Ana Manzanedo and her colleague Alícia Trepat have documented a set of practices that platform coops are setting in order to solve the downside of platforms. The first outcome of these practices is to set fairness distribution of risk and value generated by the platform activity. In that sense, it is not only that assuming risk is rewarded, but also that the consequences of bad decisions or actions affect those that made them (what Taleb calls having “skin in the game”: he or she who wants a share of the benefits needs to also share some of the risks). The second outcome of the practices is that it establishes the responsibility for the care of all those involved in the platform, which means that their vulnerabilities are covered so the reproduction of the activity of the platform is assured, even beyond the nowadays generation who carries it. We could call that having “skin in the care”.

The real world examples captured by Ana and Alicia reflect the insight explained in this previous post: that solutions for communities having thick relationships do not scale for communities with thin relationships. In fact, in the first kind of communities, emerge a behavior hardly seen in the second: voluntary risk-taking for others, which Taleb calls “soul in the game”. Accordingly, it is not unusual to see voluntary care-taking for others, which we could call “soul in the care”.

The desirable governance of a Platform Coop is the one that promotes skin/soul in the game/care:

Table 1: Desirable approach for risk and care management

Communities of peers have their own ways to avoid risk and care transfer, particularly between their members. Most of the practices described by Ana and Alicia fall in at least one of the following approaches:

Table 2: Peer’s communities approaches to avoid transfer of risk and care

Platform Coops are, like the rest of the platforms, trapped by the “law of power” and by “winner-takes-it-all” dynamics. Yet, departing from the new possibilities offered by technological progress and societal change, we know where the solution might be:

a) Opening and commoning knowledge and resources as much as possible, in order to promote diversity of players and non-monopolistic (rent-free) markets: showing that Platform Coops do not maximize self-interest, and that abundance is possible through cooperation. Attracting individuals and communities with soul in the game and making them interact to create new subjectivities.

b) Making decision-making as much distributed as possible in the communities of life (clubs, neighborhoods, etc.) that are affected by the decision, and in the communities of production (i.e. foundations, coops, etc.) working in a federated way, according to their proved competences. Involving communities with skin in the game, and letting them jump in the logic of the soul in the game.

That, of course, draws a completely different network dynamics, and therefore, a different governance. Here it is my proposal to rethink Platform Cooperativism as Platform Ecoopsystems, (a sort of mix of Platform Cooperativism and Open Cooperativism).

1. Platforms should not be conceived as monolithic architectures owned and managed in a centralized way. They should be conceived as ecosystems, or we will be trapped in the same logic from which we want to escape.

The only reason why platforms are monolithic is because it is the way in which value can be easily extracted in a centralized manner. It is true that some of them offer API’s to third party developers (i.e. Facebook) as long as those development supports their extractive business models. Platform Ecoopsystems, instead, should think in terms of distributed architectures. I suspect that, too often, p2p and sharing initiatives are secretly pervaded by the darling image of the individual entrepreneur, because the tools and practices used are adapted from those of the traditional rent-seeking economy, instead of being created from scratch.

2. There is no technological obstacle to design Platforms with distributed architectures. Let’s do it in order to promote ecosystems.

Once the extractive business model motivation is removed, there is no technological reason to prefer a centralized architecture. Resources are usually already distributed, infrastructures can be distributed, and platforms themselves can be distributed. Although blockchain is the new kid on the block, torrent technologies should not be discarded.

Table 3: Key Differences in Centralized and Decentralized Systems across the layers – taken from the Platform Design Toolkit Whitepaper:

3. Platforms must be organically built as ecosystems in which sustainability is reached by a combination of federation of communities that are trusted for making certain decisions, and market coordination.

What would happen if we think of Platforms more like an Open Source Operation System (such as Ubuntu) than as an App? What are the decisions to be made?

Table 4: Approach to Platform Decisions

The key is to minimize the decisions that must be decided by voting to those decisions where scarcity is real, through:

• Opening, opening, opening.

• Designing in such a way that financial value is distributed through free-rent markets.

• Delegating decisions to trusted participants that excel in the required competencies to perform their duty.

• If a gatekeeper is unavoidable, then it should be non-profit that distribute value as in rent-free market, assuring the financial sustainability of all participants. In other words, if there is a “cut” that can be captured because of intermediation, it has to be distributed in such way that risk and care is not transferred (see – again – Ana and Alícia for IFTF on positive platforms).

4. The kernel of a Platform Ecosystem should be a non-profit

Depending on the nature of the activity and business model, the initiators and promoters of a Platform Ecoopsystem should not be organized as a cooperative itself, but as a non-profit organization that acts as a sort of kernel of the ecosystem. It could be formed by a group of future stakeholders of the platform that distribute their contribution according to the competencies in which they are publicly recognized. This organization should a) create the initial conditions for the ecosystem flourishing and b) maintain the conditions for its sustainability as a positive platform, that compensate differently to participants according to their contribution and the stage of the project. (For instance, in the early stages, gamification might be used in order to distribute value to those that make the app/platform more viral in order to solve the chicken egg problem.

You may think that how this kernel operates is the actual key of the whole post, and maybe it is, but I prefer to just outline some intuitions about it, and maybe develop the idea in a future post, or just with a conversation in the comments of this post:

• It should release a first version of the infrastructure/platform open source software (code also could be sponsored by future stakeholders of the ecoopsystem).

• It should put in place the right mechanisms for distributing the value.

• It should organize the consultations to stakeholders.

• It should choose providers of the ecosystem, whenever that decision must be taken in a centralized way.

• It should serve as arbitrator of stakeholders’ disputes.

If value must be centralized because of some unavoidable design reason, an instantly updated and transparent accounting must be available, in which is visually clear how the value (compare with average industry) is distributed in the co-owned platform. Let the community be able to deliberate and vote periodically on how the value should be distributed.

5. Platform Ecoopsystems should leverage their two distinctive features in order to outcompete existing platforms: they do not have to create artificial scarcity, and they do not have to centralize value capture.

The ultimate competitive advantage of Platform Ecosystems is that user experience and value are not conditioned by artificial scarcity of features and services, which only purpose is to keep rent-seeking practices. In that sense, Platform Ecoopsystems do have an important business advantage, for they can better suit the needs and requirements of its users.

6. In the same way that FLOSS created their own array legal license options, Platform Ecoopsystems should create their own array of legal ownership options.

New legal agreements of property and decision-making should be explored, in order to dynamically evolve according to the needs of the Ecoopsystem. These agreements should offer different modalities of ownership and decision-making in which participants can be automatically positioned according to predefined parameters.

I have sketched here some canvases that reflect the ideas exposed above, and that could complement others toolboxes, such as Simone Cicero’s Toolkit or Platoniq’s Moving Communities Methodology.

Download the following canvases:

• The Ecoopsystem Idea Tester (draft)

• The Ecoopsystem Exploration (draft)

• The Ecoopsystem Sustainability Matrix (draft)

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Three problems of Platform Coops

Firstly, Platform Coops do not promote enough the new interesting subjectivities and relationships responsible for the emerging collaborating, sharing, commoning and p2p dynamics that are proving to be transformational. It is precisely because they are built over the already consolidated thin self-interest-driven-relationships that rule our world since the modern era. In short, they are reinforcing those relationships by giving them new ways to exist. Think, instead, about my meeting with Ana Manzanedo. She is a Ouishare Connector in Barcelona that contacted me right after I started blogging about common matters of concern. In our first meeting we shared not only our personal whereabouts but also kind of coached/mentored each other and shared specific knowledge and ideas in order to help each other to create value in the present, and also prepare the field (invitation to a community of practices, etc.) for eventually creating open value together in the near future. It is not that we were not also looking out for our own interest, but we were both ready to give more than what we were taking, now or in the future. She is not, in that sense, the average kind of relationship I have in my business activity, but sure is the one I am looking for. Building a Platform Coops that does not promote connectors, urban entrepreneurs, open makers, technopolitical citizens or technopolitical civil servants or technopolitical representatives, (and so on) will have a much narrow impact than collectives such as Enspiral, Ouishare, Las Indias Electrónicas, etc. which have this generativity of new disrupting subjectivities (Ouishare considers itself above any other thing “an incubator of people; Las Indias offer different ways to experience with them how to live in abundance as communards; etc.) Out of its members, a Platform Coop only promotes a “responsible consumer” subjectivity using more or less the same approach as their non-peer managed rival organizations. I am in favor of such Platforms Coops in the same way I am for any kind of Coop. However, it remains obscure to me in what sense they will be able to compete and outperform non Coop Platforms. Hence the call for the intervention of governments in terms of regulatory frameworks and financial support. Yet, a strong citizenship movement would be needed for that to happen… which hardly will, if new subjectivities demanding it are not promoted. Politicians only challenge existing established interests, if ever, when taking the opportunity of getting more votes. Way more.

Secondly, (and this is connected with the first problem), in this model the capture of value generated in the network is still centralized. We want that those that add value and risk something in the platform are affected by the eventual downsides or upsides. The fact that a Coop Platform does it in a more ethical way, and that it redistributes the value afterwards does not change the fact that it keeps disempowering non-owners of the cooperative. Non-owners may consider that they are, to more or less degree, in the flow of value distribution, but not in its generation nor in its governance. The straightforward approach is to use new technologies based on blockchain (or other even more interesting technologies) in order to make distribution fair, keeping the self-interest motivated actors in the game. But if we design a Platform in which every aspect of the relationship must be translated into an algorithm and coded as a smart contract, then again we are consolidating and making fresh room for the already existing subjectivities. Even more, that will erode the real face-to-face trust thick relationships that may exist. A completely different thing is to use blockchain technologies for doing boring accounting that has to be done in a p2p organization based on thick relationships, or between p2p organizations linked by thick relationships. As in the centralized case, a decentralized architecture based on thin relationships could be, in the best of the cases, a transitory step to something much more interesting, once the limitations of the model are reached and new opportunities are explored.

The third problem is that the Platform Coops, in order to compete in the market with regular platforms, may need to transfer risk or care to some of their stakeholders. The reason why most of the regular platforms thrive is because they avoid granting the usual benefits (care) that workers get in the traditional economy (pension, social security, paid vacations, etc.), and additionally, force workers to carry most of the risks (accidents, illness, etc.). Unless clients are aware and concerned about workers’ conditions — which is an emerging but not yet a game-changing trend — the market will make more competitive those platforms that cut costs that way, not to mention that most of them are fueled with big investor’s money in order to keep litigating with authorities and workers, and operating under financial losses for years. In order to survive and keep their share of the market, Coop Platforms may be tempted to practice the less aggressive practices of risk and care transfer to workers as a way of surviving.

In the second part of this post, I will explore operational responses to these problems.

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-Lewis Mumford, In the Name of Sanity

In two books, “The Book of Abundance” and “The Book of Community” and in Manifesto, Las Indias outline a model of organizing society that could start with the development of intentional communities. A new model of the economy based on the concept of abundance can be already implemented at the group level. On the other hand, the examples of group-level organizing can enrich our understanding of this desired future model. This paper uses empirical data to give some substance to the concept of abundance within an intentional community. The following is an invitation to further reflection and dreaming together. Using the stages from Dragon Dreaming method, one can consider the Utopian writings such as these by Las Indias as a stage of dreaming and the real life experiences as the stages of implementation. This analysis is a stage of celebrating and evaluation to help clarifying the goals in more practical terms.

I will use findings from my research on Acorn community to see what questions the practice raises. Communities are changing over time and their membership fluctuates, therefore it should be noted that the empirical content reflects the interviews conducted in August 2014. More details about this egalitarian community can be found in a series of three articles analyzing how Acorn’s experience can enrich the understanding of peer production model and an article on the personal experience of living in this community – see references below the text.

Making more with less

Acorn community has managed to generate more affluence thanks to sharing resources and living together. Life is cheaper there in comparison to individual living in an urban setting. In this way, communards can enjoy more with less while pursuing a meaningful work. The 42-hour labor quota includes also tasks not related to enterprise directly.

These are some examples of saving money and time thanks to collective living:

1) No one possesses one’s own car, which reduces the costs of insurance. Thanks to the skills within community, maintenance of electronics can be assured without hiring specialists.

2) Buying in bulk, dumpster diving, or exchanging products with other communities, reduces costs of food. One of the communards estimated that they spend about 1,200 dollars per person, per year on food.

3) Time is better used by mutualizing some tasks such as cooking, shopping, or declaring income for taxes.

4) By sharing tools and objects, there is less need of buying them: clothes, books, computers, kitchen tools, bikes, cars, and other stuff.

Furthermore, the communards enjoy some advantages of both city and rural living. Being surrounded by like-minded people within the community and communards from neighboring communities gives an occasion to meet people and undertake common activities. The atmosphere is different than in typical rural settings. On the other hand, they enjoy the advantages of rural living such as access to organic self-produced food, being close to nature, and no need to commute to work.

One of my interviewees reduced considerably the use of antidepressants, another one stopped drinking alcohol because they experienced less stress living in the community than in their previous lives.

The complexities of defining abundance

Las Indias defines abundance as the absence of the necessity “to work out what is produced and what not, and above all, how much access to a given product this or that person will have.” (The Book of Abundance, p.22) One of the criteria for evaluation whether a consumption choice is necessary would be its contribution to “genuine enjoyment of each.” Furthermore, trying to limit the consumption of others goes against the logic of abundance: “A life oriented to the construction of abundance, an interesting life, cannot be based on deprivation or the desire to deprive others.” (Idem, p. 71) The examples below illustrate that this definition of abundance does not take into account other aspects of produced goods. There are many nuances regarding the products: their quality, individual preferences, the environmental impact, ethical considerations, values inherent in a specific consumption pattern.

Consumption is not only about scarcity. Values are expressed by spending community money. One of Acorn’s principles in spending collective resources is that alcohol and cigarettes are bought with personal pocket money – a monthly allowance (so members can buy limited amount of these goods). An interviewee did not like the fact that once alcohol was bought with collective money to celebrate the completion of a project. Another example of this sort of reflection expressed by one of the interviewees is the proposition to count biking instead of using a car as part of labor quota. This would incite using less fuel, which is motivated by environmental considerations and not by saving money.

Food is also an issue of clashing values. Some members are vegan and the rest eats animal products. Both groups have broader reflection beyond the costs of food that are behind their choices. Vegans are motivated by the protection of animals. The carnivore camp envisions that with their diet community could gain a complete food autonomy. The community would not need to buy industrial products to replace animal products. This implies a withdrawal from the money system and the mainstream food system to counter socio-economic power relations. When aggregated, our food choices define the way the system of production is organized.

Spending collective resources to construct a new building or make similar major investment can also be a challenge to the concept of abundance. In Acorn, there were different opinions about what is the most cost-effective and the best way to construct a building. Certain individuals were more successful at getting their opinion implemented. Similar example was an investment into a machine. Some members consider machines as an additional cost with the need for maintenance that does not exceed much the gains of productivity. They are also afraid of being dependent because of the automation of work.

The definition of abundance could be also expanded to the availability of interesting work. One of the interviewees observed the scarcity of enjoyable jobs, not everyone gets to do the cool tasks such as those requiring creativity. Certainly, one could argue that if one wants to pursue some fulfilling activity, one is free to do so. However, usefulness and recognition constitutes part of work satisfaction. In Acorn, there are still some jobs that are necessary but much less attractive. For example, bringing garbage to the landfill is such a job. A person doing it found a way to make it more bearable by being accompanied by another communard. However, still this job is not the first choice. The sense of responsibility for less interesting jobs is different among members. Everyone has a different definition of what an interesting and meaningful activity is. Each activity is accompanied by an individual narrative and interpretation. For example, one of the members considered cleaning as his spiritual practice. Once more, abundance appears as something subjective.

Diverging preferences do not prevent Acorners from living together peacefully. In case of disagreements, many that I have interviewed work on themselves – trying to see the bigger picture like the advantages of staying together.

Abundance and personal development: what role is there for the community to play?

The perception of abundance evolves and can be learned or unlearned. One of the interviewees, originating from US middle class family, shared how her experiences of traveling to developing countries and living in Acorn community transformed her thinking about what one really needs in life in terms of material goods and comfort. Intentional communities in their present forms, namely with a very basic standard of living, can be venues of personal experimentation with abundance. Such an experimentation can be already undertaken in everyday life as the path of inner transformation and getting rid of compulsions that keep us in the current economic system.

If we agree that the perception of abundance is a result of inner work and learning processes, how would this translate into communal or societal practice? Let’s imagine such a situation: someone feels that to be happy, this particular thing is needed. Should the community agree and let the individual pursue it assuming that it takes time for someone to unlearn consumerist wants or rather establish conditions to re-think the want. This question is about the threshold. It is obvious that with the transformation of work, needs, conditioning and cultural context will change too.

Consumption can be chosen and changed but some consumption patterns require healing to be changed. Addictions can have many different forms that are related to consumption and patterns of behavior. Often omitted in the debates on addictions, even sugar or sweetness can be a powerful addiction leading to tooth decay, which results in the demand for dentistry (it defines what is produced). There are different theories about the causes of addictions. Bruce Anderson sees the causes of addictions in destruction of community and human connections caused by the capitalist system. Anne Wilson Schaef describes in her book “When Society Becomes an Addict” that the underlying cause of substance or behavioral addictions is the addiction to powerlessness and nonliving. Addictions serve the addicted to avoid confronting certain problems or shut down certain feelings. These are just two theories that illustrate how addictions reflect a deeper social problem rather than being an individual weakness or a matter of choice.

Acorn community’s way of dealing with addiction seems to be preventive exclusion. An interviewee mentioned that an alcoholic has been rejected in membership application. Living together with an addicted person may be challenging. It seems like this is one of the issues that communal initiatives need to study and prepare for.

The above examples illustrate defining abundance is difficult. There is no objective state of abundance. It is partly a result of inner work. The way to measure whether a community has reached the state of abundance would be to make a survey and prove that there is no frustration or lack in anybody. However, is it the aim of the society or community to never feel frustration? And if yes, what measures of working on our inner world or on our outer world would this involve?

Other articles on Acorn

Gajewska, Katarzyna (September 2016):  Egalitarian alternative to the US mainstream: study of Acorn community in Virginia, US. Bronislaw Magazine

Gajewska, Katarzyna (21 July 2016): An intentional egalitarian community as a small-scale implementation of Post-Capitalism, P2P Foundation Blog.

Gajewska, Katarzyna (10 January 2016): Case study: Creating use value while making a living in egalitarian communities. P2P Foundation Blog.

Gajewska, Katarzyna (27 December 2014): An intentional egalitarian community as a small-scale implementation of postcapitalist, peer production model of economy. Part I : Work as a spontanous, voluntary contribution. P2P Foundation Blog.

Photo by ellenm1

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The post Nathan Schneider in defense of platform cooperativism: responding to the Las Indias critique appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Yesterday, we talked for a long time about the video above. It’s worth watching. Sinek’s thesis is that the culture of adherence “hooks” us, creating real addiction, because receiving “likes,” retweets, and silly chat messages from friends makes us release dopamine. Immediate satisfaction. Dependence. And inevitably, a mechanism substitution is produced: in any difficult situation, just like someone who relieved stress with alcohol during adolescence says as an adult “I need a drink,” the adherence addict looks at their cellphone, disconnects from the immediate surroundings, and seeks approval in the form of little hearts. Whether they are venting online or not, they disconnect from interpersonal relationships. The correlation between depression and use of Facebook beyond a certain number of hours seems to show that he’s right.

What Sinek points out about the generation born since 1984 is that this substitution has a disastrous cultural effect: in the first place, friends stop being a community, people you lean on, and become people you have fun with. If there’s a better option, they’ll toss you aside. Nobody gets too involved. Deep interpersonal relationships are not developed. Secondly, work inevitably becomes frustrating, because work or professional experiences cannot be gratifying and create meaning if you don’t feel that you’re building, and that building is a communal activity. The result is unhappiness. According to Sinek, “millenials” are running into two “inescable” obstacles: moments in which deep personal relationships are needed, and work.

Platform cooperativism

When we created the term “platform cooperativism” a few years before it became fashionable in the English-speaking world, we were seeking quick solutions to the crisis at a time when unemployment was beginning to take off in more and more countries. The idea of a platform that took advantage of the possibilities of automation to aggregate the services of independent freelancers was appealing to us as a fast and simple tool capable of bolstering the economic situation of those who were weakly situated in the market.

But we weren’t fooling ourselves: “platform cooperativism” basically means cooperativism without community, and therefore without learning, without knowledge shared and developed in common. A “cooperativism without touching,” without even meeting, that lost all meaning of worker cooperativism, and which only was interesting in the framework of a cataclysmic wave of unemployment in which any tool had to be considered good. It didn’t occur to us that anyone would turn it into the banner of “a new cooperative movement” with pretensions of “overtaking” traditional cooperativism.

But if we connect the dots, the result is obvious: “platform cooperativism” is a way to overcome the “obstacle” that the logic of belonging and commitment presents to the culture of adherence. Instead of learning to make community, rather than finding what the Adlerians call “the courage to belong” and enjoy fraternity, it redefines work with the logic of the books of faces to make it “easy,” so there’s no need to get involved, make contact, be appreciated, commit to others…

If cooperativism has value, it’s precisely because it isn’t emotionally “low cost”; because it requires us to learn to discuss, to disagree, to be appreciated, to come to consensus. It has value because isn’t a sugar-frosted or truncated experience. It’s powerful, it’s personal, it’s full of life. If we want conquer work to reconquer life we  must not fear life and try to protect ourselves from it, but embrace it.

PS. When “platform cooperativism” is not proposed as a form of work, but as a way of economically sustaining and distributing the eventual benefits from a service in the so-called “sharing economy,” there is a different critique, which we have made many times. In the first place, for every centralized service in the “sharing economy” a free (in both senses) and distributed alternative can be created that does not need a hired bureaucracy. We have demonstrated this with functional and useful code. So, what sense does it make to maintain a centralized structure? The answer is obvious: to create a bureaucracy that “mediates” between the “members” by taking a cut to pay for wages and infrastructure. It’s a way of “inventing” unnecessary jobs by creating scarcity artificially.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

Photo by zimpenfish

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If we study the productive reality of the last thirty years, the changes turn out to be amazing. Among all of them, the most striking, the most unexpected, the one that most strongly contradicted the idea that the great economic systems of the twentieth century had about themselves, was not that the future would be full of computers, cellphones, and electronic equipment. That idea had already appeared in the ’40s and ’50s in science fiction and popular futurism. Nor was it globalization. The idea of a world united by free trade had been part of the Anglo-Saxon liberal ideal since the Victorian era, and from the foundation of the League of Nations, between the wars, it was part of the declared objectives of the great English-speaking powers.

No, the most shocking thing was the beginning of the end of business gigantism. From the State businesses of the USSR, to shipbuilding and metallurgy in Asturias, from Welsh mining to United Steel or the big automotive companies, the oligarchs that had been the model of “enterprise” for the contemporary industrial world, stopped hiring, collapsed, and fired tens of thousands of workers. It wasn’t just “de-localization”: the new Chinese or Vietnamese plants didn’t grow indefinitely, either. Markets like electronic products expanded year after year, and yet personnel and capital global used were reduced. It was said that the new labor-intensive industries would be services, especially services connected with the new dominant form of capital: finance. But soon, banks and insurers that employed hundreds of thousands of people at the turn of the century started to reduce personnel. Today, the great banks are on track to reduce personnel by 30% over the next decade.

What happened?

What had happened was, in fact, amazing. Following the Second World War, the United States had become the great provider to the world. When the war ended, US GDP was around half of the global GDP. Benefiting from the European need for reconstruction and from peace treaties that, while not reaching the level of humiliation of Versailles, were openly asymmetrical, big Anglo-Saxon businesses globalized at great speed speed. It was a dream come true for their shareholders. It wasn’t at all strange to economists. At the time, if Marxists, Keynsians, and neoliberals agreed on anything, it was that businesses were able to, and in fact tended to, grow indefinitely. But by the ’50s, it was already obvious that something was going wrong. In the USSR and the countries of the East European, you could always blame the arbitrariness of the political system or the mistakes of the planners. But in the USA, it was different. And yet, it was there, present and invisible, like an elephant in a high-society gala. The first to realize it was a economist called Kenneth Boulding. Boulding noted that American businesses were reaching the limit of their scale, the point at which inefficiencies due to having to manage a larger size were not compensated for by the benefits of being bigger. Looking at the America of his time, he also warned that big businesses would try compensate for their inefficiencies using their weight in the market and in the State. We were under pressure long before “too big to fail” in the crisis of 2008, but he could already tell that Big Businesses would not hesitate to use the power they had as a result of employing tens of thousands of people to get made-to-fit regulations and thinly-veiled monopolies. Business over-scaling, warned Boulding, could end up being a danger to the two main institutions of our society: state and market.

But what came next was even more surprising. Businesses bet on improving their systems and processes. They discovered that information was important—crucial—to avoid entering the phase in which inefficiencies grew exponentially. It also became obvious that a business size that was inefficient for one market became reasonably efficient for a larger market. As a result, they used all their power to promote a branch of technology that had shone only marginally in the great war: information. With this same objective, as soon as the opportunity arose, they pushed governments to reach commercial agreements and, above all, frameworks for the free movement of capital, since the industry that had scaled fastest and had begun to give alarming signs of inefficiency was finance. Meanwhile, the champion in business scale, the USSR and the whole Soviet bloc, collapsed, to the astonishment of the world, in an obvious demonstration that operating life wasn’t infinite.

A true revolution in support of the feasibility of large scales in crisis was implemented in the West. The political result was called “neoliberalism.” It basically consisted of the extension of free-trade agreements, which expanded markets geographically; financial deregulation, which allowed the rise of “financialization,” or extension of markets over time; and a series of rents and monopolies for certain businesses, which were assured by regulations, like the hardening of so-called “intellectual property.”

The technological result was known as the “IT revolution,” which is to say revolution of information technology. But it came with a surprise, following a series of apparent coincidences in the search for ways beyond the limits on efficiency imposed by the rigid hierarchical systems inherited from the previous century. At the end of the ’60s, the structure of networks that connected big university computers, which was financed by defense spending, took a distributed form. This would not have brought about a radical change if a new field, domestic information science, had not evolved towards small, completely autonomous computers, known as “PCs.” The result was the emergence in the ’90s of an immense capacity for distributed and interconnected calculation outside the fabric of business and government: the Internet.

The revolution of scale

The Internet brought profound changes in the division of labor, which overlapped with the ongoing reduction of optimal scales, and changed the social results expected from delocalization, the first trend in globalization.

In the ’90s, when the “end of history” seemed go hand in hand with the consolidation of a new string of industrial technology giants (Microsoft, Apple, etc.), free software, which had been a subculture until then, built the first versions of Linux. Linux is the “steam engine” of the world that is emerging: the first expression of a new way of producing and, at the same time, a tool to transform the productive system. Over the next twenty years, free software would come to be the greatest transfer of knowledge and value in the contemporary era, equivalent to several times all foreign aid to development sent from developed countries to those on the periphery since WWII.

Free software is a universal public good and, in an era in which information infrastructure is a fundamental part of any productive investment, a free form of capital. Free capital drove an even greater reduction in the optimum scale of production. But it also helped make value chains of the physical goods with strong technological component distributed. Globalization and delocalization had broken the links in value creation in thousands of products throughout the world, especially in the less-developed nations of the Pacific basin, but all those chains were re-centralized in the US, and to a lesser extent, in Japan, Germany and other central countries, where big corporations (from Apple to Nike) branded, designed, marketed, and hoarded the benefits of intellectual property. The possibility of free software was key for many of those chains to “insource” in countries like China, and produce all the elements, including those of greater value added.

The immediate result was prodigious economic development, the greatest reduction in extreme poverty in the history of humanity, the greatest increase in real wages in the history of China, and the appearance of new global centers of innovation and production in coastal cities. These cities play by a new set of rules that, not surprisingly, include an extreme relaxation of intellectual property, an accelerated reduction of scales, and production chains systems and assembly systems that allow a formidable increase in scope, which is to say, the variety of things produced.

The Direct Economy

As all these changes were set in motion in Asia, in Europe, the free software model was expanding into a whole spectrum of sectors. Soon, groups would appear that replicate the mode of production based on the commons (“the P2P mode of production“) in all kinds of immaterial content—design, books, music, video—and increasingly, in the world of advanced services—finance, consultancy—and industrial products—drinks, specialized machinery, robots, etc.

But while the “P2P mode of production” is a fascinating path for a transition from capitalism to abundance, its direct impact—how many people live directly from the commons—is relatively small. As in Asia, Europe, and the US, structural change will begin in an intermediate space that is also based on the digital commons: the Direct Economy.

The Direct Economy is all those small groups of friends—and therefore, a basically egalitarian organization—that design a product that generally incorporates software and free knowledge into itself or its process of creation, sell it in advance on a  crowdfunding platform (making bank financing or “shareholders” unnecessary), produce it in short runs of a few thousands in a factory, whether in China or on the side of their house, and use the proceeds to improve the design or create a new product.
The Direct Economy is bar owners who invest 10,000 euros in equipment and begin to produce beer 100 liters at a time, or a few tens of thousands of euros and gain capacity to prepare almost 1,500 liters every 12 hours in continuous production—and then go on to bottle and begin distributing nearby and in networks of beer artisanal lovers.  And of course, they will have more varieties than the big brewery in their are, higher quality, and a better quality/price ratio.

The Direct Economy is the academy or the high school that installs a MOOC or Moodle to be able offer its students services over the summer, independent app developers, the role-playing bookstore that buys a 3D printer and starts selling their own figurines, or the children’s clothes store that starts designing and producing their own strollers, toys, or maternity bags.

All of them are small-scale producers making things that, until recently, only big businesses or institutions were able to make. All of them have more scope than the scale model. All of them, at some point in the process, use free software and knowledge, which reduces their capital needs even further. All of them take advantage of the Internet to reach providers and customers for low costs—for example, by being able to reach very geographically dispersed niches or find very specialized providers. Most will not have to resort to banks or investors to finance themselves, but rather, will use pre-sale and donation systems on the network to raise money. And some of them use the “commodification” of the manufacturing industry and its flexible production chains for the process.

As for internal organizing, we’re generally looking at models that are much “flatter” and more democratic than conventional businesses. While traditional businesses are autocracies, or at best aristocracies based on hierarchical command and responsibility, the large majority of projects in the Direct Economy are “ad-hocracies,” in which the needs of the moment shape teams and responsibilities. This even happens in cases where big businesses decide to take a gamble on creating a spin-off and competing in a new field. Instead of an org chart, there are task maps. Rather than “participation in management,” there emerges the type of energy that characterizes any group of friends that make something “spontaneously.” If the legal process wasn’t still so arduous, if it didn’t require notaries and endless paperwork, we would say that the natural way to the Direct Economy is worker cooperativism.

Conclusion

But none of this is as important as the broader meaning of the Direct Economy to people’s possibilities in life. In Wage Labor and Capital, one of his more accessible works, Marx explained the trap in the narrative that exalts social mobility and equality of opportunities: wages can’t become capital. Or, rather, couldn’t… and it’s true that it continues to be unable to in a good part of the world and in many branches of industry. But we’re seeing something that is historically shocking—the reduction to zero of the cost of an especially valuable part of capital, which materializes directly knowledge (free software, free designs, etc.). And above all we see, almost day by day, how the optimum size of production, sector by sector, approaches or reaches the community dimension.

The possibility for the real community, the one based on interpersonal relationships and affections, to be an efficient productive unit is something radically new, and its potential to empower is far from having been developed. This means that we are lucky enough to live in a historical moment when it would seem that the whole history of technology, with all its social and political challenges, has coalesced to put us within reach of the possibility of developing ourselves in a new way and contributing autonomy to our community.

Today we have an opportunity that previous generations did not: to transform production into something done, and enjoyed, among peers. We can make work a time that is not walled off from life itself, which capitalism revealingly calls “time off.” That’s the ultimate meaning of producing in common today. That’s the immediate course of every emancipatory action. The starting point.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

The post Why producing in common is the starting point appeared first on P2P Foundation.

At the end of last year, we began the fusion of Enkidu and Las Indias. Not only was it the logical conclusion of the logic of integration, but also a reorganization of the whole group that prepared us for a new stage, both in terms of the market—with new products, channels, and ideas we’ve been working on since 2015—and our social impact and utility for our surroundings.

At the beginning of July, we sealed the first part with the signing of the merger between the two cooperatives. It was the first “paw.” But we have two more: the Art, a tool that we have never been able to develop the way it deserved, and the Club, which, since November, has been holding activities almost every Thursday. So not surprisingly, the guide to reorienting both “paws” has been fed by the public discussion among the members of the club in La Matriz. The result of all this reflection is that we believe that we have finally found a form and growing activities that are called to make the most of each of the pieces we’ve built during these years. And we’ve given ourselves an objective: it’s all going to be ready before October first, the eve of the 14 anniversary of Las Indias.

Our toolbox

The Group has always been a “toolbox” for us, more than an end in itself, because we have always distinguished clearly between the community, in all its degrees and forms of relationship, and objects—cooperative, association, whatever—which let the people of that community build what they want. That doesn’t mean that they can have things any way they want. A clear and orderly toolbox, where it’s intuitively clear which tool to go to for each new idea or problem, and which also puts them within arm’s reach, ultimately leads to building more and better.

In the group, there are three tools: Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas (Society of the Electronic Indies), which is the economic base and the market-facing platform of the Indiano communards, with its own system of integration; El Arte de las Cosas (the Art of Things), which is the structure to spread cooperativism through community production of everyday goods and objects; and las Indias Club, which is the group’s space for deliberation, reflection, and learning. We Indianos commit to involve ourselves both in Art and in the Club and contribute as much as we know how and are able; but not all members of the Art will participate in the reflections of the Club, nor will all the members of the Club want to make beer or whatever is proposed at a given time in the Art.

The Cooperative Group in detail

1. The Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas («Society of the Electronic Indies») is the worker cooperative through which the Indiano communards enter the market. As head of the group, it is responsibility for sustaining and driving the other two pieces. Because, like the medieval monastaries, it’s not just about having founded a community way of life, which is sustainable, thanks to the market, and which allows the communards to enjoy their passion for learning and growing; it’s also about making everything we’ve learned available to our surroundings because, if we do it well, new ways of living and working will expand around us—a new culture and a different economic practices “within the shell of the old society,” which will be what really creates social change.
2. El Arte de las Cosas («The Art of Things») has became a worker cooperative with an open social base, dedicated to the promotion of cooperativism through the community production of everyday goods and objects. That is, it’s about expanding the community experience and cooperative production, making, offering integration as a “collaborating partner” to whoever wants, for example, to make beer, as we are already doing, soap, books, electronic gadgets, drip irrigation systems, etc.; We are already organizing anyone interested in the community production of beer for personal consumption and enjoyment, in the same way we would organize market-oriented cooperative production. That is, the Art is becoming our main tool to empower our surroundings with practices and productive technologies applied to everyday life, so people can enjoy and make the most of the reduction of optimal scales of production and experiment and learn the modes of production among peers.
3. las Indias Club is already the group’s space for deliberation, reflection, and learning. From November to July, it went through a “constituent” stage. In the new stage, it has to to keep creating spaces of deliberation outside of the ambient noise, proposing new topics—from robotification to poetry, or the new forms of expression in the blogosphere—like we did from February to June, in more than a dozen meetings. And we practice new, more regular formats, like the next European gathering around the news that E?ropano publishes on a daily basis from a transnational perspective, which is so valuable these days.

Surely, this is the moment to change the format of the “Someros.” Somero is first and foremost the annual conference of the Club, and the Club is already mature enough to move on to a new kind of meeting: to go from listening to outsiders’ experiences, to listening to its own members. The format needs to go from the kind typical of every event intended to get the public’s attention to the kind used in the “Meetings of Economic Democracy” that we organized years ago (which doesn’t mean we might not organize other event with a form similar to the one used so far in Somero, with another name). Now, the members of the Club need to do the talking. They are the ones that need to do presentations, take part in gatherings, discuss new ideas, make proposals, and offer reflections to others. It’s about taking the leap from the “call to action” that the two first “Someros” were, to the social constitution of the Club as an association with mood and momentum of its own, dedicated to feeding the rest of our community, in the broadest sense, with ideas and deliberation.

In the same self-managed logic, we should, over the remainder of year, organize the GNU social Camp in an open call specific to the members of the club and people involved in the development of GNU social across Europe.

Forms of integration

Every tool has its own forms of integration, which, together, allow for a whole range of commitments. The Society of Las Indias has its own itinerary of integration, which is well-known for all its alternatives and possible results; in the Art of Things, the normal way will be enter as a collaborating partner to be part of concrete projects oriented towards personal consumption (beer, for example) or the market (creating a book, developing a product for the direct economy), but it could well be that over time, it could have full-time worker-members; and in the Club, one could be a full member—those dedicated to maintaining and financing the structure, or collaborator—the members who participate in deliberation and activities.

What about the future?

Among friends and members of the Club, there already exist initiatives that indicate that in the Indiano community, which is made up of all members of the three structures, all kinds of
ventures will emerge. We hope that many of them will be integrated naturally into the cooperative group.

So, if we do things well, we could be on the path to having, with an expanded group that can hold many more people than today, the first node to materialize the big idea that arose from this community to win over theoreticians and activists from across the world, from Michel Bauwens to Kevin Carson: the phyle. That’s what orients us, and we must not lose it, but also not forget that, as the Communard Manifesto said:

We have to confront a gigantic problem created by over-scaling, from smallness, with smallness, and step by step.

Las Indias: an organizational diagram

 

Organizations	las Indias Club	El Arte de las Cosas	Sociedad de las Indias
Legal status	Association	Cooperative of production	Worker Cooperative
Activity	Debates, conferences, events, p2p learning, workshops, open discussions.	Communitarian production of everyday goods (beer, books, soap, gadgets, etc.).	Consultancy (Innovation, Networks, Commercial Intelligence, Regional Development) and software development.
Membership and money	Open membership. Everyone can participate and become a supporting member. Activities are mainly sponsored by Sociedad de las Indias but international events use to have some external sponsoring.	Open membership. In every activity participants must pay their equal share of the production costs and if the production goes to the market they get an equal share of the revenues.	Selective membership after a learning itinerary. Work organized according to hacker ethics. Incomes, savings and the biggest part of consumption are shared. Everyone can take from the common fund according to her/his needs determined by her or himself.
Social Organization	Democratic Association	Cooperative	Egalitarian Community
Members (October 2016)	110	20	6

 

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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By way of background, the Communard Manifesto comes out of the Las Indias Cooperative Group, which is a real-world venture in establishing a phyle — a non-territorial networked economic support platform — of the kind that Las Indias’s David de Ugarte described theoretically in his 2009 book Phyles.

The word “phyle” itself comes from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, describing global networks that serve as support platforms for the local physical enclaves, and the enterprises within them, that constitute the nodes of the networks.

De Ugarte’s concept of the phyle also relies heavily on the concept of “neo-Venetianism” (a networked, non-territorial community with territorial member enclaves, providing various forms of support to local nodes). And like the medieval guilds of skilled trades, the phyle acts as a support platform for member enterprises and territorial enclaves. Examples might include low-interest credit and seed capital, training and certification, low-cost insurance (including against unemployment), legal services, cooperative joint purchasing and marketing, collaboration software, hostels for travelling members, and the like.

The Las Indias Group is, first of all, a community, with physical locations in Uruguay and Spain. Its economic activity — a direct outgrowth of its community life and fraternal relations — consists of a number of cooperative enterprises.

Like the Communist Manifesto of 168 years earlier, the Communard Manifesto begins by contrasting the revolutionary technologies of abundance with the social relations of production within which they are embedded. These social relations are riven with contradictions — inequality, unemployment, and social decomposition. Also like the Communist Manifesto, the Communard Manifesto‘s main concern is the path by which these revolutionary new forces of production will burst out of their capitalist integument and form the basis of a new post-capitalist society with social and economic forms consistent with abundance.

The forces of abundance include not only physical production technologies like micro-manufacturing, but new social means of organizing production — the hacker ethic, commons-based peer production, free information, and horizontal collaboration.

The old capitalist economic system is attempting to enclose this abundance as a source of rents. At the same time, the technologies of abundance are drastically reducing the need for productive labor, and thereby destroying wage and salaried labor as the means to earn sufficient purchasing power to consume naturally free or cheap goods at their monopoly prices. The attempt to impose artificial scarcity on abundance, for the profit of a few, leads to chronic underconsumption, unemployment and depression.

Unlike the Marxists — or at least the Old Left of the mass-production era — the authors of the Communard Manifesto do not see post-capitalist society as a logical extrapolation from large-scale production under capitalism. And it does not envision a transition based on direct assault by revolutionary parties based on the same principles of mass and scale as mid-20th century industrial capitalism.

Rather, the Communard Manifesto is in the same tradition as the autonomist work of Dyer-Witheford, Negri and Hardt (especially the latter two’s emphasis on “Exodus” in Commonwealth), Holloway’s How to Change the World Without Taking Power, and Mason’s Post-Capitalism. In the words of the Manifesto itself, “the new world will be born and affirmed inside the old.”

Profound changes in social and economic relationships—system changes—are not the product of revolutions and political changes. It happens the other way around: systemic political changes are the expression of new forms of social organizing, new values, and ways of working and living, that have reached enough maturity to be able to establish a broad social consensus. As of a certain point in development, a “competition between systems” is established. The new forms, until then valid only for a small minority, begin to seem to be the only ones capable of offering a better future for the large majority. Little by little, they expand their spectrum and their number, encompassing and transforming broader and broader social spaces, and become the center of the economy, reconfiguring the cultural, ideological, and legal basis of society from within.

As the technologies of abundance become cheaper, more accessible and smaller in scale, escape through building counter-institutions — Exodus — rather than attempting to conquer the institutional core of the old system becomes increasingly feasible

The appearance of new ways of producing based on new forms of communal property—like free software—and distributed communication architectures—linked directly to decommodification and the creation of abundance—put forth the notion that we are on the threshold of a new phase in which we will be able to change the nature of that competition between systems.

But, above all, what justifies a new time for the development of communitarianism is an irreversible economic change that has been imposed gradually: the reduction of the optimal scales of production. This decline in the optimal productive scale explains the deep trends that have produced the current economic crises, and why the political and corporate responses are often times counterproductive. And any alternative is not centered on social class or the nation, but on community.

The rapid decrease in optimal scale of production, and in necessary capital outlay for production, has led to a chronic economic crisis in which the enormous masses of accumulated investment capital are unable to find profitable outlets: “fewer new large industries that justify grandiose investments are appearing than in prior periods.” The neoliberal response of financializing markets and generating investment bubbles to soak up investment bubbles — a recurring theme in analyses by the Marxists at the Monthly Review Group since the 1980s — led to the Crash of 2008.

Instead, new technologies require very little in the way of capital outlay and are amenable to cooperative ownership by small-scale producers or local community control — thus rendering finance capital irrelevant.

We can group these new forms around two broad trends: the “P2P mode of production” and the “direct economy.” The P2P mode of production replicates the free software model in all kinds of industries where knowledge condensed into design, software, creativity, blueprints, etc., is central to the creation of value; and can accumulate in a “immaterial universal commons” that can be improved, reformed, and used in alternative ways for many kinds of different projects.

This multifunctionality of tools and value chains—which is what economists call “scope”— is the key to the direct conomy, a way of creating products created by small groups and launching them on global markets by using, on the one hand, low-cost, adaptable, external industrial chains and free software and, on the other, advance sales systems or collaborative financing.

That is, before our eyes, before and after the large financial crisis, a new kind of small-scale industry has developed, which is characterized by being global and by getting capital and credit outside the financial system, some in collaborative financing platforms, others announcing their own pre-sales and getting donations in exchange for merchandising. In fact, it’s an industry of “free” capital, which doesn’t have to give up ownership of the business to the owners of capital because, on the one hand, it reduces its needs by using publicly available technological tools, like free software, and on the other, obtaining the little capital it needs in the form of advance sales and donations.

Taken together, P2P production and the direct economy, two ways of substituting scale with scope, are the leading edge of a productive economy moving more and more quickly towards the reduction of scale. That makes them essential to understanding why communitarianism has a unique opportunity in the new century.

If there’s one point I take issue with, it would be the emphasis on production for the global economy by these small-scale manufacturers. Lean production is ideally suited to short supply chains with production directly geared to demand and collocated as closely to the point of consumption as technical efficiency permits. I believe the great majority of micro-manufacturing, in a post-capitalist economy, would be for neighborhood, community and regional markets rather than globalized supply chains.

Leaving that issue aside, the Communard Manifesto sees the transitional path as prefigurative: creating a demonstration effect of what’s feasible here and now — and thus leaves open the possibility for a rapid adoption curve during the phase transition.

Although we are still far from general abundance, we have a model of the production of abundance for intangible goods and innovation—the “P2P mode of production.” This, in turn, feeds a sector, the direct economy, that demonstrates enough productivity in the market to compete and beat the industry “from the outside,” without the help of over-scaled finance. That is, this new productive ecosystem is capable of competing and gaining ground against a giant that enjoys the advantage of extra-market rents, like customized regulations, grants, or patents. We’re talking about the same extra-market rents that multiplied with neoliberalism and which have produced the simultaneous erosion of state and market, which is to say, social decomposition. So, just to demonstrate that a productive alternative exists is already big news.

This social and productive space around the “new digital commons” or simply, the “commons,” is today’s equivalent of the first cities and markets of the medieval bourgeoisie, a space where new non-commercial social relationships appeared, and the new logic, together with signs of autonomy, begin to show a limited but direct impact on productivity. Throughout the lower Middle Ages, the bourgeoisie was able to drive those cities to turn them, first, into a big “urban workshop,” and later, into “municipal democracies.” A similar historical task, now with a society of abundance as the goal, is what lies ahead for communitarianism.

This is because this whole reduction of scales brings the optimum size of productive units ever closer to the community dimension, and therefore, points to community as the protagonist of a society of abundance.

So, much like Negri and Hardt in Commonwealth, the Communard Manifesto sees the new relations of production as coextensive with our communities and horizontal social relations, and capital as increasingly external and irrelevant to production.

In a capitalist economy, with technologies of abundance enclosed via “intellectual property” and other monopolies, abundance increases the profits of property holders while empoverishing everyone else. In a post-capialist economy, with such monopolies abolished and production controlled by the community, increased abundance benefits everyone by reducing the amount of labor time necessary for enjoying a given standard of living.

The general result will be an increase in our agency, and in our control over every aspect of our lives — a reintegration of our work into the rest of our social life, and reclamation of control over the pacing of work on the pattern that prevailed under pre-capitalist production by self-employed artisans and free peasants. Along with this will come an end to the scarcity mindset that pits us against one another, and the accompanying social authoritarianism. The tools of small-scale production will lead to a society much like that in Kropotkin’s vision, where the distinctions between town and countryside, and between head and hand work, disappear.

Developing this new society within the shell of the old entails expanding along phyle lines from existing nodes.

Egalitarian communities should undertake a path that allows them to go from the current model, based on the resistance and resilience of the “small community,” to another that starts from a large network of egalitarian and productive communities. We must feed the new sprouts, which are capable of maintaining themselves in the market, and at the same time, create more spaces of abundance and decommodification. Additionally, we need to take decommodification beyond our interior, and make it permeate all our surroundings. It’s time to begin the competition between systems.

A time is coming when we will have to learn to grow in many new ways: incorporating new members, incubating communities, teaching community techniques in neighborhoods, or creating popular universities of a new kind, that give tools for multispecialization.

We have to confront a gigantic problem created by over-scaling—from smallness, with smallness, and step by step. We have to use diversity and abundance to break out of the traps that a culture in decomposition tends to constantly fall into, which magnify defeatism, pessimism, and the idea of “every man for himself”. It’s not going to be a stroll through a rose garden, and we’re certainly not going to be able to make headway without encountering serious resistance.

Photo by //lucylu

The post Book of the Day: The Communard Manifesto, by Las Indias appeared first on P2P Foundation.

While our conversation and its results took place on the Internet, everything was easy. If we published an online book and there were two possible covers, we did not choose between them, but published both and left the readers to choose which to download. If we wanted to protest against a law because we thought that it ruled against our civil rights and there were two strategies… We followed both and each member of the community chose which one to do… Or even to do both. We call this system “plurarchy”. Plurarchy is the essence of distributed networks: nobody can filter anybody, everybody can do, say and publish what they want without subtracting from the opportunities for other’s expression, and the “decisions” are seldom a clear yes or no, but usually “more or less”. As our conversation deepened, we became closer and more consensual but our diversity did not decrease. In fact, just the opposite happened. We had more diversity. To the external world we might look like a crazy rainbow of surprisingly passionate nuances.

But in some cases it was necessary to make a decision. If we published a book on paper, there usually were big savings of scale and we could not afford publish two different editions with the money we had. That is, sometimes we were in situations of scarcity and scarcity makes it necessary to decide. And to make a decision means to renounce a certain degree of diversity.

Through this we discovered that every conversation that acted as if there was only one output from all the inputs of our members was condemned to centralization, as democratic as it might be. The problem is that, once you create a mechanism for centralizing, it is very easy to generate artificial scarcity.

For example, why is it that a newspaper–however democratic–cannot reflect as many points of view as there are? Why are not all articles in Wikipedia approved? Why is that the “Towel Day” article is “relevant” in the English Wikipedia but “irrelevant” in the Spanish version and thus remains unpublished? The short answer: because each incorporation, each extra text, increases the global costs and therefore subtracts opportunities for the other contents that are published thanks to a limited amount of money. It is necessary to choose. It can be done through authoritarian methods–as it happen in the usual newspapers–or through oligarchy–as with Wikipedia’s bureaucrats–or democratically–as in some alternative media. But you must choose, because scarcity is real…

Yes, it is real… but unnecessary, we said. It is a kind of artificial scarcity because there were other way to organize the media or a wiki which makes abundance and thus maximum diversity, possible. There is no bureaucracy or voting system in BitTorrent. Nobody decides which contents can be published in the blogsphere or in the world wide web, because distributed networks make abundance possible: a new page, a new point of view, is not an extra cost for anybody. Choose a distributed structure for publishing your book, your magazine or your encyclopedia and we are back to the world of diversity!

Since then we have investigated distributed networks and how apply their logic to more and more fields of the human activity, even physical production. We learned something extremely important: diversity lives in distributed networks… but not necessarily in its nodes.

Take other example: we used to insist that a blog is not media, the blogsphere is. Why? Because a blog has the same problems that a newspaper or Wikipedia has. Alone it lives in scarcity. But as part of the distributed world network of blogs, it takes part and contributes to abundance and diversity.

Why am I telling you this story? Because when I listen the concerns about the diversity of American communes, I feel they are like a blog trying to include the whole content of the world in itself. And I think that is not their role or what they should want from themselves, but from their network.

Nodes, communities, have to be free and distinctive to contribute to a really diverse network, and not try to substitute for the role of the network we must build.

Take las Indias. We are sociologically not representative of our environment in many issues. For example: the number of females is double the number of males. It also happens that the percentage of us born in South America, 50%, is a lot higher than the percentage of people born out of Europe living in Spain… but it is a lot less than the percentage of South American born people in the global map of Spanish speakers… and so on, and so on…

The question is, are we more or less diverse than the society we live in? I cannot say. We are just different, as it is different today to live in an egalitarian community. We have a distinctive culture and it attracts–and selects by itself–distinctive persons. We have had in our history more male sympathizers than female sympathizers but, the fact is, our way of living has been more attractive for women. Are we doing anything wrong? Should we worried about not being representative? Should we refuse the application of new female members for a while in order not to become sexually biased in our way of looking the world? We don’t think so.

I understand the concerns of American communities. It is shocking for me that you have so few “foreigners”. English is one of the three most spoken languages in the world and there is a vibrant conversation in English online. Shouldn’t you represent these diversities in your composition? Or is it the diversity of your suburb, your state, the USA or English speaking North America that you should represent? I think the answer is that you should not represent anything but yourselves. It does not mean a community should not be concerned about diversity. But the diversity we have to be worry about is not about how our fellow communards “are” according to sociological divides, but what the communal life allows them/us to do. The kind of diversity directly linked with what we call “abundance”. I think the main ethical commitment of the commune life is not to artificially produced scarcity and I also believe that abundance, diversity in what we do, is the real measure of success for a community.

The kind of diversity many of you are concerned about, even looking for, sex, sexual orientation, race, etc. will come by itself, but probably not to every community, but to the network we must build together.

Originally published in «Commune Life Blog»

Photo by art around

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Photo: “We don’t worship work: basic income”

A few days ago, Yanis Varoufakis defended the idea of a universal minimum income independent of work and social coverage, the basic income, as the structural reform needed to end the crisis.

The first thing to do with Varoufakis, as with anyone who makes an argument, is to understand their frame of analysis and its objectives. The center of Varoufakis’ economic thought is an old idea that has tortured many of the great economists of history, like Ricardo, Marx, or Keynes. The idea is simple and powerful: crises happen because, by itself, capitalism is unable to create an effective demand capable of absorbing all of its production.

Varoufakis’ critique of Keynes

For Keynes, the main way to escape from this tendency is rebalance the relationship between consumption and investment. The way is monetary policy—making credit more accessible to produce inflation and incentivize families to spend more before their savings lose value—and, as an exception, public spending, making the State a substitute for the nonexistent increase in family spending. But in general, Keynesians have also applauded redistribution of rents (which might or might not mean direct public expense). Basically, the Keynesian solution consists of using the State (the central bank or government apparatus) to turn chronic over-accumulation into effective demand, preferably from families, but also from the State. In reality, Keynes didn’t care how that was produced, with a “New Deal” or with a “welfare State,” but it’s logical that in the postwar consensus, Keynesianism converged with social-democratic models.

What Varoufakis tells us is that this model isn’t going to work any more. On the one hand, it’s the legacy of neoliberalism, financialization, that makes it impossible to significantly expand credit even more.

On the other hand, there’s a peculiar idea: that the robotification of services through Artificial Intelligence represents a new kind of innovation for him, a new way of increasing productivity in which—according to him—for the first time in history, unemployment created by the conversion of the affected sectors (services) wouldn’t be absorbed over the long term by new sectors (we’ll comment later on this idea). This structural trend of growing unemployment would make social security systems as we understand them today nonviable, which is to say, labor organized via the State that makes payments towards the pensions and health expenses of not only active workers, but pensioners and the unemployed. The global result, Varoufakis tells us, is Keynesianism’s vision of hell: an insurmountable imbalance between savings/investment/accumulation and family and State consumption (effective demand) that produces a permanent deflationary trend.

But, following Keynesian logic, given that those who have the least are the ones can save the least, creating a minimum income that’s delinked from work, “just because,” would increase effective demand without substantially increasing savings (which equals investment, or what the Marxists would call “accumulation”). To put it crudely: everything distributed through the minimum income would become consumption without affecting investment and savings. The economy would grow again, and would do so in a much more balanced way. The amount of the minimum income would become a simple, standalone lever, and the economic planners of the twenty-first century would play with it in very much the way the central bankers of the twentieth century played with interest rates. That way, a minimum equal income for everyone, Varoufakis tells us, is the most effective way to confront the deflationary trends that manifest capitalism’s inability to balance itself.

At this point, the idea of the State giving up insurance systems (health, unemployment, retirement) and a part of social policies (direct grants for social inclusion) in favor of a equal minimum universal income for everyone is already sufficiently justified for him. As of this moment, the discussion is settled, and the rest of the arguments are already merely “politics,” enticement, rhetoric, or making the case. He makes this quite clear in his presentation. After the description of the problem of the crisis and the reasoning of his solution, he puts all those arguments into a little box that he calls “narrative” and instructs the audience on how to use it. And that’s where Varoufakis is mistaken.

He’s thinking not like the good economist that he is, but like a typical economist of a financial institution, or like a consultant for an international organization, providing a solution to a single problem—the deflationary trends that weaken growth—without considering anything else. He’s not thinking like Keynes thought, except insofar as Keynesians now run the World Bank and other temples of the “international class.” And he’s wrong because the impact and social meaning of public policies are measured by much more than their effect on interest rates.

What would Europe be like with a basic income?

First off, there’s a series of important economic critiques of Varoufakis’ argument. By centering on the monetary aspect of the crisis, he leaves aside the transformations in the productive base of capitalism, the seeds of which have been there since its origin, and which financial capital only magnifies. What’s more, he’s missing something fundamental that Mason and Bauwens could see: that the reduction of optimal productive scales—of which AI is a part—together with distributed networks, provide an opportunity for a profound change in the economic system: going from producing value to producing abundance. As a result, he doesn’t see the most basic thing: just because big businesses aren’t going to absorb the surplus of labor that they themselves produce, that doesn’t mean that this surplus is going to be permanent, or that the working class has no other alternative than living life subsidized by State rents.

But beyond theory and the existence of alternatives that go beyond Keynesian patches, the narrative of the “guaranteed minimum income” (previously known as “basic income”) hides a good part of its moral, social, and political costs.

The loss of the centrality of work feeds xenophobia

To begin with, it places most of the middle class and the working class in a situation of direct dependence on the State. The logic of the public insurance system was that the State administered pension, health, and unemployment funds. But these, in the end, depended on labor. As says Varoufakis: “labor insured itself.” By becoming a purely redistributive system, disconnected from work, the center definitively becomes the State. But the “really existing” State is not a universal State, and not even a “universalist republican State.” It is fundamentally and universally a nation-State. It is the kind of State that manufactures national identity and is legitimized through it. In the nation-State, being a citizen is the result of having its nationality, which is why it’s inherited from parents. That’s why hundreds of thousands of Argentines, for example, vote in Spain, even in local elections, without having ever resided there and without anyone minding much.

That perverse logic, which questions the citizenship of many who contribute and exalts that of many others who haven’t so much as visited, would be reinforced in the world of the universal minimum income. In the world of the basic income, it’s not creative citizenship—what you contribute to society through your work—but national identity that guarantees you a minimum income. As Varoufakis himself says, in a regime of “guaranteed minimum income,” it’s the transfers from the State that make you a citizen, independent of your contribution. To me, that seems like a true moral perversion. But its political consequences are still worse.

The Europe of the basic income would no longer be the Europe that considers migrants on the basis of what they contribute to social security, but a double-walled Europe that would see migrants as more people the “social dividend” that Varoufakis talks about has to be distributed to. They become competitors in the zero-sum game that the distribution of a given benefit always is, and not as workers whose work creates value and supports everyone’s social security and pensions.

One of the main reasons that racism is growing across Europe is the loss of the centrality of work, due to the increasing importance of grants and social assistance to many precarious families. That’s why the narratives of the extreme right are again gaining traction in the working class. Do we want to reinforce them?

The story that Varoufakis proposes puts us in a world where xenophobic narratives would be legitimated. It’s no coincidence that the country where we’re seeing the most openly discriminatory and xenophobic public policies is Denmark, where the link between work and public rents is already almost non-existent. It’s hard to believe that someone like Varoufakis doesn’t see the causal relationship between change in the narrative that’s fundamental to redistribution and the growth of an ethnic and xenophobic nationalism.

Basic income at the cost of more inequality?

But he also doesn’t seem to realize, as we’ve seen in the Swiss campaign for the referendum, that it opens the door to a brutally regressive tax system and an exponential rise in inequality.

In Switzerland, the promoters of the referendum proposed to finance the basic income with a VAT of 50%. That’s very high, they recognized, but they assured us that there would no longer be an income tax or social taxes, that fraud would automatically be reduced, and that there would be less interference in prices mechanisms, which is why the economy as a whole would be more efficient and competitive. That’s all true. But there’s a problem: someone who has little income spends it all on survival. They pay 50% in taxes on what they earn. But as income increases, the percentage that we use for consumption is smaller and smaller. The percentage they would pay in taxes is the same. It’s the drama of indirect taxes. They’re regressive, which is to say, the more you earn, the smaller the percentage of your revenue you have to pay. Indirect taxation favors inequality, taking proportionally more from those who most need that money. So, the weight of modern tax systems falls on direct taxes, in which each income “bracket” pays a higher rate than the one below.

It wouldn’t necessarily have to be this way. A basic income can be built on a more balanced tax system, but advocates of the basic income can’t just gratuitously advocate a move to a tax system based only on indirect taxes. They know that superimposing a real basic income, equivalent to a minimum wage, on a system of direct and progressive taxes would raise fiscal pressure to the point of making most small businesses nonviable, which would drive unemployment up.

Why is the basic income an attractive strategy?

The basic income is an attractive proposal because fits very nicely into the spirit of our time.

On the one hand, there’s the argument from individual empowerment, which is very important. The social experience of unemployment, with all its stigma and guilt, makes it odious for us to deal with the State, and even more so to tell some functionary about our misfortunes, to have to bear the scrutiny of a functionary or a family doctor to get sick leave. The basic income is as desirable as the abolition of customer service by telephone operators. It has the same kind of attraction that makes more and more people replace visits to their bank with a web page or an app.

On the other hand, it’s something “new” that can apparently overcome wearisome partisan divisions. The libertarian Right sees it as a corrected and expanded version of school vouchers. The new Left sees the centrality of the State as an acceptance of its values, and believes it’s found the alternative to the European social/Christian democratic model that was so rattled by neoliberalism.

It’s also logical that it would attract technocrats and academics, and even some critical economists as well-liked as Varoufakis. The idea of reducing the central part of social policies to a redistributive variable (the amount of the minimum equal income for everyone) opens up not only a theoretical playing field in macroeconomics, but the possibility of an independent agency that sets it the way central banks set interest rates. The economy and economists would return to the center of practical economic policy, and politicians would see their power reduced in favor of analytical arguments.

There’s no doubt: the basic income starts with good intentions. And yet, it would be a grave mistake.

The hidden face of the basic income

The main problem with the basic income is that it would mean the definitive end of the centrality of work in the social narrative. It’s not just a moral problem, it’s that we will only be able to win sovereignty over the economy if we take the other path. In this, Mason is completely right to once again defend the theory of labor value, even if only to put work, the transformative capacity of our species, at the center of the social and economic problem.

If worrying about the end of the centrality of work sounds too philosophical, its direct consequences are quite practical: the rise of the centrality of the nation-State and national identity in daily life, with the consequent legitimization of nationalism and xenophobia.

And if this wasn’t enough, a very possible reinforcement of the rising trend of inequality because of the kind of regressive tax system proposed as fiscal base of this model. And if it tries to balance itself, which seems inevitable, there will be a still greater reduction of the SME and freelancer community and jobs, to the benefit of Big Business.

In summary, it attacks everything in the world we live in that makes it possible think about and work for a good society that can advance towards overcoming scarcity and inequality.

Varoufakis is mistaken. Very much so.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original

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