Fordism – P2P Foundation

Peer-to-peer-commons – The historical ‘third movement’ of radical science? It can only get better

Mike Hales — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Originally published 18 September 2018 at foprop.org

Mike Hales: When I first read Gary Werskey’s 2007 ‘three movements’ article – four years ago – I was sceptical. He discussed two British movements of radicals around science, in the 30s-40s and the 70s-80s, and speculated on the possibility of a third (which might possibly have an environmental impetus).

I was particularly unconvinced about the possibility of a Marxist movement, like the other two. But now, in 2018, I do have the sense that, yes, the peer-to-peer commons movement may be the thing that is in fact standing in that place. It would be worthwhile, at least, to proceed on the basis that it is – with substantial (if, for activists, secondary) implications for the field of science and technology studies (STS). I’m in no doubt that P2P-commons is the biggest thing I’ve seen in my activist lifetime . . and that it mobilises the stuff I’ve been cultivating these past 50 years, as a libertarian socialist with an orientation to the politics of knowledges and technologies.

It would be worth proceeding on the basis that P2P-commons is ‘the third radical science movement’

Lucy Gao and I have just finished a project to research and build a presentation at 4S Sydney 2018, the annual gathering of the academic research field of STS. The theme of the conference session – Lives in STS as a series of failed political experiments – was generated from a comment that Gary had made, and Lucy and I took his ‘three movements’ as a frame for narrating two stories of experimenting and ¿failing? in two ‘lives in STS’ – hers of ten years and mine of forty-five. The conference presentation is posted in Youtube (mirrored at hooktube) and a bundle of related materials on radical science and radical professionalism – including a one-page outline of the two stories and a transcript of several hours’ interviews – has now been posted here in 3 History, at Lives in STS. For length, a part of that presentation had to be dropped: an analytical framing of . . Fordism/post-Fordism and P2P as a mode of production in waiting . . STS academia and radical science activism, and . . organic-intellectual activism in-and-against the professional-managerial class (PMC). I had thought of making a ‘directors’ cut’ after the conference. However, too much other work waiting. So … regard this present blog post as the synopsis of the absent footage.

Three things stand out for me about this Lives in STS project, and the place that I got to through working on it with Lucy. Lucy is an Associate Professor in STS, in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She was born 40 years after I was, and works in an academic field that burst full-formed upon the Chinese cultural world in the late 80s, with its churned and manifestly political (two-movements) history buried beneath a surface of glossy Westernism, managerialism and professionalisation.

‘Radical science’ in the 70s wasn’t essentially about science?

The first thing is my own sense that ‘radical science’ in the 70s wasn’t essentially about science, and that where I have gone to with it isn’t essentially ‘science’ either. I saw, and see, a bunch of cultural formations within a broad and deep generational movement of radical professionals. This has been theorised – among other framings – as a history of the PMC in what once (40 years ago!) was called ‘late capitalism’. In the past generation – I would say, as an aspect of the post-Fordist regrouping of capital and forces opposed to capital – there has been an emergence of a profound and historically new politics, of the producing and mobilising of knowledges, on a mass, globally distributed scale. In the 50s it was ‘Big Science’ and the underpinning of ‘the military-industrial complex’. In the 60s it was the ascendance of ‘science policy’ and arguments about the public or privatisable nature of research production. In the 80s (alongside computerisation) there began to be talk of ‘a knowledge economy’ and in the 90s ‘knowledge intensive business services’ and ‘innovation services’ were subjects of research in ‘national systems of innovation’. In the 90s I was part of this, as an STS researcher (more to be posted in due course).

But all the way through, in my perception, the sub-plot has been one of #organicintellectual production (Gramsci’s term, from Italian Marxism of the 1920s and 30s) and the increasingly clear possibility of – and need for – organising the production of knowledges – on a mass scale, on a class scale – to facilitate quite different modes of production, forms of living and relationships between professionals and other people who are ‘not paid to think’. This on-going story of organic intellectual practice is the concern of the 4 History thread here in FoP RoP. It also is why the analytical frame for the pattern language in the 2 Commoning thread has at its centre the choreography of ’the dance of knowing’, and the question of the historically altered production of #labourpower. In FoP RoP I’m proposing this as one of three spheres of literacy (see here) that can, combined, constitute a cultural-materialist ‘take’ on the historical evolution and ongoing activist production of a P2P-commons mode of production and everyday living.

The movement for P2P-commons may be significantly ‘cultural’ and profoundly ‘materialist’, in ways that might be facilitated and clarified

The second thing I note is that, although I’ve understood myself for 40 years now to be conducting an enquiry within #culturalmaterialism – rather than any kind of received Marxism – the movement for P2P-commons may also be significantly ‘cultural’ and profoundly ‘materialist’, in ways that might be facilitated and clarified by the kind of neo- (not post-) Marxian, carefully hybridised frame that I’m setting out to articulate in FoP RoP, and specifically, in 2 Commoning.

The #materialism within the P2P-commons movement is very obviously present in the core attention given to . . open architectures of apps and the peer-to-peer production of free code . . distributed web infrastructures . . open data, linked data/data ownership/document ownership . . licensing, and to infrastructural technologies of coordination over distributed fields of action including cryptocurrencies and credit-accounting mechanisms, hashchains, open-value supply-chain accounting systems and open-ledger algorithms and architectures.

The cultural-historical orientation is a little less visible. But it’s clearly present for example in the anthropological perspective that led Michel Bauwens to see the historical-evolutionary, post- and anti-capitalist significance of commons, and to inaugurate the P2P Foundation. Likewise it manifestly underlies the scholarly, activist research and development work of Bauwens’ partners in the Commons Strategies Group – David Bollier, Silke Helfrich – on cultural-historical stories of commoning, past and present, presented in their collections of essays The wealth of the commons and Patterns of commoning and under analysis in their work-in-progress towards a pattern language of commoning. See here for notes on the relationship between this and my own pattern-language work here in FoP RoP.

The P2P-commons movement seems to be carrying forward – expanding – the organic intellectual impetus that began to be apparent in the 70s, ‘in-and-against the PMC’

The third thing I’m aware of is the way in which the P2P-commons movement seems to be carrying forward – and expanding – the organic intellectual impetus that began to be apparent in ‘the second radical science movement’ of the 70s. That was baby-boomers then. But now – although there are baby-boomers still on the scene – it’s another generation, who are discovering and enacting the organic intellectual mode differently. I began to see them only about 18 months ago. I’d been working on a notion of creating some kind of ‘college’ in which baby-boomer and twenty-something activists (and between) could engage in a cross-generation ‘legacy’ dialogue, theorising the ongoing practice of organic-intellectual, libertarian-socialist, activism. I sketched the idea in Humble origins 3 – Activists and the long march home. I’d decided the initiative called for an online platform of some kind (constituting a space for an ‘invisible college’) and had begun checking out the Loomio platform-for-deliberation www.loomio.org/. My ears pricked up here because Loomio was not only well-framed software with a wide and expanding voluntary-sector uptake across countries and cultures, but also because I clearly saw the attention to the #facilitation of group process that underlies the design. Here was a clear historical line, back to the discoveries and commitments of my own generation of community-oriented activism in the 70s (See ‘radical cultural R&D’ in 4 History and the Foreword/Preface to Location).

From Loomio the platform app, through Loomio the workers’ coop of developers, I came to Enspiral, the federation (family?) of post-Occupy activist hacktivist developers and cooperative entrepreneurs, among whom facilitation was a taken-for-granted dimension of activist culture. Thence, to Sensorica and an expanding world of anarcho-hackerist politics, Scuttlebutt infrastructure, a fediverse of code (and P2P producers of code and protocols); and wider formations of post-Occupy, anti-oligarch, direct-democracy research and development, ‘open-value’ value-chain accounting and ’agile’ post-Fordist cultural forms. This had all sorts of odd, contradictory resonances with my business-school experience of the 90s (when stealing the post-Fordist discoveries of Japanese and Italian flexible production systems was bread-and-butter for my colleagues in capitalist supply-chain innovation). Clearly, the histories were getting very mixed up, hybridising, rippling through, wave-fronts interfering. Clearly, there were younger radicals afoot now, in the teensies. who didn’t draw the same sorts of lines – between entrepreneurship and community, or solidarity and efficiency, or activism and technology, or politics and nurturing – that might have been problematic for an earlier generation, brought up in environments that were at once both more corporate, more professionally demarcated and careerist and more inclined to ‘design’ rather than ‘hack’ a solution. Then, it was corporate-competitive ‘right first time’, now it’s fail early, keep fixing and keep forking and federating.

P2P-commons is way bigger than ‘radical science’ was

P2P-commons is way bigger than ‘radical science’ was (post-Fordism is far further on). Most directly, it’s a successor to the radical technology arms of that movement, all the way from the alternative energy community, committed to off-grid or anarcho urban-artisan living, to the ‘human-centred’ and participatory, labour movement-oriented design movements in corporate-industrial settings. Work on other things – ‘radical science’ history in 4 History, organising within the world of ‘platform cooperativist’ activism in 3 Platforming – is preventing me really getting to grips with the pattern language of commoning in 2 Commoning. But I’m in no doubt that that theorising venture is just as relevant (and on the same cultural-materialist basis) for today’s P2P-commons movement, as was 70s neo-Marxian labour-process theorising in the Radical Science Journal collective, for 70s radical professionalism. Except . . it’s a bigger field, the stakes are raised, the pluriversal cultural challenges sit more obviously and crucially on the face of things; and the Beyond the fragments challenge that faced baby-boomers at the end of the 70s has hatched many fresh forms. Things are on the move. Goodness knows what the ‘third movement’ will look like in China, where my STS colleague Lucy Gao is coming at things 40 years later, with no ‘second movement’, an established, otiose, first movement, and with all the waves of all the Fordisms crashing in a tsunami of history and economy, in the wake of the ‘Great Enlightenment’ of the late 80s.

Whatever . . Yes Gary, there is a third (Marxism-inheriting) radical science movement! It can only get better.

Photo by pedrosimoes7

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Book of the day: The Political Economy of the Common

Adam Arvidsson — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Adam Arvidsson (translated from the Italian by Tiziano Bonini)

The Political Economy of the Common. Ed. by Andrea Fumagalli

(as yet untranslated Italian-language book)

Economia politica del comune, collects a series of essays, mostly published elsewhere, which summarize his analysis of post-crisis contemporary capitalism.

Capitalism has changed. Andrea Fumagalli says so. And he said that, for a long time, his school; the tradition of autonomy, starting from the early writings of Mario Tronti and Raniero Panzieri of the sixties, passing through the intellectually fertile experience of Potere Operaio of the seventies and the brilliant analysis of post-Fordism and the new figure of the social worker ‘of the eighties, always with the analysis firmly anchored in the thought of the now internationally recognized master of the Italian Theory Antonio Negri, has developed a Marxism for the digital age, focused on the Grundrisse, and in particular on the famous’ fragment on the machines ‘, more than on Capital. Together with Christian Marazzi and Maurizio Lazzarato, Andrea Fumagalli is the person who most contributed to this perspective, adding a solid empirical basis based on his experience as a professional economist.

The new book by Andrea, Economia politica del comune, collects a series of essays, mostly published elsewhere, which summarize his analysis of post-crisis contemporary capitalism. For the author, the scenario of the last ten years has been a strengthening of a model of biocapitalism where capitalist exploitation is based no longer on the mere theft of working time in factories or on the appropriation of intellectual production – in the form of technological innovation or intellectual property, central to the analysis of cognitive capitalism – but now on the subsumption – that is, the inclusion and putting to work – of the deepest dimensions of the human condition, such as those related to affections or relationships, particularly when they are articulated through the ubiquitous connectivity of smartphones and social media, and even to life itself as an object of biotechnology.

The man-machine union, visible and potential object of criticism or sabotage in the Fordist factories, has now progressed to become part of the human condition and in this way capable of making life itself – la nuda vita, Agamben would say – in its dimensions pre and post human, in vitro as well as in silico, object of appropriation and capitalist valorization.

In biocapitalism, production is based on putting the commons to work, a concept that is different from that of common goods, even if these are part of it, but which also refers to that life in common – made up of elements such as language, the gestures, the affections, the corporality and the relationships – which now, through digital technologies, is potentially put to work in its most varied manifestations: the freelancer who organizes his temporary cooperation with a team for a specific project, the Airbnb guest who strives to offer a positive stay experience or the teenager who posts a selfie with her favorite brand on Instagram.

Capitalist valorization has also progressed far beyond the Marxian model of the bourgeois drinker of the worker’ sweat. Financial markets play an increasingly central role and, through the financialization of life and productive relations, operate like giant vacuum cleaners that suck up crumbs of surplus value from the global productive and reproductive factory – the credit card, the shipping insurance required in the just-in-time value-chain – to then redistribute them, without transparency or democratic regulation, on financial markets. In this situation in which the socialization of the productive forces, the commons that constitute the true source of value – has now left the greedy pockets of the individual bourgeois to circulate on the financial markets in the form of digitized data – communism is already with us, only that does not belong to us. Biocapitalism represents the realization of the communism of capital, the famous concept taken up by Antonio Negri – and by Marx who, although he never uses it, mentions this possibility in the Grundrisse.

What to do then, comrades? There is no longer a factory to be sabotaged, nor a winter palace to be conquered. But, Andrea suggests, we can re-appropriate the tools in the hands of the capitalist class: finance and money. The currency, – writes Andrea – is now a direct expression of capitalist power, without the intermediation of the state. Andrea proposes the creation of coins and alternative financial instruments, suggesting the use of the seductive technology of the crypto-currencies: blokchain and bitcoin, which are able to establish circuits of valorization external to global finance; it would be desirable for a new currency of the commons suitable to finance a new welfare of the commons, triggering processes of local redistribution of wealth, to then let them grow and acquire more and more powerful autonomy. A strategy similar to that of the autonomy of the eighties, the age of the Hakim Beyi’s TAZ’s, the golden age of the Italian centri sociali of the nineties that, among other things, Andrea recognizes as his main source of inspiration.

The book offers a theoretical sum by one of the main representatives not only of the contemporary Marxist thought but of one of its most fruitful veins. As such it should be seen, in particular the introductory essay “The premise and Twenty thesis on bio-cognitive capitalism”, which sums up the subject with admirable clarity. For me it was a very fruitful reading: Andrea is and always has been, since its brilliant analysis of the new forms of self-employment of the second generation in 1994, a Master.

At the same time I think that the book a little exaggerate the grip and power of bio-capitalism. The result is a totalitarian image, where every human activity is immediately subsumed and exploited, from pedaling for Deliveroo to being on Facebook, and, using the same logic – why not -, playing soccer is actually a way to help reproduce the basics of the football market that exploits the fans as well as the television audience. What to me it sounds “weird”, however, it is the astonishing ineffectiveness of contemporary capitalism in exploiting the common which has partly generated. Facebook, Airbnb and Amazon earnings all in all modest, Uber and Deliveroo are at a loss, start-up incubators around the world are abandoning the cash for equity model, finding that they do not make a lot of money by incubating start-ups. Above all, there is a lack of innovation and ideas: large multinational companies have liquid reserves of unprecedented historical size – Apple announces a stock buy back of $ 100 billion – and no one seems able to find profitable use of big data or algorithms that go beyond the completion of the advertising targeting or the advice of other songs you may like on Spotify.

Capitalism like that will definitely not be able to survive the radical challenges that await us as we begin to cross the Anthropocene. To paraphrase another great master of Italian postwar Marxism, Giovanni Arrighi, the problem is not that the cognitive biocapitalism exploits our life, but that it isn’t able to do it well enough. I say this because as long as there is exploitation at least there is a rationality to criticize or sabotage. Instead contemporary biocapitalism looks increasingly like a rotting body that no one has the power to take away, as the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck claims. In this context, the alternative currency will certainly contribute to creating alternative valorisation circuits. My intuition is that the protagonists of this process are not so much those of Macao or Teatro Valle, but rather the entrepreneurs of that pirate modernity that now connects the small Chinese factories with the needs of the popular classes of Lagos or Tangier, passing through Piazza Garibaldi of Naples.

Photo by Lanpernas .

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