Mike Hales: Here’s a libertarian socialist addressing a pluriverse¹:

• Many co-existing forms of commoning, in a world of profuse and inescapable difference/diversity; also, of abundance not scarcity.

• Seeing commoning as a material relation that communities and resources stand in – a system of alternative (non-capitalist, liberating) RoPs (relations of production) in the material sphere. Prefiguratively constituting a mode of production, which may evolutionarily supplant the capitalist mode.

• Seeing commoning, also, as requiring radical modes of knowing (an altered ‘dance of knowing’) organised under alternative (distributed) RoPs in the sphere of knowing. This is another, critical, dimension of class recomposition: a globalised recomposition of labour-power.

• In the sphere of the heart – the wellsprings of action (both wise and unwise) – commoning (and especially, multiple co-existing, differing commons) requires transverse orientation, an altered system of RoPs in the production of motivation and affiliation: open to true diversity, to mutuality across difference, to the non-Othering of different others.

The table below sketches six modes of participation in commons, each associated with a particular political mode: anarchist (free-libre), socialist-associationist cooperative, municipalist, consumerist, libertarian-legal.

All modes may coexist (pluriverse-wise) in communities alongside each other in the same territory. But also, multiple modes may be deployed within a given community, addressing a single commons, to deal with various dimensions of material, cultural and emotional reality. For example, anarchists in the FLOSS/free internet movement fundamentally attempt federating around protocols. But they need to engage successfully in politicised collaborating too, in order to arrive at viable protocols. In their ‘autonomous’ lives (workplaces, families, neighbourhoods) they also are likely to engage in politicised collaborating.

Q: Platforms are infrastructure-pieces. What is the contribution that platform infrastructures – in the current digital/cloud sense – may make in each mode? In each of the modes of commoning, what are the current or traditional ways of doing it, without resorting to post-post-Fordist tech? ²

Q: What kind of landscape do multiple platforms and commons constitute, together and alongside one another, for a community or in a territory? A complex, layered, institutionally-partitioned, pluriversal, material-cultural infrastructure for living and working.

NOTE: The ‘nudging’ mode below (unselfconscious individualistic participants in an unregulated common pool) is particularly important in a context of chaotic environmental commoning.>

Mike Hales, July 2018. Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence BY-NC-SA 

Photo by pedrosimoes7

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Extracted from: http://www.audacities.co/#about-audacities

Productive Cities are Prosperous Cities

Cities are where the battle for a sustainable, equitable world will be won or lost.

The majority of people in the world live in cities, and cities are now the epicentre of economic power (600 cities will generate 60% of GDP by 2025) as well as the primary drivers of impacts on planetary life support systems.

Cities are positive human creations in so many ways, but right now, they are also often extractive and destructive to both people and planet in how they are built and maintained.

We need to rebuild cities from the inside out so that they are regenerative.

Remaking Cities

Creating prototypes of more self-sufficient cities, through relocalised and distributed production of food, energy and manufacturing, will help cities progress towards carbon and waste reduction objectives.

Relocalised production can also help contribute to developing more meaningful, secure livelihoods for people in a world where traditional jobs are fast disappearing, through automation, offshoring, casualised work, and an increasing number of people working as freelancers.

Enabling people to produce more of what they need for themselves – through providing open access to productive technologies, fostering a circular economy, and the availability of a shared design commons – can contribute to making cities regenerative.

This approach is known as ‘design global, manufacture local’.

Extracted from: http://www.audacities.co/#what-we-do

Prototypes
AUDAcities will establish a prototypes in interested Australian cities based on the Fab City Global Initiative’s Poble Nou district in Barcelona, which aims to demonstrate how relocalising production of food, energy and manufacturing can work. These ‘fractals’ of self-sufficient, productive cities can help inform and catalyse a wider agenda of industrial and economic transformation.

Photo by michelle-robinson.com

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Four years ago, Thomas Piketty published his best-seller that tried to provide a working model for capital in the twenty-first century. The reasons why Piketty failed to accomplish some of his goals have been well explained by David Harvey.

I’d like to shed light on a new process that has been neglected by both Piketty and Harvey. For those who wish to understand “capital in the twenty-first century”, studying a rising form of production is of paramount importance. Following the format of ‘capital’, I call this emerging phenomenon ‘phygital’.

What is capital?

Capital is a process, not a thing, which results in social relations. Put simply, it is a process in which money is used to make more money. This process is situated in a specific context where the capital owners develop multifaceted relations with the rest of the people and their habitat.

The owners of a company profit by developing relations with their employees, partners, suppliers, customers, natural environment etc. How value is created and wealth is accumulated in the hands of the very few is a complex process. However, to quote the Encyclopedia of Marxism, “the issue is to understand what kind of social relation is capital and where it leads”.

I shall argue the same for another process, named ‘phygital’.

What is phygital?

‘Phygital’ is a process whereby ‘physical’ (material production) meets the ‘digital’ (production of knowledge, software, design, culture). It encapsulates digitally enhanced physical reality and production, to show how the influx of shared knowledge changes and improves production.

First it was Wikipedia and the myriads of free and open-source software projects. They demonstrated how people, driven by diverse motives, can produce complex ‘digital artefacts’ if they are given access to the means of production. Now we are also observing a rich tapestry of initiatives in the field of manufacturing.

For example, see the Wikihouse project that produces open source designs for houses; the OpenBionics project that produces open source designs for robotic and bionic devices; or the FarmHack and L’Atelier Paysan communities that produce open source designs for agricultural machines. Digital technologies enable people to cooperate in a remote and asynchronous way, and produce designs that are shared as digital commons (open source). Then the actual manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures (from 3d printing and CNC machines to low-tech tools and crafts) and with local biophysical conditions in mind.

Similar to capital, phygital is a process that results in social relations. However, it is a process in which shared resources (commons) are used to produce more shared resources (commons). The kind of social relations can thus be very different to capitalism. And it may lead to a post-capitalist economy and society.

Do we really need another new term?

No, not necessarily. But we need a new paradigm, informed by the past, which can address most of the problems that capitalism has been creating, for the benefit of the many and of the environment. Towards that end, discussions around and experimentation with post-capitalist alternatives are necessary.

I believe that new ideas should ideally be described by using already widely understood terms so that the message is effectively communicated. However, I cannot come up with a better term that would describe this conjunction of the digital with the physical. If someone can, may this brief essay serve as inspiration.

Originally published in Open Democracy.

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Digital technologies allow for the creation of a new mode of production, a new mode of allocation, and new types of social relations beyond the state-market nexus.

Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a deeper transformation of the fundamentals of our social life. As capitalism faces a series of structural crises, a new social, political and economic dynamic is emerging: peer-to-peer (P2P).

What is P2P? And why is it important in building a commons-centric future? These are the questions we try to answer, by tying together four of its aspects:

1. P2P is a type of social relations in human networks;

2. P2P is also a technological infrastructure that makes the generalization and scaling up of such relations possible;

3. P2P thus enables a new mode of production and exchange;

4. P2P creates the potential for a transition to an economy that can be generative towards people and nature.

We believe that these four aspects will profoundly change human society. P2P ideally describes systems in which any human being can contribute to the creation and maintenance of a shared resource, while benefiting from it. There is an enormous variety of such systems: from the free encyclopedia Wikipedia to free/open-software projects, to open design and hardware communities, to relocalization initiatives and community currencies.

WHAT IS P2P AND HOW IS IT RELATED TO THE COMMONS?

To begin with, P2P computing systems are characterized by consensual connections between “peers.” This means the computers in the network can interact with each other. It is in this context that the literature started to characterize the sharing of audio and video files as P2P file-sharing, and that at least a part of the underlying infrastructure of the Internet, like its data transmission infrastructure, has been called P2P.

Let’s now assume that behind those computers are human users. A conceptual jump can be made to argue that users now have a technological affordance (a tool) that allows them to interact and engage with each other more easily and on a global scale. P2P can be seen as a relational dynamic through which peers can freely collaborate with each other and create value in the form of shared resources.

It is this mutual dependence of the relational dynamic and the underlying technological infrastructure that facilitates it, which creates the linguistic confusion between P2P as a technological infrastructure and P2P as a human relational dynamic. However, a technological infrastructure does not have to be fully P2P in order to facilitate P2P human relationships. For example, compare Facebook or Bitcoin with Wikipedia or free/open-source software projects: they all utilize P2P dynamics, but they do so in different ways and with different political orientations.

P2P is therefore a mode of relating that allows human beings, organized in networks, to collaborate, produce and exchange value. The collaboration is often permissionless, meaning that one may not need the permission of another in order to contribute. The P2P system is thus generally open to all contributors and contributions. The quality and inclusion of the work is usually determined “post-hoc” by a layer of maintainers and editors, as in the case of Wikipedia.

P2P can also be a mode to allocate resources that does not involve any specific reciprocity between individuals, but only between the individuals and the collective resource. For example, you are allowed to develop your own software based on an existing piece of software distributed under the widely used GNU General Public License, only if your final product is available under the same kind of license.

In the realm of information that can be shared and copied at low marginal costs, the P2P networks of interconnected computers used by collaborating people can provide vital shared functionalities for the commons. However, P2P does not only refer to the digital sphere and is not solely related to high technology. P2P can generally be synonymous with “commoning,” in the sense that it describes the capacity to contribute to the creation and maintenance of any shared resource.

There are multiple definitions of the “commons.” We adhere to David Bollier’s characterization of the commons as a shared resource, co-governed by its user community according to the rules and norms of that community. The sphere of the commons may contain either rivalrous goods and resources, which you and I cannot both have at the same time, or non-rival goods and resources, whose use does not deplete it. These types of goods or resources have in turn either been inherited or they are human-made.

For example, a type of commons may include the gifts of nature, such as the water and land, but also shared assets or creative work such as cultural and knowledge artefacts. Our focus here is on the digital commons of knowledge, software and design, because they are the “new commons.” These commons represent the mutualization of productive knowledge that is an integral part of the capacity for any kind of production, including physical goods.

P2P is arguably moving from the periphery of the socio-economic system to its core, thereby also transforming other types of relationships, such as market dynamics, state dynamics and reciprocity dynamics. These dynamics become more efficient and obtain advantages utilizing the commons. P2P relations can effectively scale up, mainly because of the emergence of Internet-enabled P2P technologies. This means small-group dynamics can now be applied at the global level.

ARE P2P TECHNOLOGIES GOOD, BAD OR NEUTRAL?

We do not claim that a certain technology may lead to one inevitable social outcome. Yet we recognize the key role that technologies play in social evolution and the new possibilities they create if certain human groups successfully utilize them. Different social forces invest in this potential and use it to their advantage, struggling to benefit from its use. Technology is therefore best understood as a focus of social struggle, and not as a predetermined “given” that creates just one technologically determined future.

Still, when social groups appropriate a particular technology for their own purposes, then social, political and economic systems can effectively change. An example is the role that the invention of the printing press, associated with other inventions, played in transforming European society.

The fast-growing availability of information and communication technology enables many-to-many communication and allows an increasing number of humans to communicate in ways that were not technically possible before. This in turn makes possible massive self-organization up to a global scale. It also allows for the creation of a new mode of production, a new mode of exchange, and new types of social relations outside of the state-market nexus.

The Internet creates opportunities for social transformation. In the past, with pre-digital technologies, the costs of scaling in terms of communication and coordination made hierarchies and markets necessary as forms of reducing these costs. Hence societies that scaled through their adoption “outcompeted” their tribal rivals. Today, by contrast, it is also possible to scale projects through new coordination mechanisms, which can allow small group dynamics to be applied at the global level. This means that it is now possible to combine “flatter” structures and still operate efficiently on a planetary scale. This has never been the case before.

HOW DOES P2P RELATE TO CAPITALISM?

We are living through a historical moment in which networked and relatively horizontal forms of organization are able to produce complex and sophisticated social outcomes. The latter are often better than the artefacts produced through state-based or market-based mechanisms alone. Just consider how the peer-produced Wikipedia displaced the corporate-organized Encyclopedia Britannica, how peer-produced free/open-source software displaced proprietary software, or how Wikileaks survived the assaults of some of the world’s most powerful states.

The hybrid forms of organization within P2P projects do not primarily rely on either hierarchical decisions or market pricing signals, but on mutual coordination mechanisms, which are remarkably resilient. These emerging mutual coordination mechanisms, however, are also becoming an essential ingredient of capitalism. This is the “immanent” aspect of peer production (or P2P production) that changes the current dominant forms.

But such mechanisms can also become the vehicle of new configurations of production and exchange, which are no longer dominated by capital and state. This is the “transcendent” aspect of peer production, as it creates a new overall system which can subsume the other forms. In the first scenario, capital and state subsume the commons under their direction and domination, leading to a new type of commons-centric capitalism. In the second scenario, the commons, its communities and institutions become dominant and, thus may adapt state and market forms to its best interests.

The new forms of collaborative production that rely on P2P mechanisms do have some hierarchies. Nevertheless, they generally lack a hierarchical command structure for the production process itself. Peer production has introduced the capacity to organize complex global projects through massive mutual coordination. What market pricing is to capitalism and planning is to state-based production, mutual coordination is to peer production.

As a result, the emergence and scaling of these P2P dynamics point to a potential transition in the main modality by which humanity allocates resources: from a market-state system that uses hierarchical decision-making (in firms and in the state) and pricing (amongst companies and consumers), towards a system that uses various mechanisms of mutual coordination. This does not mean that the market and the state will disappear entirely, but that the configuration of different modalities — and the balance between them — will be radically reconfigured.

None of this implies that the P2P transition will lead to a utopia, nor that it will be easy. Indeed, if the history of previous socio-economic transitions is any guide, the transition will most likely be messy. Just as P2P is likely to solve a number of problems in our current society, it will create others in the new one. Nevertheless, this remains a worthwhile social evolution to strive for, and even if P2P relations do not become the dominant social form, they will profoundly influence the future of humanity.

Summarizing the relationship between the relational and technological aspects, the P2P relational dynamic — strengthened by particular forms of technological capacities — may become the dominant way of allocating the necessary resources for human self-reproduction, and thus replace capitalism as the dominant form. This will require a stronger expansion of this P2P modality not just for the production of “immaterial goods,” but also for the production of physical (material) goods.

HOW IS P2P TO BE IMPLEMENTED IN PRACTICE?

While P2P is emerging as a significant form of technological infrastructure for various social forces, the way it is actually implemented (and owned and governed) makes all the difference. Not all P2P is equal in its effects. Various different forms of P2P technological infrastructure can be identified, each of which leads to different forms of social and political organization.

On the one side, for example, we can consider the capitalism of Facebook, Uber or Bitcoin. On the other, we can look at the commons-oriented models of Wikipedia or free/open-source software projects. Adopting this or that specific form of P2P technological infrastructure is the locus of intense social conflict, because the choice between them has enormous consequences on what may or may not be possible.

P2P enables a new (proto-)mode of production, named commons-based peer production, that is characterized by new relations of production. In commons-based peer production, contributors create shared value through open contributory systems, govern the common work through participatory practices, and create shared resources that can, in turn, be used in new iterations. This cycle of open input, participatory process and commons-oriented output is a cycle of accumulation of the commons, which parallels the accumulation of capital.

At this stage, commons-based peer production process should be seen as a prefigurative prototype of what could become a completely new mode of production and a new form of society. It is currently a prototype, since it cannot as yet fully reproduce itself outside of a mutual dependence with capitalism. This emerging modality of peer production is not only productive and innovative “within capitalism,” but also in its capacity to solve some of the structural problems that have been generated by the capitalist mode of production. In other words, it represents a potential transcendence of capitalism. That said, we argue that as long as peer producers or commoners cannot engage in their own self-reproduction outside of capital accumulation, it remains a proto-mode of production, not a full one.

Peer production can be innovative within the context of capitalist competition, because firms that can access the knowledge commons possess a competitive advantage over firms that use proprietary knowledge and can only rely on their own research. For example, by mutualizing the development of software in an open network, firms obtain vast savings in their infrastructural investments. In this context, peer production could be seen as a mutualization of productive knowledge by capitalist coalitions themselves, with IBM’s investments in free/open-source software projects as a case in point.

Yet this capitalist investment is not a negative thing in itself, but rather a condition that increases the societal investment in a P2P-based transition. It is precisely because P2P solves some structural issues of the current system that both productive and managerial classes move towards it. This means that capital flows towards P2P projects, and even though it distorts P2P to make it prolong the dominance of the old economic models, it simultaneously creates new ways of thinking in society that undermine that dominance.

Nevertheless, the new class of commoners cannot rely on capitalist investment and practices. They must use skillful means to render commons-based peer production more autonomous from the dominant political economy. Eventually we may arrive at a position where the balance of power is reversed: the commons and its social forces become the dominant force in society, which allows them to force the state and market forms to adapt to its own requirements. So we should strive to escape the situation in which capitalists co-opt the commons, and head towards a situation in which the commons capture capital, and make it work for its own development.

This proposed strategy of reverse cooptation has been called “transvestment” by telekommunists Dmytri Kleiner and Baruch Gottlieb. Transvestment describes the transfer of value from one modality to another. In our case this would be from capitalism to the commons. Thus transvestment strategies aim to help commoners become financially sustainable and independent. Such strategies are being developed and implemented by commons-oriented entrepreneurial coalitions such as the Enspiral network or Sensorica.

For example, the participants to the Enspiral network create commons-oriented products and services, while generating income from the capitalist market. They contribute a part of their income to the pool of the Enspiral Foundation. The total amount is then invested in new projects through a collaborative funding process. Enspiral also harnesses external funding using certain “hacks,” like capped returns, which gradually allow them to transfer all of their resources to their social mission. Loomio, a free/open-source decision-making platform, is the most prominent product of the network.

As said, the digital commons of knowledge, software and design are abundant resources enriched through usage. It is here that full sharing and the full ability for contributions must be preserved. But in the added value services and products that are built around these commons, we deal with rival resources. Here the commons should be protected from capture by capital. It is in this cooperative sphere of physical and service production where reciprocity rules should be enforced. We propose to combine non-reciprocal sharing in the immaterial sphere, with reciprocal arrangements in the sphere of physical production. Thus, in our vision, commons-based peer production as a full mode of production combines commons and cooperativism.

TOWARDS A COMMONS-CENTRIC SOCIETY?

At that point, if the move from microeconomic P2P communities to a new “macroeconomic” dominant modality of value creation and distribution is successful, a transition phase towards a commons-centric economy and society can occur. This will be the revolution of our times, and a fundamental shift in the rules and norms that decide what value is and how it is produced and distributed in society. In short: a shift to a new post-capitalist value regime.

P2P is considered to be both a social relation and a mode of exchange, as a socio-technological infrastructure and as a mode of production, and all these aspects when combined contribute to the creation of a new post-capitalist model, a new phase in the evolution of the organization of human societies. This will necessitate a discussion about economic and political transitions. At the microeconomic level of commons-based peer production, P2P dynamics are already creating the institutional seedlings prefiguring a new social model.

P2P could lead to a model where civil society becomes productive through the participation of citizens in the collaborative creation of value through commons. In this pluralistic commonwealth, multiple forms of value creation and distribution will co-exist, but most likely around the common attractor that is the commons. We do not argue for a “totalitarianism” of the commons. But to make the commons a core institution that “guides” all other social forms — including the state and the market — towards achieving the greatest common good and the maximum autonomy.

This text is based on a working monograph of the authors under the provisional title Peer-to-Peer: A Manifesto for Commons Transition.

Originally published by ROAR Magazine.

All images (Just White Paper, Geta, Corners, Macro Slider, Two on Blue and Peeling Onion) by aotaro

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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.

In the preface to his major book, “The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange.”, published by Duke University Press in 2014, he makes the exact same argument I made in P2P and Human Evolution in 2005-6. He similarly distinguishes, using a different terminology, the gift economy reciprocity (called Equality Matching by Alan Page Fiske), characteristic of clan societies, from the pure gift of pooling (called Communal Shareholding by Fiske), which is characteristic of nomadic society. And it is all grounded in a large body of evidence of anthropological research and findings. Karatani similarly hypothizes an emerging “Mode D” of exchange, which is again based on pooling, AND, this is a illumination for me, on renewed nomadism. Think about it, the major and principal effect of internet technology is to massively enable and allow nomadism! In those conditions, the author shows, contributory pooling as an exchange mechanism ‘naturally’ emerges as a necessity.

I am majorly excited to read this important book and if you have any interest in the theoretical and historical grounding of the P2P transition, then it is strongly recommended for you as well!

Karatani Kojin, from the Preface:

“This book is an attempt to rethink the history of social formations from the perspective of modes of exchange. Until now, in Marxism this has been taken up from the perspective of modes of production— from, that is, the perspective of who owns the means of production. Modes of production have been regarded as the “economic base,” while the political, religious, and cultural have been considered the ideological superstructure. In the way it splits the economic from the political, this view is grounded in capitalist society.

Accordingly, the view runs into difficulties in trying to explain pre-capitalist societies: in Asiatic or feudal societies, to say nothing of the clan societies that preceded these, there is no split between political control and economic control. Moreover, even in the case of contemporary capitalist societies, viewing the state and nation as simply ideological superstructures has led to difficulties, because the state and nation function as active agents on their own. Marxists believed that ideological superstructures such as the state or nation would naturally wither away when the capitalist economy was abolished, but reality betrayed their expectation, and they were tripped up in their attempts to deal with the state and nation.

As a result, Marxists began to stress the relative autonomy of the ideological superstructure. In concrete terms, this meant supplementing the theory of economic determinism with knowledge derived from such fields as psychoanalysis, sociology, and political science. This, however, resulted in a tendency to underestimate the importance of the economic base. Many social scientists and historians rejected economic determinism and asserted the autonomy of other dimensions. Even as it led to increased disciplinary specialization, this stance became increasingly widespread and accepted as legitimate. But it resulted in the loss of any totalizing, systematic perspective for comprehending the structures in which politics, religion, philosophy, and other dimensions are interrelated, as well as the abandonment of any attempt to find a way to supersede existing conditions.

In this book, I turn anew to the dimension of the economic. But I define the economic not in terms of modes of production but rather in terms of modes of exchange.

There are four types of mode of exchange:

* mode A, which consists of the reciprocity of the gift ;

* mode B, which consists of ruling and protection;

* mode C, which consists of commodity exchange; and

* mode D, which transcends the other three.

These four types coexist in all social formations. Th ey differ only on which of the modes is dominant. For example, in capitalist society mode of exchange C is dominant. In Capital, Marx considered the capitalist economy not only in terms of modes of production but also in terms of commodity exchange — he theorized how the ideological superstructure could be produced from mode of exchange C. Particularly in volume 3 of Capital, he took on the task of explicating how a capitalist economy is above all a system of credit and therefore always harbors the possibility of crisis.

But Marx paid only scant attention to the problems of precapitalist societies.

It would be foolish to criticize him on this though. Our time and energy would be better spent in explaining how ideological superstructures are produced through modes of exchange A and B, in the same way that Marx did for mode of exchange C. That is what I have attempted in this book. One other question I take up is how a society in which mode of exchange A is dominant emerged in the first place.

Since Marcel Mauss, it has been generally accepted that mode of exchange A (the reciprocity of the gift ) is the dominant principle governing archaic societies. But this principle did not exist in the band societies of nomadic hunter-gatherers that had existed since the earliest times. In these societies, it was not possible to stockpile goods, and so they were pooled, distributed equally. This was a pure gift , one that did not require a reciprocal countergift. In addition, the power of the group to regulate individual members was weak, and marriage ties were not permanent. In sum, it was a society characterized by an equality that derived from the free mobility of its individual members. Clan society, grounded in the principle of reciprocity, arose only after nomadic bands took up fixed settlement. Fixed settlement made possible an increased population; it also gave rise to conflict with outsiders.

Moreover, because it made the accumulation of wealth possible, it inevitably led to disparities in wealth and power. Clan society contained this danger by imposing the obligations of gift – countergift . Of course, this was not something that clan society intentionally planned. Mode of exchange A appeared in the form of a compulsion, as Freud’s “return of the repressed.”

This, however, led to a shortcoming for clan society: its members were equal but they were no longer free (that is, freely mobile). In other words, the constraints binding individuals to the collective were strengthened.

Accordingly, the distinction between the stage of nomadic peoples and that of fixed settlement is crucial. As is well-known, Marx hypothesized a “primitive communism” existing in ancient times and saw the emergence of a future communist society as that primitive communism’s restoration after the advancement of capitalism. Today this stance is widely rejected as a quasi-religious historical viewpoint. Moreover, if we rely on anthropological studies of currently existing primitive societies, we are forced to reject this idea of primitive communism. We cannot, however, dismiss the idea simply because it cannot be found empirically — nor should we. But Marxists have largely ducked this question.

The problem here is, first of all, that Marx and Engels located their model of primitive communism in Lewis H. Morgan’s version of clan society. In my view, they should have looked not to clan society but to the nomadic societies that preceded it. Why did Marx and Engels overlook the difference between nomadic and clan societies? This was closely related to their viewing the history of social formations in terms of mode of production. In other words, when seen from the perspective of their shared ownership of the means of production, there is no difference between nomadic and clan societies.

When we view them in terms of modes of exchange, however, we see a decisive dif erence — the difference, for example, between the pure gift and the gift based on reciprocity.

Second, when seen from the perspective of modes of exchange, we are able to understand why communism is not simply a matter of economic development nor of utopianism, but why it should be considered instead the return of primitive communism. Of course, what returns is not the communism of clan society but that of nomadic society. I call this mode of exchange D. It marks the return of repressed mode of exchange A at the stages where modes of exchange B and C are dominant. It is important to note, though, that clan society and its governing principle mode of exchange A themselves already constitute the return of the repressed: in fixed settlement society, they represented attempts to preserve the equality that existed under nomadism. Naturally, this did not arrive as the result of people’s desire or intention: it came as a compulsory duty that offered no choice.

Mode of exchange D is not simply the restoration of mode A — it is not, that is, the restoration of community. Mode of exchange D, as the restoration of A in a higher dimension, is in fact only possible with the negation of A.

D is, in sum, the restoration of nomadic society. Yet this too does not appear as the result of human desire or intention, but rather emerges as a duty issued by God or heaven or as a regulative idea. In concrete terms, D arrives in the form of universal religion, which negates religions grounded in magic or reciprocity.

But there is no need for mode of exchange D to take religious form. T ere are cases where mode of exchange D appeared without religious trappings — in, for example, Ionia from the seventh to the sixth centuries BCE, or Iceland from the tenth through the twelfth centuries CE, or the eastern part of North America in the eighteenth century. What these share in common is that all were poleis formed by colonialists: covenant communities established by persons who had become independent from their original states or communities. In them, if land became scarce, rather than perform wage labor on another person’s land, people would move to another town. For this reason, disparities in landed property did not arise. Because people were nomadic (free), they were equal. In Ionia, this was called isonomia.

This meant not simply formal political equality but actual economic equality.

Of course, these communities were all short-lived: they ended when they reached the limits of the space available for colonization. These examples show that communism depends less on shared ownership of the means of production than on the return of nomadism.

But in actuality, all around the world socialist movements that aimed to bring about mode of exchange D were generally carried out under the guise of universal religions. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, socialism became “scientific” and lost its religious hue. But the key question here is not whether socialism is religious; it is whether socialism intends mode of exchange D. Socialism in the twentieth century was only able to realize societies dominated by modes of exchange B and C, and as a result it lost its appeal. But so long as modes of exchange B and C remain dominant, the drive to transcend them will never disappear. In some form or another, mode of exchange D will emerge. Whether or not this takes religious form is unimportant. This drive is fundamentally rooted in that which has been repressed from nomadic society. It has persisted throughout world history, and will not disappear in the future— even if we are unable to predict the form in which it will appear.”

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