We will publish in two parts, the article by Raoul Victor on Money and Peer Production which was also his presentation at the fourth Oekonux conference, march 2009.
Raoul Victor:
“I’ll try to deal with the question of the relations between this two realities: money and Peer Production.. What are these relations today and what they might be in the future? Especially if one thinks that Peer Production is a germ of the future society.
The question is not so simple, first of all, because money and Peer Production relay on different and antagonistic principles. Money is based on exchange, on symmetric exchange. I give you something and you give me something of equivalent value. Money, as an universal equivalent of value, is used 1. to allow that exchange, 2. to measure the value of what is exchanged and 3. to hoard the value of what is exchanged.
On the contrary, Peer production is not based on any symmetrical relation. There is not exchange of equivalents at any level of the process of production. There are different definitions of Peer Production, insisting more or less on different aspects of it.
I’ll use here something close to the Michel Bauwens’ definition of P2P which refers to the three moments of the process.
1. Input, raw material is “open” and “free”, gratis.
2. The process of collaboration is based on “voluntary participation” and not on wage or coercion relationships.
3. The output, the result of the collaboration is “universally available”, free, gratis.
How these two antagonistic realities can relate to each other ? The answer depend on the historical framework we consider. If we think that one day a full developed Peer society will exist, it is clear that things will be different according to the advancement of the process which leads to such a situation. Thus, I will deal with three specific moments: 1st. within the framework of dominant capitalism; 2d. in a period of “transition” defined by the fact that Peer Production has started to extend to the material (non digital) domain; 3d. in a full developed Peer Society.
I had thought at the beginning (as I wrote in the abstract of this workshop) that I would follow here the Germ form theory and its 5 step model (of Stefan Meretz and Stefan Merten) to distinguish the different moments of that evolution. But I realized that it would have been too long to describe that theory. So I choose to use a more simplified presentation.
But, before going forward, I think it is necessary to say a few words about the frequent idea that money and symmetric exchange are something “natural”, almost inherent to human nature, which has always been naturally accepted and that therefore which will always exist.
Symmetric exchange did not exist within the old primitive communities. Within these communities there was no private property nor exchange. Production and distribution were organized as in a big family. Exchange developed first as a marginal activity at the fringes of these communities, through the exchange between them under the form of direct barter. Animals furs against salt, for example. That was a collective exchange, between communities. The first forms of money appear later under the form of “commodity money”. A specific good, common and directly useful to all is used as mean of exchange. Many goods have been used as such: shells (in the 5 continents), grains, oil, cattle (the Roman word for money, “pecunia” derives from “pecus”, meaning cattle). Later precious metals silver or gold have been used as money. It is only around the 6th century BC that fiat money, State money appears in Greece and probably a little bit later in China.
But exchange through money will remain essentially marginal during almost one thousand years, before the development of capitalism. Under the slave societies, Greece, or Roman Empire as in the feudal society, the main economic activity remains agriculture. At that level, between the slave and his master, between the serf and his lord, the economic relations are mostly based on direct contributions under the form of products or labor. It is only under capitalism that money plays a dominant role in social life. Capitalism places money at the heart of the two main dimensions which define a mode of production: the goal of production and the way the producers participate to production. Profit under the form of money becomes the real goal of production. At the same time, wages, paid with money, become the medium for most workers to participate to production. The labor force becomes a commodity by itself and has a money price in a specific market.
The tendency to imagine that the present use of money is something natural coming from the beginning of humanity is completely wrong.
Another common and wrong idea is that symmetric exchange and money were naturally accepted since the beginning of their existence. In fact the rejection and the mistrust of money are very old. In the 4th century BC, Aristotle, made a pitiless criticism of money, of exchange itself, opposed to “household management” logic.
He wrote, for example:
“There are two sorts of wealth-getting, (…); one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former is necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another.”
He also said : “All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind”.
In the Christian Bible you can also find a denunciation of trade and money with the famous passage about Jesus chasing the merchants from the temple. More generally, it is the same mistrust which explains that in the “heavens” described by religions, money is absent. With the development of capitalism criticisms of money became more frequent. Thomas More in the 16th century in his Utopia. The Diggers in England, in the 17th century who said: “When humanity started to sell and buy, it lost its innocence”. The anti-capitalistic socialist movements that appear as from the 19th century naturally develop at radicalized that rejection. No. Symmetric exchange and money are not natural and have not been easily accepted by humans along history.
That was a long parenthesis, but I think it is important to see how the absence of symmetric exchange and money in the Peer Production relationships are an achievement of an old human ambition.”