.
The solution is to promote as much consolidation as possible within the counter-economy. We need to get back to the job of “building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” A great deal of production and consumption already takes place within the social or gift economy, self-employment, barter, etc. The linkages need to be increased and strengthened between those involved in consumers’ and producers’ co-ops, self-employment, LETS systems, home gardening and other household production, informal barter, etc. What economic counter-institutions already exist need to start functioning as a cohesive counter-economy.
As Hernando de Soto has pointed out, the resources already available to us are enormous. If we could leverage and mobilize them suffiiciently, they might be made to function as a counterweight to the capitalist economy. For example: the average residential lot, if subjected to biointensive farming methods, could supply the majority of a family’s vegetable needs. And what’s more important, the total labor involved in doing this would be less than it takes to earn the money to buy equivalent produce from the supermarket. The average person could increase his independence of the wage-system, improve the quality of his food, and reduce his total work hours, all at once. This is an ideal theme for mutualist propaganda.
A key objective should be building the secondary institutions we need to make the resources we already have more usable. Most people engage in a great deal of informal production to meet their own needs, but lack either access or awareness of the institutional framework by which they might cooperate and exchange with others involved in similar activities. Expanding LETS systems and increasing public awareness of them is vital. Every need that can be met by producing for oneself, or exchanging one’s own produce for that of a neighbor, increases the amount of one’s total consumption needs that can be met without depending on employment at someone else’s whim. If an organic gardener lives next door to a plumber and they exchange produce for plumbing work, neither one can provide an outlet for the other’s entire output. But both, at least, will have a secure source of supply for both his vegetables and plumbing needs, and an equally secure market for the portion of his own output consumed by the other. The more different trades come into the system, the larger the proportion of total needs that can be met outside the framework of a job.
Ultimately, we need a cooperative alternative to the capitalists’ banking system, to increase the cooperative economy’s access to its own mutual credit. This is illegal, under the terms of capitalist banking law. The banking system is set up to prevent ordinary people from leveraging their own property for interest-free credit through mutual banking. Gary Elkin has argued that it might be possible to slip mutual banking in through the back door, by piggybacking it on a LETS system. Members of a LETS system might start out by extending store credit against the future labor of other members, and expand from there.