Republished from JOPP, Issue #10: Peer Production and Work

Arwid Lund: This article examines the relation between peer production and capitalism on a systemic and theoretical level. One problem with understanding peer production as an alternative and potentially competing mode of production in relation to capitalism is that the main bulk of economic theory deals only with capitalism. Alternative economic theories from an emerging theoretical P2P movement have done important pioneer work on commons-based peer production, and in discussing its sustainability as a mode of production both on a systemic and individual level (for the peer producers) within capitalism. This article argues that the disadvantages of the P2P movement’s theoretical framework, compared to a Marxist one, have their roots in an evolutionist motif, and the article aims to situate peer production more clearly in relation to the workings of capital, and in relation to a Marxist understanding of the potential for political agencies and counter-powers to emerge from capital’s outside.

Photo by Mantissa.ca

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“Hope is rooted in men’s incompletion, from which they move out in constant search – a search which can be carried out only in communion with other men. Hopelessness is a form of silence, of denying the world and fleeting from it. The dehumanization resulting from an unjust order is not a cause for despair but for hope, leading to the incessant pursuit of the humanity denied by injustice. Hope, however, does not consist in crossing one’s arms and waiting. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope, and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.” (Freire 1970: 80).

Arguments pessimistic about change often reflect the upbringing and dominant culture perpetuated by the system to sustain its preservation. Culture influences human psychology and mentality and consequently the thinking about economic system. If one changes one part of the social organization such as the culture and human relations in the production system, the other elements will feel like a misfit and will be easier to change. We tend to forget that culture is something constantly evolving. We treat it as a natural law. Certainly, getting out of habits and mental framework is difficult but not impossible. Although creating an alternative culture requires effort, some effort is also put in maintaining the dominant culture. So the question is where to put the effort.

Culture and Change – Chicken or Egg?

Graeber and Wengrow in their article in Eurozine illustrate that the structural factors such as group size are less determinant of the relations between people than the culture. Egalitarian organization can also function in a large-scale group. Even the same group can apply different forms of governance as seasonal changes in tribes’ organization of work exemplify. Native Americans have adopted a different organization to mobilize during hunting period. In governance system oriented on maintaining stability, the institutions created to sustain production system may have interest in developing compatible culture and structure human relations. Peter Gray argues in the book “Free to Learn” that educational institutions were designed to maintain production based on hierarchy. School system socialized into hierarchical and slave mentality.

Systemic change proposals such as an unconditional basic income or other forms of luxury communism promise a step towards freeing people from fear and a new emotional and psychological functioning. However, there are certain drawbacks to this strategy. It puts too much stress on money and waiting for government to step in as the solution. This may further reflect the fetish of money that dominates our minds. The stress on rights and other abstract ideas makes a distance between us, our capacity to act, and the change that is striven for. Another option to achieve liberation from coercive work and other injustices imposed by the current system is addressing the culture and human relations that sustain this system. In a case study, I mention the need for a different culture and human relations to sustain a UBI. While monetary transfer contributes to the liberation from exploitative precarious employment, to sustain a UBI, a deeper change is required: a culture and mentality that eliminates the desire to exploit. If there is no adequate culture underlying the economic change, the practices from the previous system will be continued. For example, migrants not having the right to a UBI will be more in demand and a parallel labour market will be created.

Horizontal culture is shaped by everyday choices that for people raised in such a culture are an automatic way of structuring daily interactions. Some insights can be extrapolated from Jean Liedloff’s (1975) ethnographic study. When living with an indigenous tribe in Venezuela, she observed an absence of coercion to work there. Society waited until someone decides to work out of one’s own will by discovering this motivation in oneself. The way children are treated in this society helps them to develop the motivation to contribute to it. Their needs of touch and security are responded fully and therefore, personality disorders are prevented. According to her, human beings are naturally inclined to search for belonging and be a contributing part of a community. Liedloff gives several examples of social interactions that do not use force, pressure, or threats to achieve what is in the interest of the community.

Customs, skills, and attitudes for horizontalism

Past and present examples show us that a non-hierarchic culture can be cultivated and chosen intentionally. Peter Gray writes about practices of sustaining non-hierarchic culture in hunter-gatherer bands: punishing competitive behaviors and child rearing that was oriented on meeting children’s basic needs. Hunter-gatherer bands in South East Asia are an example of a large scale cultural work. These groups, living at the margins of the state (understood as a way of organizing human relations) knew how to prevent hierarchical relations from penetrating their interactions and undermining their project. James C. Scott argues that a population of about one hundred million people was living at the margin of state. Their lives were structured around the avoidance of incorporation into state structure and they were pursuing nomadic life and foraging mainly in the hills, which offered a rescue from the state. State representatives saw these people as a potential danger, stigmatizing them, because they constituted a possible tempting life outside of its structures (Scott 2009: 30). This form of living was attractive because of the autonomy and egalitarian social relations. The populations were also healthier than sedentary ones (ibid: 186). Three themes constitute hill ideology: equality, autonomy, and mobility. They would prefer flight rather than rebellion (ibid: 217-218). They developed practices that hinder the development of hierarchies and state power: refusal of history (which could serve as a base for claims about distinction and rank) and creating a culture in form of cautionary tales to warn would-be autocratic headman (the stories would suggest that he would be killed) (ibid: 276). They did not want to have a chief or a headman who could be used by a state.

Local and international initiatives of contemporary social movements, often in form of short-lived uprisings, experiment with governance principles, culture of a new type of democratic system, and human relations. Graeber describes the agenda of the alterglobalization movement in the following way (2009, p. 70): “This is a movement about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties, or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, nonhierarchical consensus democracy. Ultimately, it [ . . . ] aspires to reinvent daily life as a whole.”

Another example of experimenting with a new culture can be found in autonomist movements in Argentina. Their new governance system was characterized by the following features: 1) horizontalidad: a form of direct decision making that rejects hierarchy and works as an ongoing process; 2) autogestion: a form of self-management with an implied form of horizontalidad; 3) concrete projects related to sustenance and survival; 4) territory – the use and occupation of physical and metaphorical space; 5) changing social relationships; 6) a politics and social relationships based on love and trust; 7) self-reflection; 8) autonomy: sometimes using the state, but at the same time, against and beyond the state (Sitrin 2012: 3f.).

Raising and becoming cooperative individuals

Graeber and Wengrow conclude that family can be a source of socializing into hierarchical way of thinking and structural violence such as gender inequalities. Furthermore, traumatic experiences within family can induce search and abuse of power as Alice Miller conceptualized in her books. Creating a free society would need to start within family and household.

Schools are well designed to supply compliant workers. Alternative pedagogy projects show that they may focus on raising cooperative individuals. In a French school, which is supported by movement Colibris (hammingbirds) and managed by Elisabeth Peloux, special classes are designated to teaching cooperation skills. There are three occasion to learn cooperative skills: 1) philosophy workshop where children learn how to express themselves and listen to each other; 2) “Living together” meeting where they discuss issues related to being in the group and talk about conflicts; and 3) Peace education where they learn self-awareness, dealing with emotions, and contact with nature. They also play cooperative games. In contrast to competitive games, the aim is to have good time together and win by accomplishing a task through cooperation. All children learn how to be a mediator and mediation is regularly practiced in case of a conflict.[1]

***

Book references

• Freire, Paulo (1970): Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated from Portuguese manuscript by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York The Seabury Press.
• Graeber, David (2009): Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh Oakland: AK Press
• Gray, Peter (2013): Free to Learn. Basic Books
• Liedloff, Jean (1975): The Continuum Concept. Da Capo Press; Reprint edition (January 22, 1986)
• Miller, Alice (2002): For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 3rd edition (January 1, 1990)
• Scott, James C. (2009): The Art of Not Being Governed : An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press.
• Sitrin, Marina (2012): Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. Zed Press, London

[1]     The examples were given during public talk by Elisabeth Peloux on 13th January 2018, in Strasbourg, France.

Photo by Hey Paul

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More indications of how to restore a new balance towards egalitarian (or rather ‘equipotential’) outcomes come from David Graeber, who wrote a very important article summarizing the last 3 decades of findings from archaeology and anthropology, which have overturned many of our insights:

1) In the excerpt on Seasonal Reversals of Hierarchical Structures‎‎ he shows several examples of tribes and societies which combined more egalitarian and more hierarchical arrangements, according to context.

2) In the excerpt on the Transition from Foraging to Farming Societies‎‎, he shows that this was by no means a universal transition towards more hierarchy ; in fact, many agricultural societies and their cities had deep democratic structures (sometimes more egalitarian than their earlier tribal forms)

3) Finally in the last one, Top-Down Structures of Rule Are Not the Necessary Consequence of Large-Scale Organization, he gives several examples showing ‘size does not matter’

All this should give us hope, that the evolution towards the current hierarchical models are not written in stone, and that societies can be more flexible than they appear.

Seasonal Reversals of Hierarchical Structures

David Graeber: “From the very beginning, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. Anthropologists describe societies of this sort as possessing a ‘double morphology’. Marcel Mauss, writing in the early twentieth century, observed that the circumpolar Inuit, ‘and likewise many other societies . . . have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer months, Inuit dispersed into small patriarchal bands in pursuit of freshwater fish, caribou, and reindeer, each under the authority of a single male elder. Property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, another social structure entirely took over as Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale-rib, and stone. Within them, the virtues of equality, altruism, and collective life prevailed; wealth was shared; husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Seals.

Another example were the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Canada’s Northwest Coast, for whom winter – not summer – was the time when society crystallised into its most unequal form, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastlines of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations, still ranked, but with an entirely different and less formal structure. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter, literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.

Perhaps most striking, in terms of political reversals, were the seasonal practices of 19th-century tribal confederacies on the American Great Plains – sometime, or one-time farmers who had adopted a nomadic hunting life. In the late summer, small and highly mobile bands of Cheyenne and Lakota would congregate in large settlements to make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. At this most sensitive time of year they appointed a police force that exercised full coercive powers, including the right to imprison, whip, or fine any offender who endangered the proceedings. Yet as the anthropologist Robert Lowie observed, this ‘unequivocal authoritarianism’ operated on a strictly seasonal and temporary basis, giving way to more ‘anarchic’ forms of organisation once the hunting season – and the collective rituals that followed – were complete.”

Transition from Foraging to Farming Societies

David Graeber: “Let us conclude, then, with a few headlines of our own: just a handful, to give a sense of what the new, emerging world history is starting to look like.

The first bombshell on our list concerns the origins and spread of agriculture. There is no longer any support for the view that it marked a major transition in human societies. In those parts of the world where animals and plants were first domesticated, there actually was no discernible ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic Forager to Neolithic Farmer. The ‘transition’ from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production typically took something in the order of three thousand years. While agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception. In the time between, people in areas as far removed as Amazonia and the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East were trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you like, switching annually between modes of production, much as they switched their social structures back and forth. Moreover, the ‘spread of farming’ to secondary areas, such as Europe – so often described in triumphalist terms, as the start of an inevitable decline in hunting and gathering – turns out to have been a highly tenuous process, which sometimes failed, leading to demographic collapse for the farmers, not the foragers.

Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like ‘the agricultural revolution’ when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity. Since there was no Eden-like state, from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of rank or private property. If anything, it is among those populations – the ‘Mesolithic’ peoples – who refused farming through the warming centuries of the early Holocene, that we find stratification becoming more entrenched; at least, if opulent burial, predatory warfare, and monumental buildings are anything to go by. In at least some cases, like the Middle East, the first farmers seem to have consciously developed alternative forms of community, to go along with their more labour-intensive way of life. These Neolithic societies look strikingly egalitarian when compared to their hunter-gatherer neighbours, with a dramatic increase in the economic and social importance of women, clearly reflected in their art and ritual life (contrast here the female figurines of Jericho or Çatalhöyük with the hyper-masculine sculpture of Göbekli Tepe).

Another bombshell: ‘civilization’ does not come as a package. The world’s first cities did not just emerge in a handful of locations, together with systems of centralised government and bureaucratic control. In China, for instance, we are now aware that by 2500 BC, settlements of 300 hectares or more existed on the lower reaches of the Yellow River, over a thousand years before the foundation of the earliest (Shang) royal dynasty. On the other side of the Pacific, and at around the same time, ceremonial centres of striking magnitude have been discovered in the valley of Peru’s Río Supe, notably at the site of Caral: enigmatic remains of sunken plazas and monumental platforms, four millennia older than the Inca Empire. Such recent discoveries indicate how little is yet truly known about the distribution and origin of the first cities, and just how much older these cities may be than the systems of authoritarian government and literate administration that were once assumed necessary for their foundation. And in the more established heartlands of urbanisation – Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Basin of Mexico – there is mounting evidence that the first cities were organised on self-consciously egalitarian lines, municipal councils retaining significant autonomy from central government. In the first two cases, cities with sophisticated civic infrastructures flourished for over half a millennium with no trace of royal burials or monuments, no standing armies or other means of large-scale coercion, nor any hint of direct bureaucratic control over most citizen’s lives.”

Top-Down Structures of Rule Are Not the Necessary Consequence of Large-Scale Organization

David Graeber: “notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization. Walter Scheidel notwithstanding, it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe. To take just one well-documented example: around 200 AD, the city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, with a population of 120,000 (one of the largest in the world at the time), appears to have undergone a profound transformation, turning its back on pyramid-temples and human sacrifice, and reconstructing itself as a vast collection of comfortable villas, all almost exactly the same size. It remained so for perhaps 400 years. Even in Cortés’ day, Central Mexico was still home to cities like Tlaxcala, run by an elected council whose members were periodically whipped by their constituents to remind them who was ultimately in charge.

The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.”

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David Bollier: What is “value” and how shall we protect it?  It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer.

For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple: value is essentially the same as price. Value results when private property and “free markets” condense countless individual preferences and purchases into a single, neutral representation of value:  price.  That is seen as the equivalent of “wealth.”

This theory of value has always been flawed, both theoretically and empirically, because it obviously ignores many types of “value” that cannot be given a price. No matter, it “works,” and so this theory of value generally prevails in political and policy debates. Economic growth (measured as Gross Domestic Product) and value are seen as the same.

Meanwhile, the actual value generated outside of market capitalism – the “care economy,” social labor, eco-stewardship, digital communities and commons – are mostly ignored or considered merely personal (“values”).  These types of “value” are seen as extraneous to “the economy.”

My colleagues and I wondered if it would be possible to develop a post-capitalist, commons-friendly theory of value that could begin to represent and defend these other types of value.  Could we develop a theory that might have the same resonance that the labor theory of value had in Marx’s time?

Marx’s labor theory of value has long criticized capitalism for failing to recognize the full range of value-creation that make market exchange possible in the first place.  Without the “free,” unpriced services of child-rearing, social cooperation, ethical norms, education and natural systems, markets simply could not exist.  Yet because these nonmarket value-regimes have no pricetags associated with them, they are taken for granted and fiercely exploited as “free resources” by markets.

So we were wondering:  If modern political/economic conceptions of value are deficient, then what alternative theories of value might we propose? In cooperation with the Heinrich Boell Foundation and anthropologist David Graeber, who has a keen interest in these themes, we brought together about 20 key thinkers and activists for a Deep Dive workshop in September 2016 to explore this very question.  So much seems to hinge upon how we define value.

I am pleased to say that an account of those workshop deliberations is now available as a report, Re-imagining Value:  Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature (pdf download). The 49-page report (plus appendices) explains that how we define value says a lot about what we care about and how we make sense of things – and therefore what kind of political agendas we pursue.

Here is the Contents page from the report:

Introduction

I.  THE VALUE QUESTION 

A.  Why “Value” Lies at the Heart of Politics

B.  Should We Even Use the Word “Value”?

II.  TOWARDS A RELATIONAL THEORY OF VALUE

III.  KEY CHALLENGES IN DEVELOPING A NEW THEORY OF VALUE 

A.  Can Abstract Metrics Help Build a New Value Regime?

B.  How Shall We Value “Nature”?

C.  Should We De-Monetize Everyday Life?

IV.  COMMONS-BASED PEER PRODUCTION: A FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT IN UNDERSTANDING VALUE?                       

A.  Practical Strategies for Building New Systems of Value

B.  The Dangers of Co-optation and Wishful Thinking

C.  But Peer Production Still Relies Upon (Unpaid) Care Work and Nature!

V.  NOTES TOWARD A COMMONS THEORY OF VALUE 

CONCLUSION 

Appendix A:  Participants

Appendix B:  A Commons Theory of Value

Appendix C:  Readings for Value Deep Dive

Excerpts

Below, some excerpts from the report:

The absence of a credible theory of value is one reason that we have a legitimacy crisis today.  There is no shared moral justification for the power of markets and civil institutions in our lives.  Especially since the 2008 financial crisis, the idea of “rational” free markets as a fair system for allocating material wealth has become something of a joke in some quarters.  Similarly, the idea of government serving as an honest broker dedicated to meeting people’s basic needs, assuring fairness, providing ecological stewardship and advancing the public interest, is also in tatters.

“We cannot do without a value regime,” said Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation and cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group.  “Today, we have a dictatorship of one kind of value as delivered by the market system, which determines for everyone how they can live.”  Consider how the labor of a nurse is regarded under different value regimes, he said:  A nurse working as a paid employee is considered value-creating – a contributor to Gross Domestic Product.  But the same nurse doing the same duties as a government employee is seen as “an expense, not a value-creator,” said Bauwens.  The same nurse working as a volunteer “produces no value at all” by the logic of the market system.

Bauwens said that his work in fostering peer production communities is an exploratory project in creating a new type of “value sovereignty” based on mutualism and caring.  An important aspect of this work is protecting the respective community’s value sovereignty through defensive accommodations with the market system.  “The peer production system lives a dichotomy,” explained Bauwens.  “It is based on contributions for which we don’t get paid.  We therefore have to interact with the market so that we can earn a living and get paid for what we have to do.”  Maintaining a peer community within a hostile capitalist order requires that the community “create membranes to capture value from the dominant system, but then to filter it and use it in different ways” – i.e., through collective decisionmaking and social solidarity, not through the market logic of money-based, individual exchange.

…. One participant, Ina Praetorius, a postpatriarchal thinker, author and theologian based in Switzerland, asked a provocative question:  “Do we need to use the word ‘value’ at all?”  She explained that as an ethicist she does not find the word useful.  “Value is not part of my vocabulary since writing my 2005 book, Acting Out of Abundance [in German, Handeln aus der Fülle].  It’s perfectly possible to talk about the ‘good life’ without the notion of value.”  Praetorius believes the word “value” is useful to merchants and economists in talking about money and markets.  But it has little relevance when talking about ethical living or the human condition.

Praetorius is also suspicious of “value” as a word associated with the German philosophical tradition of idealism, which she regards as “an unreliable authority because of its strange methodological origins” – “Western bourgeois men of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, who created an invisible sphere of abstract concepts meant to denote certain qualities, as a means to forget their own belonging to nature and their own basic needs, especially towards women.”

But ecophilosopher Aetzel Griffioen, based in The Netherlands, regards the word “value” as “a necessary abstraction that can be used in some places and not in others.”  In his dealing with a labor union of domestic workers, for example, Griffioen considers the word too philosophical and abstract to use.  However, “for commoners trying to tackle what so-called economists call ‘value-creation,’ it is a practical necessity to use the word in trying to create commons based on their own values.”

Again, the value/values dichotomy cropped up.  Economics claims the word “value” for itself while everyone else, in their private and social lives, may have their own personal “values.”  This rift in thinking and vocabulary is precisely what this workshop sought to overcome.  Economists are eager to protect their ideas about “value” as money-based and make them normative. Commoners and others, by contrast, want to broaden the meaning of the term to apply to all of human experience.  This conflict prompted Ina Praetorius to conclude, “Language is politics.”  For herself, she has no desire to contest with economists over control of the term.  Others, however, are determined to continue that very struggle.

Towards a Relational Theory of Value

The conventional economic definition of “value” has a significant rhetorical advantage over other notions of value/s.  It can be encapsulated in numbers, manipulated mathematically and ascribed to individuals, giving it a tidy precision.  Value defined as price also has an operational simplicity even though it flattens the messy realities of actual human life and ecosystems.  It purports to precisely quantify and calculate “value” into a single plane of commensurable, tradeable units, as mediated by price.

Through discussion, workshop participants set forth a rough alternative theory of value based on a radically different ontology.  This theory sees value arising from relationships.  Value does not inhere in objects; it emerges through a process as living entities – whether human beings or the flora and fauna of ecosystems – interact with each other.  In this sense, value is not fixed and static, but something that emerges naturally as living entities interact.

“In a commons, value is an event,” said Silke Helfrich of the Commons Strategies Group.  “It is something that needs to be enacted again and again.”  The difference between the standard economic theory of value and a commons-based one is that the latter is a relational theory of value, said Helfrich.

According to Nick Dyer-Witheford, this idea aligns with Marx’s thinking.  While some observers say that a Marxist theory of value ascribes value to things, Dyer-Witheford disagreed, noting that “Marx condemned the idea of value inhering in objects as commodity fetishism.  He believed in a relational theory of value – the relations between workers and owners – even if Marx may not have considered the full range of social relationships involved in the production of commodities.”….

Everyone agreed that a relational theory of value has great appeal and far-reaching implications.  It means that the “labor” of nonhumans – the Earth, other creatures, plants – can be regarded as a source of value, and not definitionally excluded, said Neera Singh, the geographer.  Indeed, this is a point made in a John Holloway essay on Marx’s ideas about “wealth”:  the nonhuman world produces such an excess of wealth that it overflows what capitalism can capture in the commodity form, said Sian Sullivan, a co-investigator with the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value in the UK and Professor of Environment and Culture at Bath Spa University.  “This of course leads to the paradox of capitalism trying to use commodity form, an engine of accumulation, to solve ecological crises that the commodity form created in the first place.  It does not know how to protect intrinsic value.”

The report deals with a wide variety of other issues related to the “value question”:  Can abstract metrics help build a new value regime?  How shall we value “nature”?  Should we attempt to de-monetize everyday life?  The report also includes a major discussion of commons-based peer production as a fundamental shift in understanding value.  This point is illustrated by open value accounting systems such as those used by Sensorica, and by organizational experiments in finance, ownership and governance.

While workshop participants did not come up with a new grand theory of value, they did develop many promising lines of inquiry for doing so.  Each prepared a short statement that attempted to identify essential elements for a commons theory of value.  (See Appendix B in the report.)  We hope that the record of the workshop’s discussions will help stimulate further discussion on the question of value – and perhaps bring forth some compelling new theories.

Event photography by Pedro Jardim

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At the outset Balthazar briefly summarizes his own intellectual journey as an economist, looking back on his earlier assumption that the economy as a whole was the spontaneous result of innumerable interacting trends interacting in a complex manner, and could be ultimately traced to individual preferences. This is the common perspective of most mainstream economists, who view the economic system as something that “just is,” arising naturally or inevitably, and not the result of power or vested interests.

Balthazar gradually came to question this assumption: Is our economic system really something that “just happened,” because most people want things more or less this way? He noticed, in particular, the absence from public debates of any consideration for the possibility that a majority of people, absent institutional constraints, might have preferred increased leisure over increased consumption. From there he considered the destructive effect such a preference would have on the conventional economic paradigm of avoiding idle productive capacity and idle investment capital, and preventing general deflation. The long-term results of abundance and leisure — post-scarcity — would be the collapse of capital asset and securities values, the collapse of the tax base, and default on public debt.

In examining this question — whether an economic system geared towards consumption rather than leisure is truly the result of spontaneous individual preference — Balthazar goes back to Keynes’s Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren. In that work, Keynes envisioned a world of superabundance and leisure, with an average work week of 15 hours, by the year 2030. He considers whether Keynes was correct that the natural outcome of technological advances in productivity, absent any institutional forces to thwart that natural course, would have been a future society of increased leisure and abundance, and radically reduced work hours. And if he was correct, what institutional forces have prevented that outcome?

Balthazar suggests that the institutional mindset of those making macroeconomic policy, and the Keynesian orthodoxy itself, are geared toward maximizing the utilization of production capacity, finding profitable outlets for investment capital, and avoiding deflation. These institutional goals of American capitalism, and the capitalist state, are directly at odds with the possibilities of a post-work, post-scarcity society. And the economy’s tendency towards increasing GDP rather than leisure may reflect, not the sum total of revealed individual preference, but systemic imperatives.

We face the real possibility that, far from a case in which we are the principals and those in charge of the economy are honest agents — with the state reflecting the spontaneous preferences of the public and the corporate economy functioning as a sort of “dollar democracy” — the actual state of affairs is one of the alleged “agents” pursuing interests of their own and using the “principals” as means to an end.

Specifically, the doctrine of “economic maximalism,” or growth for its own sake, is at the heart of a legitimizing ideology actively promoted by all the centers of cultural reproduction, that not only present growth and increased consumption as desirable, but present a state of affairs in which these goals are maximized as natural, inevitable, and — yes — the “spontaneous outcome of individual preferences.” In short, we live in a system whose complex of ideological institutions conditions to view its dynamics as a fact of nature rather than something that results from the application of power and reflects the interests of those who are in control. The system conditions us to believe in a legitimizing ideology, that is, precisely identical to what Balthazar himself believed fresh out of school.

In developing this thesis, Balthazar first does an in-depth content analysis of political and economic commentary on the Great Recession in The Economist, examining the ways in which the overwhelming dominance of the economic maximalist ideology in the pages of that publication. In all its commentary and reporting, The Economist took for granted that getting people to work and consume more was the only common sense path, and that the desirability of these things was an overwhelming collective social consensus.

He next conducts a broad survey of the history of political economy to trace the origins of that ideology, and the path by which it attained the status of orthodoxy. Especially interesting in this regard is the prevalence, in the political economy of the 18th century, of the idea of the spontaneous preferences of ordinary working people as an obstacle to be overcome, and the need to coerce or manipulate them — for the sake of some “higher good” — into working harder than they would have chosen to if left to themselves. And as I have documented elsewhere, there is a large body of commentary by propertied advocates of Enclosure arguing that depriving the rural population of their rights to subsistence on the common was absolutely necessary to get them to work as hard as their masters wanted them to, rather than simply working until their own perceived wants were satisfied.

And even Adam Smith, Balthazar notes, for all his break with mercantilism, shows a great deal of continuity with it in treating the good of the commonwealth as a thing in its own right over and above the revealed preferences of actual working people. In this he anticipated commentators today who treat the “economy” as an end in itself. The most egregious example I ever heard was a neoconservative commentator on one of the cable news channels during the Iraq War in 2003, gloating that Americans preferred to work longer hours and forego the six weeks of vacation their German counterparts enjoyed so that “their country” could afford to maintain carrier groups in the Indian Ocean.

Despite the pretense of value-neutrality in mainstream economics, the one question neoclassicals and Keynesians compulsively avoid addressing is the source of their own implicit valuation of “jobs,” full employment and maximizing output. And there is no consideration of the ethical problem of whether maximizing those values amounts to “nudging… Keynes’ grandchildren into higher levels of work and consumption. There is, in other words, virtually no discussion about the legitimacy of a general (economic) interest that would supersede the sum of all private (economic) interests.”

In the second part of his essay, in order to “examine the desirability of economic growth from a perspective other than that of neoclassical economics,” Balthazar “step[s] outside of economic science altogether.” Specifically, he examines the process of individual preference formation, and once again calls into question “the mainstream view that such a collective preference [for economic activity] is merely reflecting the aggregation of individual interests and is therefore not superseding them.”

In his critique of the framing of economic maximalism as simply the reflection of cumulative individual “revealed preference,” he refers to four narratives. The first narrative is the radical historiography of primitive accumulation, in which capitalism as a historic system is shown to have been established by large-scale coercion rather than emerging spontaneously. The second is Keynes’s assessment that the value placed on growth, production and consumption, to the extent that they are a genuine and widespread cultural phenomenon, are an atavism or holdover from the age of scarcity, one that should be superseded by the superior values of abundance and leisure. (I would add here that, to the extent that it serves as the legitimizing ideology of a system established by a history written in letters of blood and fire, as examined in the first narrative, it is doubly atavistic and undesirable.) The third, while recognizing that the ideology of growth maximization supersedes spontaneous individual preferences, nevertheless sees it as potentially useful in some cases for remedying the less desirable consequences of individual preferences (here Balthazar focuses on the neoconservatives, who resemble the enclosing Whig magnates in their desire to motivate the working class to more industry). And the fourth narrative (of special interest from the perspective of post-scarcity technology)

searches plausible alternatives to the tendency of markets to commodify both goods and labor services. More generally, this literature is searching for production and exchange arrangements that rely on motivational frameworks other than the hedonistic self-interest of homo economicus.

Balthazar finishes his essay by drawing the conclusion that there is no basis, either in neoclassical economics or in any generally accepted moral theory, for justifying the commanding institutions of our society in promoting growth maximization as a systemic goal overriding individual preferences.

One thing that would have benefited this essay — and it’s odd that it’s missing, considering Keynes’s scenario in Economic Possiblities For Our Grandchildren assumed technologically-based increases in productivity — would have been for Balthazar to address the possibility that technologies could actually increase consumption (in the sense of use-value) even as labor hours and nominal GDP decrease.

The problem is that, in the context of post-scarcity technologies, the very concepts of “growth” and “consumption” are ambiguous. Traditional metrics of “growth” like GDP measure the total monetized value of inputs like material resources and labor consumed to create a given unit of consumption. But as smaller and smaller amounts of labor are required to produce the same use-value, and the ephemeralization of production technology has the same effect on capital expenditures and natural resource inputs, use-value is increasingly becoming decoupled from exchange-value. To take the extreme example, in a world of Star Trek matter-energy replicators the possibilities for consumption of desired goods would be for all intents and purposes unlimited — and yet both GDP and ecological footprints would be virtually zero. As technology pushes us into the realm of abundance, the material standard of living improves even as the processes by which we produce that standard of living disappear from the cash nexus.

I examined this phenomenon at some length in an article for the P2P Foundation Blog, “Abundance Creates Utility But Destroys Exchange Value” (Feb. 7, 2010).

From this standpoint, the state’s Hamiltonian policy of propping up the artificial exchange value of material inputs and labor and creating an artificial need for them — snatching scarcity from the jaws of abundance — serves the same function as the artificial scarcity imposed by the landed classes of England in the Enclosure movement. It compels laborers to do extra, unnecessary work in order to support a parasitic class in addition to themselves, and encloses the production process within the control of an institutional structure that serves no technically necessary function.

An explicit examination of the autonomists (particularly the “Exodus” model Negri and Hardt discuss in Commonwealth) would also have been of value in Balthazar’s treatment of the fourth narrative. That is, their thesis that networked communications and other modern technologies are
reducing the significance of physical capital, making human social relationships in society at large increasingly the most important factor of production, and blurring the lines between social life and work in a way that makes the capitalist and wage employment increasingly superfluous — and overdue to be bypassed.

The section in which Balthazar discusses Mauss and Polanyi on gift economies would have benefited from some reference to David Graeber.

Finally, it’s worth noting that analysts as far back as Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops have argued that it would be possible to immediately reduce the work week to 15 hours with no reduction in standard of living, simply by eliminating waste production, guard labor, and the surplus labor consumed by rentiers.

Overall, I recommend Balthazar’s essay highly as a contribution to post-scarcity literature.

Photo by kenteegardin

The post Book of the Day: The Discrete Charm of Economic Growth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As an example of the latter, Akerlof and Shiller argue that “our free market system” by its very nature “tends to spawn manipulation and deception.” And what they describe — “[i]f business people behave in the purely selfish and self-serving way that economic theory assumes” — is an economy in which economic actors are abstract “economic men” and most productive and distributive functions are mediated by the cash nexus. But there have been markets throughout most of human history. And many of the societies in which market exchange has existed have arguably been a lot freer than the one we live in now. But societies in which everything is mediated by the cash nexus, and most economic functions are performed by for-profit business firms, are a relatively recent phenomenon of the capitalist era and — according to anthropologist David Graeber — totally a creation of the modern state. So what Akerlof and Shiller describe is actually a system created by massive state brutality, and maintained by ongoing state intervention, that grossly distorts spontaneous human social relations. What does their use of “free market”add to this?

And what, in practical terms, does a “free market system” even mean? Is a political-economic-social system in which the overwhelming majority of landed property can be traced back to state engrossment and land grants to privileged classes, and the enclosure of vacant and unimproved land by absentee landlords, and the rightful owners (i.e. the actual occupants, users and cultivators) pay tribute to them, a “free market”? Is a system where title to most of the world’s mineral and energy reserves dates to colonial robbery a “free market”? Is a system where the majority of profit depends on patents and copyrights — i.e., a state restriction on the right to copy information or designs — a “free market”? Is a system where the state limits competition, and most industries are dominated by a handful of corporations with administered pricing and collusive suppression of innovation a “free market”? Is a system where the majority of corporations would be running in red ink if the state weren’t socializing a major share of their operating costs and risks a “free market”?

If it is, the term “free market” doesn’t mean much. On the other hand if “free market” means anything, the present system is not a free market. It’s a system where capitalists and landlords control the state, and the main function of the state is to guarantee profits and rents to the propertied classes.

The only conclusion I can draw is that “free market,” as the overwhelming majority of people in mainstream discourse use it, simply means “the system we have now,” as opposed to (maybe?) Social Democracy or an idealized New Deal economy. But what we have now is arguably as statist  as the New Deal or Western European Social Democracy ever was — it’s just that less of the state intervention is on the side of labor unions and the poor.

Some folks on the Left like Naomi Klein and Dean Baker recognize a distinction between “corporatism,” or the “corporate welfare,” and the “free market.” And some on the right are fond of responding to left-wing critics by saying “Oh, that’s corporatism (or crony capitalism), not capitalism.” But the latter, at least, do it as just a hand-waving gesture to acknowledge a few outlying phenomena like the Export-Import Bank or somesuch, while defending the core of the existing system as legitimate.

That’s nonsense. There is no “free market system.” There never has been. Despite the efforts of some on the Right to pretend that some period in the past has at least approximated laissez-faire, capitalism — the system that replaced feudalism 500 years or so ago — was founded on massive robbery, aggression and enslavement, and has been statist to its core ever since.

If politicians and talking heads, or academic intellectuals, want to talk about corporate capitalism, by all means let them do so. But stop talking as if the system we live under has anything to do with freedom.

Citations to this article:

• Kevin Carson, Does ‘free market’ even mean anything?, Augusta Free Press, 2016-03-31
• Kevin Carson, Does “Free Market” Even Mean Anything?, Strike the Root, 2016-03-31

The post Does “Free Market” Even Mean Anything? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the shownotes to the episode:

This week’s episode of the C-Realm Podcast begins with a discussion of David Graeber’s 2012 essay, Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit. KMO shares a portion of the conversation with Eric Boyd from C-Realm Vault Podcast episode 082 about some possible reasons why SF visions of moon bases, robotic maids and flying cars never came true. After that, KMO talks with G. Paul Blundell of Acorn Community about running large, complex operations without hierarchy, exploitation or coercion. Paul argues that renouncing hierarchy does not mean abandoning the benefits of coordinated action involving millions of people. The episode ends with a reading from a post to the blog The Hipcrime Vocab

Music by The Little Stevies.

The post Podcast of the Day/C-Realm: G. Paul Blundell on the Acorn Community appeared first on P2P Foundation.

David Graeber. Image by Jeanne Frank

“The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue. Had the Internet been described to a science fiction aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the most dramatic technological achievement since his time, his reaction would have been disappointment. Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to come up with? We expected computers that would think!

Overall, levels of research funding have increased dramatically since the seventies. Admittedly, the proportion of that funding that comes from the corporate sector has increased most dramatically, to the point that private enterprise is now funding twice as much research as the government, but the increase is so large that the total amount of government research funding, in real-dollar terms, is much higher than it was in the sixties. “Basic,” “curiosity-driven,” or “blue skies” research—the kind that is not driven by the prospect of any immediate practical application, and that is most likely to lead to unexpected breakthroughs—occupies an ever smaller proportion of the total, though so much money is being thrown around nowadays that overall levels of basic research funding have increased.

Yet most observers agree that the results have been paltry. Certainly we no longer see anything like the continual stream of conceptual revolutions—genetic inheritance, relativity, psychoanalysis, quantum mechanics—that people had grown used to, and even expected, a hundred years before. Why?

Part of the answer has to do with the concentration of resources on a handful of gigantic projects: “big science,” as it has come to be called. The Human Genome Project is often held out as an example. After spending almost three billion dollars and employing thousands of scientists and staff in five different countries, it has mainly served to establish that there isn’t very much to be learned from sequencing genes that’s of much use to anyone else. Even more, the hype and political investment surrounding such projects demonstrate the degree to which even basic research now seems to be driven by political, administrative, and marketing imperatives that make it unlikely anything revolutionary will happen.

Here, our fascination with the mythic origins of Silicon Valley and the Internet has blinded us to what’s really going on. It has allowed us to imagine that research and development is now driven, primarily, by small teams of plucky entrepreneurs, or the sort of decentralized cooperation that creates open-source software. This is not so, even though such research teams are most likely to produce results. Research and development is still driven by giant bureaucratic projects.

What has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped in creating marketable products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do, in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.

My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.

The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.

As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure.

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.

If all this is true in the social sciences, where research is still carried out with minimal overhead largely by individuals, one can imagine how much worse it is for astrophysicists. And, indeed, one astrophysicist, Jonathan Katz, has recently warned students pondering a career in the sciences. Even if you do emerge from the usual decade-long period languishing as someone else’s flunky, he says, you can expect your best ideas to be stymied at every point:

You will spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors, you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. . . . It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal, because they have not yet been proved to work.

That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.

In the natural sciences, to the tyranny of managerialism we can add the privatization of research results. As the British economist David Harvie has reminded us, “open source” research is not new. Scholarly research has always been open source, in the sense that scholars share materials and results. There is competition, certainly, but it is “convivial.” This is no longer true of scientists working in the corporate sector, where findings are jealously guarded, but the spread of the corporate ethos within the academy and research institutes themselves has caused even publicly funded scholars to treat their findings as personal property. Academic publishers ensure that findings that are published are increasingly difficult to access, further enclosing the intellectual commons. As a result, convivial, open-source competition turns into something much more like classic market competition.

There are many forms of privatization, up to and including the simple buying up and suppression of inconvenient discoveries by large corporations fearful of their economic effects. (We cannot know how many synthetic fuel formulae have been bought up and placed in the vaults of oil companies, but it’s hard to imagine nothing like this happens.) More subtle is the way the managerial ethos discourages everything adventurous or quirky, especially if there is no prospect of immediate results. Oddly, the Internet can be part of the problem here. As Neal Stephenson put it:

Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one; it—or at least something vaguely similar—has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.

And so a timid, bureaucratic spirit suffuses every aspect of cultural life. It comes festooned in a language of creativity, initiative, and entrepreneurialism. But the language is meaningless. Those thinkers most likely to make a conceptual breakthrough are the least likely to receive funding, and, if breakthroughs occur, they are not likely to find anyone willing to follow up on their most daring implications.

Giovanni Arrighi has noted that after the South Sea Bubble, British capitalism largely abandoned the corporate form. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, Britain had instead come to rely on a combination of high finance and small family firms—a pattern that held throughout the next century, the period of maximum scientific and technological innovation. (Britain at that time was also notorious for being just as generous to its oddballs and eccentrics as contemporary America is intolerant. A common expedient was to allow them to become rural vicars, who, predictably, became one of the main sources for amateur scientific discoveries.)

Contemporary, bureaucratic corporate capitalism was a creation not of Britain, but of the United States and Germany, the two rival powers that spent the first half of the twentieth century fighting two bloody wars over who would replace Britain as a dominant world power—wars that culminated, appropriately enough, in government-sponsored scientific programs to see who would be the first to discover the atom bomb. It is significant, then, that our current technological stagnation seems to have begun after 1945, when the United States replaced Britain as organizer of the world economy.

Americans do not like to think of themselves as a nation of bureaucrats—quite the opposite—but the moment we stop imagining bureaucracy as a phenomenon limited to government offices, it becomes obvious that this is precisely what we have become. The final victory over the Soviet Union did not lead to the domination of the market, but, in fact, cemented the dominance of conservative managerial elites, corporate bureaucrats who use the pretext of short-term, competitive, bottom-line thinking to squelch anything likely to have revolutionary implications of any kind.”

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