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Item 1: The Political Economy of Peer Production
This is the essay which led to the creation of the P2P Foundation and the elaboration of ‘p2p theory’. This first essay appeared in CTheory and explains the basis of our understanding of the importance of the peer to peer dynamic in our society, and how it both within and outside of capitalism:
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The Political Economy of Peer Production. CTheory, October 2, 2006. Retrieved from http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499 Re-published Post-Autistic Economics Review, issue 37.
(other version at: http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue37/Bauwens37.htm )
Item 2: A primer on P2P and the Commons
Written and arranged in 2016, this longer brochure is aimed at explaining all the basic elements of our approach, with explanatory illustrations and graphics:
Item 3: The Practices of P2P
The P2P approach aims to be a ‘low theory’, i.e. it aims to understand and generalize ideas that stem from the real practices of the peer to peer -driven communities. Here we identify ten ‘seed forms’, that we think we be part of our co-constructed post-capitalist future.
Item 4: What Needs to happen with capital and with the market ?
Two movements mesh cooperative traditions with the digital revolution: Platform Cooperativism, and Open Cooperativism. How do they relate?
Can we transform the renting economy of Uber and AirBnB into a genuine sharing one? Platform cooperatives must become open and commons-oriented.
Item 5: How do we fund the transition, i.e. using capital for the commons
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Bauwens, Michel and Vasilis Kostakis. 2014. “From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons”
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Bauwens, M., & Niaros, V. (2016). Value in the Commons Economy: Developments in Open and Contributory Accounting.
This is a bit longer, but contains our fundamental vision of a shift in value regime and on getting ‘value sovereignty for the commons, while using open and contributive accounting to account for all contributions; as well as ‘transvestment’ techniques to transform external financing from capital and state sources, to actual expansion of the commons while creating fair livelihoods for the commoners.
Item 6: P2P Politics and the transformation of the state form
In this article, we focus on the simultaneous transformation of state, market and civil society , but with special attention to the concept and practices of an enabling state which supports autonomous commons-based initiatives: the Partner-State The Partner State is a concept where public authorities assist in the direct creation of value by civil society, and promote commons-based Peer Production.
(A more elaborate version in a peer-reviewed journal is here at http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-7-policies-for-the-commons/peer-reviewed-papers/towards-a-new-reconfiguration-among-the-state-civil-society-and-the-market/ )
Can Commons and P2P practices offer viable solutions for our present and future social, political and ecological crises? This is the story of how it’s done in a time when the old is dying but the new is not fully born.
Item 7: The mechanics of the transition
Other authors who recently turned to the commons such as Jeremy Rifkin, Paul Mason, and George Monbiot, are not always very precise about how the transition can occur. A short attempt to explain after reading Rifkin’s book.
Item 8: What about values and spirituality ?
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The Next Buddha Will Be a Collective: Spiritual Expression in the Peer-to-Peer Era. ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation Issue: Volume 29, Number 4 / Spring 2007 Pages: 34 – 45. Draft version retrievable via
The Reality Sandwich version of the above text is shorter and more accessible (long version here ). This short article deals with many of the same themes: If we can have P2P economics why not P2P Spirituality?
Item 9: Introducing Cosmo-local production
Design global, manufacture local: a new industrial revolution?
An article at The Conversation, by Vasilis Kostakis and Jose Ramos. This article introduces a new mode of production, where the design is developed as a global commons and the manufacturing takes place locally, through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in mind.
This article aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on post-capitalist construction by exploring the contours of a commons-oriented productive model. On the basis of this model called “design global-manufacture local”, we argue that recent techno-economic developments around the emergence of commons-based peer production and desktop
Item 10: Living within ecological limits, in our cities and bioregions
One of our 3 strategic priorities has been the open source circular economy and our detailed studies of the ecological impacts of cosmo-local production methods.
But this new report does two more things:
1) first of all, it grounds our approach in biophysical economics, the only real economics, as we cannot have an economics that is in permanent overshoot vis a vis our planet’s regenerative capacities
2) second, it establishes the crucial historic and present link between the development of commons-based provisioning systems as the very key strategy to radically diminish the human footprint of our societies
Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Niaros were asked to conduct a research project to identify urban commons project, convey the wishes of leading contributors and creators of these projects, and suggest a longer-term institutional design for cooperation between the public sector and the commons.
This is the english Executive Summary of the report, which contains a number of graphics on public-commons partnership approaches.
A fuller treatment on urban commons-based transitions is available in a new report published for the Boll Foundation:
The emerging discussion about the sustainability potential of distributed production is the starting point for this paper. The focus is on the “design global, manufacture local” model. This model builds on the conjunction of the digital commons of knowledge and design with desktop and benchtop manufacturing technologies (from three-dimensional printers and laser cutters to low-tech tools and crafts). Two case studies are presented to illustrate three interlocked practices of this model for degrowth. It is argued that a “design global, manufacture local” model, as exemplified by these case studies, seems to arise in a significantly different political economy from that of the conventional industrial model of mass production. “Design global, manufacture local” may be seen as a platform to bridge digital and knowledge commons with existing physical infrastructures and degrowth communities, in order to achieve distributed modes of collaborative production.
Lead photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash
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]]>This is derived from original proposals by the Telekommunisten group, where entities capable of doing transvestment are called ‘Venture Communes’.
The following short text and audio lecture explain the background to this idea and practice.
Ian Wright: Dmytri Kleiner‘s “venture communism” is a recent proposal for getting from here to there. You can download Dmytri’s manifesto here.
A key idea is a new kind of institution — the “venture commune” — an association of co-operatives that is the sole owner of all the assets of all constituent worker-owned firms.
All land, buildings, capital etc. are rented by the co-ops from the venture commune. All members of co-ops are automatically members of the commune. Hence, the means of production are communally owned.
In theory this institution solves the problem of the highly unequal distribution of capital between worker-owned firms in a market economy.
In addition, the venture commune democratically allocates funds to new worker-owned start-ups. The idea here is that the institutions of the venture commune will compete with the institutions of venture capitalism, and eventually crowd-out the latter.
I gave a half-hour talk on Dymtri’s ideas in Oxford, UK, which provides more details. You can listen to the audio here:
In that talk I refer to the input/output relations of the venture commune with the surrounding capitalist sector. This diagram summarises the main monetary flows:
Venture communism is precisely the kind of institutional proposal that satisfies the requirement of a political economy of socialism that is immediately a new kind of political practice. For me, it is an highly instructive reference and starting point.
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]]>Here is a draft of a text we wrote for another study commissioned by the Boll Foundation, that will serve for a ‘deep dive’ discussion on the value shift, organized by the Commons Strategies Group in Berlin later this month. This analysis is preliminary, the main study will be finished in November this year. We hope to integrate the empirical findings of the P2P Value scientific community in there as well.
The text, co-written and with the assistance of Vasilis Niaros of the P2P Lab, starts here below,
Michel Bauwens, Amsterdam , September 2, 2016
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Our common world is faced with huge questions regarding the evolution of value. Amongst the important questions we can think of are the following:
- What is value, specifically in the context of the allocation of resources in human societies, and perhaps even more specifically, in more ‘digitalized’, ‘networked’ societies where emerging knowledge commons are playing an ever more important role?
- What ‘should’ be value, in a world marked by ecological and resource constraints that are now operating at a global scale ? Can we imagine a value system that rewards generative instead of extractive activities and exchanges ?
- In a world of social, cultural and institutional diversity, can a new ‘value system’ ever incorporate the multiple values that are not recognized by capitalism, such as the care economy and domestic work ?
David Graeber’s book, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, is a deep historical and anthropological survey of ways of dealing with value reviewing anthropological research and approaches, and is itself a testament to the wide variety of value practices and explanations. It’s main underlying thesis, if I understood it correctly, is that value is related to ‘making society’ and that we need value regimes that allow us to direct attention and energy to what we commonly value. Value comes into being through social practices. This stands in paradoxical contrast with the capitalist value regime, which seems to lead to avenues that no one in society, or perhaps only the very few, really want.
There is of course no consensus about what value is, and what economic value is derived from, neither cross-historically, nor amongst analysts and commentators of contemporary capitalism. What human individuals and societies are willing to put their attention and energy to, and the ‘rules of the game’, through which resources are allocated, varies amongst cultures, amongst various regions, amongst ideological groups within a society, and amongst various historical times.
The debate therefore rages on whether what determines value is located in the objective sphere (reflecting an amount of labor, energy, capital, resources …), such as is claimed by the labor value theory (LVT), or those arguing that value (and money) should now be tied to biomass or energy expenditure; or is it located in the subjective sphere (the marginalist school, austrian economics and its influence on mainstream neoclassical economics), whether as a simple correlation of individual desires, or as a conscious collective decision and social contract (many monetary reformers and for example Modern Monetary Theory would adhere to that view).
There is certainly a revival of interest in Marx, and in the labor value theory, though the general literature of current Marxism is still very poor in looking at how ICT and digitization would affect its understandings.
A recent exception is the work of Christian Fuchs. A common characteristic of these approaches is the claim that despite technological changes, capitalism itself is intact, and therefore, the analytical tools of Marx and the LVT are still essential. Fuchs also published a number of books looking at how digitalisation, the emergence of social media and of peer production and its derivatives, are changing capitalism. Within that tradition, Fuchs stresses that the ‘audience labour’ of social media users is ‘productive labour’, and that Facebook and other platforms are capitalist platforms are extracting surplus value from the labour. This also means that social media users are considered as part of the class struggle within capitalism.
There is a second stream, located with the labour theory of value, represented by authors like Jakob Rigi or Olivier Fraysse, who stress that the production of use value does not directly create surplus value, and that the platforms are extracting rent. Facebook is not selling what we produce on social media, which is about sharing ‘use value’ to peers, what they are selling are derivatives from our sharing, i.e. data about our likes and interests, essentially to advertisers. They are operating not in the production of value, but in the sphere of realization or circulation of value, i.e. helping sell what capitalism produces, and operating like media did before the internet, through audience work that insures the presence of attention.
The third stream, though linked to Marxism, is the post-autonomist tradition, derived from the autonomist social movements of Italy in the seventies, with authors like Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, and the analysts of the French-Italian school of cognitive capitalism,Yann-Moulier Boutang, Andrea Fumagalli, Christian Marazzo. Adam Arvidsson is broadly making the same argument.
These analysts argue that the labour theory of value is no longer the primary driver of cognitive capitalism, and that the productivity of cognitive labour cannot be compared in socially necessary labour time. Creating symbolic, creative, esthetic, cognitive value is highly contextualized and independent of the expenditure of time. They also argue that the production of value has spread to the whole of society, to what they call the ‘social factory’. Labour has become “biopolitical” because work and life have fused and become indistinguishable. Now that the production of value occurs in the ‘social factory’, value is extracted from the totality of life, in a kind of bio-cognitive capitalism. The value produced by society as a whole is what Hardt and Negri call the common, and the value of that common is extracted and ‘translated’ from ‘outside’ of the conventional production process–essentially through the financial sector, in ways that create and reinforce the inequity of our economic system.
There are of course major differences between the fundamental approach of these authors as well. The Negrian school is clearly an anti-capitalist school, and believes local and global rebellions and revolutions of the ‘multitude’ are needed to break the stranglehold of finance over the common. Adam Arvidsson’s concern in The Ethical Economy is to make the new types of value (which are independent of labour time) measurable and recognizable in the current economy, so that this new value can have its legitimate piece of the distributional pie.
What all these authors agree on however, is that there is a ‘crisis of value’, i.e. that the old value regime does not adequately recognize and reward the new value that is created.
The diagnosis is that we are transitioning to an economy with an evern increasing number of collaborative eco-systems, where the common value is produced through numerous contributions, which are most often not measured or recorded, but that value is then realized or captured through our financial systems. Value is increasingly created through the contributions of the many, but realized for the benefit of the few. However, the concern for this imbalance may entirely stay within the sphere of commodification. In this case, we would simply replace commodified labor with commodified contributions.
The authors of this report however, take a different position. Rather than discussing what the new value means for capitalism, we ask instead: What does that new value represent for a shift towards post-capitalist practices? What if the common, or the commons more precisely, actually represents a new economy that is being born within the old? This changes the perspective because it reorients discussion around commons-producing ‘peer producers’. If one adopts this perspective(we are anticipating later parts of this report), two main avenues would be open to us.
The first avenue would be to think about ‘reverse co-optation’ of value, from the ‘old’ system to the new. Can the emerging commons-centric economy, which creates value in and through the commons, use capital from the capitalist or state system, and subsume capital to the new logic? This premise proceeds from the realistic position that the new system does not have the power (yet?) to change the overall logic of the present system, but it can carve out relatively protected niches within it.
The second avenue goes one step further, within the confines of the already existing commons economy: Can broader streams of value be recognized, and become the basis of a new distribution of value that recognizes the commons and its distinct species of value-creation?
The third step will be the most difficult, if commons communities succeed in both reverse cooptation and new value distribution strategies within the confines of their communities, how does it become the basis of a wider system change, that would affect the very domination of the capitalist market and its value regime ?
The first option is represented by the ‘transvestment’ strategy of the Enspiral open cooperative, using external investments with capped returns, and also insulating their purpose-driven activities from capitalist extraction. The second option is represented by Sensorica, which internally creates a value-sovereign distribution through its open value accounting system. The key to more fundamental change however, will be the capacity to have this newly recognized value, be recognized by the system as a whole.
Before we proceed in documenting precisely such practices, we need to deepen our understanding of the value crisis.
Analysing the Value Crisis
A spate of recent books has used derivations of the labour theory of value to highlight a ‘value crisis’:
Adam Arvidsson’s book The Ethical Economy, in a thesis earlier outlined in a joint essay by Michel Bauwens, is one of many treatises stressing that contemporary capitalist value-practices are no longer able to determine what value is. Value is now more than ever essentially co-created in the civic and social sphere, and it cannot be restricted to economic value as recognized by the system of capital. The material value of products and services, and the corporations that sell them, represent only a fraction of the total value that is somehow generated by economic forces, as evidenced by the ‘goodwill’ value of stocks, which vastly exceeds the value of the material resources. The stock market is no longer an adequate way to recognize and gauge that social value; new value-measures may need to be developed, but also a recognition that many human activities are beyond ‘value’ and cannot, or should not, be measured. Many of the new value-measures that are presently being developed and experimented with, will be post-monetary ‘current-sies’, as Arthur Brock of the MetaCurrency Project calls it — systems that enable communities to see flow, and react to it.
Michel Bauwens’ commons-centric interpretation is that human societies, through commons-based peer production and related modalities of creating value, are now able to exponentially increase use-value production outside of corporations and markets. However, because abundant, digitally reproduced immaterial use-value is generated outside of the commodity form, it moves to the periphery of market production, and therefore ever greater amounts of use-value production are no longer recognized through monetization. This is creating a crisis of capital accumulation (as it becomes harder for capital to discover reliable sources of return), but also of precarious livelihoods.
It is not difficult to see that answers to this conundrum could tilt towards either more intensive capitalist responses, or to the commons. One of the solutions, as advocated by Jaron Lanier, is to monetize and commodify the digital economy through micro-payments. This is similar to the familiar efforts to value “nature’s services” through contrived markets, such as for pollution rights, and we can see similar efforts advocated in the care economy. In these visions, markets and capitalism are seen as the inescapable horizon of societies and their economies for which greater commodification is the natural, inescapable answer. Capitalist players assimilate the new value streams on the old, familiar terms. Of course, there are many other valuation proposals that do not proceed from a desire for marketization, but for the justified desire to create a flow of resources and income to the digital commons, the care economy, and people involved in managing and protecting natural resources. A key question here is, can efforts to valuation lead to any other reality than commodification ?
Jeremy Rifkin, in his book The Zero-Marginal Cost Society, argues that the trend of de-commodification seen in intangible realms (software, social networking) now extends to ‘material’ production. Distributed renewable energy creates, once the initial investment is made, an abundant flow of energy which destroys its monetary value. New manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing, create a similar effect for many material goods. Hence Rifkin predicts a future economy where demonetized collaborative commons are at the core of production, and market functions operate at the periphery.
Paul Mason, in his book Post-Capitalism, uses the labor theory of value to make a similar argument. Software and design, he argues, once they become produced through open and collaborative commons that can be abundantly reproduced, should be considered as ‘virtual machines’. This means that once labor is used to produce new software, very little new labor is needed to reproduce it, and therefore, the input of labor is minimized. This makes software companies that operate under the average socially necessary labor hyper-competitive vis a vis their competitors, but, because they are able to eliminate labor cost in production. They are also reducing the overall pool of profit for entire sectors of the economy, creating a crisis of capital accumulation through falling rates of profit.
Perhaps the most influential book of the last decade has been Race Against The Machine, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew MacAfee, which points to the danger of increased automation. Automation has now moved to knowledge work, and threatens to destroy millions of jobs. As products become ever more abundant and cheaper, they argue, with less and less human labor needed to produce them, there will be fewer and fewer humans as consumers, and capitalism as we know it will cease to operate. The book has led to a broad re-assessment of value practices, and to calls for initiating a basic income, including from leaders of Silicon Valley, who are more keenly aware than others of the potential for this wave of automation to disrupt the stability of the capitalist economy.
So, at least amongst the authors reviewed here, there seems to exist an increasing consensus that we are going through a ‘value crisis’, and that a new value regime has to be invented.
Feminist authors have been stressing the other side of this value crisis, which has been a constant characteristic of capitalism and even one of the conditions of its existence, as Slivia Federici argues in her magisterial The Caliban and the Witch. That argument is of course that capitalism cannot exist without externalizing costs and appropriating “free” resources (such as the social reproduction that occurs through families and care work). Not recognizing and not valuing domestic care work, the labour of love that is so crucial to human survival. is one of the key processes that maintain this unjust system. The broader forms of care that capitalism’s value system does recognize, and commodifies as labor for hire, are at the very bottom in terms of value recognition, most often considered to be the simplest form of exchangeable labor.
There is a parallel here with work for the commons, or commoning.
It should be noted that the capitalism renders the commons economy invisible in much the same way that it ignores the value of domestic work. The digital value crisis has similar roots: the increase in free labour goes unrecognized. Capitalism doesn’t here just ignore negative environmental and social externalities, it profits from positive social externalities generated by care work, the commons and digital communities. This is the core achievement of the new netarchical capitalism: it has learned to profit directly from the positive social externalities of commons-based peer production, just as it has always profited from unrecognized domestic work. An interesting idea here is that some of the solutions invented by peer production communities could be of interest in the care economy as well, and perhaps, vice versa.
I would propose that the concepts of the care economy and that of a commons(-centric) economy are converging in the same general direction. As Peter LInebaugh has noted, the commons requires the activity of commoning, which is nothing other than caring for a joint resource or common social object. Care-givers are often giving energy and attention to unrecognized commons, such as the family commons. Authors from the care economy, such as Ina Praetorius call for a return of ‘economics’ to its original function of providing for human needs and for recognizing all those who contribute to the general welfare. Moving towards a commons economy moving to a economy centered around commoning, i.e. caring, where people can freely choose their object of care, be recognized for it, and be rewarded for it so that they can maintain fulfilling lives. Especially in the light of the re-emergence of digital knowledge commons, as being increasingly central to the organisation of our social lives, it would seem that where the new commons are essentially about our social and ‘psychological’ reproduction, the care economy rightly focuses on its conditio sine qua non, our even more basic need for physical and affective reproduction. Both need to go hand in hand, and a dialogue between the commons ‘economists’ and the care ‘economists’ seems long overdue. Both ‘movements’ may have a lot to learn from each other. For example, both are facing the fact that most resources are controlled by the state and market, and the transvestment strategies of commoners (see below), have also been invented by reproductive care workers. Both movements are interested in re-creating meaningful autonomous work, something that both child-care collectives and digital commoners, have been successful at creating. And as Massimo de Angelis and Silvia Federici (et al.) write in the preface and introduction to a special issue of the Commoner on ‘Care Work and the Commons’, many new social movements and initiatives with the sphere of reproductive care work, are actively creating new social commons. The solutions that are found and developed within commons-creating peer to peer communities are therefore of the greatest possible interest in terms of how to support the care economy as well. Caring and commoning bring affectivity at the core of production.Perhaps as importantly, the capacity for the ‘global scaling of small group dynamics’, one of the key characteristics of commons-based peer production (CBPP) brings back the community dynamics of our original hunter-gathering anthropological condition, but adds the logic of affinity to the original logic of kinship. Bringing the commons back to the core of value creation and distribution, in the context of small group dynamics, brings care back at the center of production.
But let’s now move to a perhaps even more important central issue of the current value crisis, since it involves our very ‘survivability’, i.e. our connection to the natural world, in which we are embedded, and of which we are a substantial, not separate, part.
It seems clear that the current value regime rewards ‘extractive’ production and consumption activities. This increasingly endangers the ‘sustainability’ of the planet, or rather the capacity of the planet to sustain the current level of human activities. This points to the necessity of a shift in value regime, from ‘extraction’ to ‘generation’ (and regeneration).
Linking value to its expression in our monetary systems, ecologist John D. Liu suggests that:
“If we say that money comes from ecological function instead from extraction, manufacturing buying and selling, then we have a system in which all human efforts go toward restoring, protecting and preserving ecological function. That is what we need to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to ensure food security, to ensure that human civilizations survive. Our monetary system must reflect reality. We could have growth, not from stuff, but growth from more functionality. If we do that and we value that higher than things, we will survive.”
(http://regenerationinternational.org/2016/03/07/meet-john-d-liu-the-indiana-jones-of-landscape-restoration/ )
We can apply this principle to ‘social extraction’ as well, and relate it to the potential shift towards a commons and care economy. How do we move from a extractive to a generative economy as it relates to human communities and their commons? Indeed, the ‘value crisis’ as we described above, means that more value is extracted from generic productive activities, and less value is flowing back. The current format of ‘netarchical capital’ — in which capital no longer produces commodities for sale through commodified labor, but ‘enables’ peer to peer commons production and peer to peer ‘exchanges’ in order to extract rent from it — is similarly ‘socially’ unsustainable.
So in conclusion, it would seem that the three issues we have discussed — i.e. the free labour of digital workers and social media users, the non-recognition of care work, and the ongoing ecological degradation of our planet and its resources — are all interlinked to the dominance of a system based on extractivism.
Therefore, the key underlying shift needed is one from extractive models, practices that enrich some at the expense of the others (communities, resources, nature) to generative value models, practices that enrich the communities, resources etc.. to which they are applied. This is what we could call the Value Shift.
A historical approach to shifts in modes of exchange
According to Kojin Karatani in, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, there are four fundamental modes of exchange. The first is Mode A, which is based on the reciprocity of the gift and on the “community”. The second is Mode B, which is related to ruling and protection, and based on the “state”. The third is Mode C, which involves commodity exchange mediated by the “market”. Capitalism only emerges when the market becomes dominant and subordinates Mode A and B to its own needs.
The fourth is the hypothetical Mode D, which transcends all the other three. Each modality changes as it constrained by the domination of other modalities. For example, the form of community is first the band (under nomadism), then the tribe, then the agricultural or territorial community under imperial systems, which eventually becomes the nation under the domination of capitalist systems.
The following table summarizes Karatani’s modes of exchange:
Concerning mode A, Karatani stresses that Marx did not distinguish between the pooling of resources in nomadic bands, and the reciprocity of the gift in tribal systems. He makes that distinction very clear, though he still uses the overall name and concept of mode A (the reciprocity of the gift) to refer to this joint period, which can sometimes cause confusion. But it becomes obvious that his description of mode D (the transcendental one) is very congruent with the thesis that we may currently be at the threshold of a new type of civilization and economy based on a new mode of exchange. Very specific about the argument of Karatani is that mode D is not just a return to the reciprocity of Mode A, nor a pure nomadic band structure, but a new structure which transcends all three preceding structures. Mode A is dominated by a new form of gift exchange based mainly on the pooling of resources, i.e. the digitized commons which enable all kinds of pooling of physical and infrastructural resources. In other words, mode D is an attempt to recreate a society based on mode A, but at a higher level of complexity and integration.
What this means in our context is that Karatani marshals considerable evidence for the existence of each modality, sourced in both anthropological and historical literature. He thus recognizes different major transitions:
- A first transition occurs when the pooling of resources in nomadic bands is replaced as a dominant modality of exchange by the reciprocity-based gift economies of tribal systems. This allows a scaling from bands to clans, tribes and inter-tribal systems and, therefore, creates a world that consists of a collection of tribal mini-systems.
- A second transition occurs when the reciprocity-based systems of tribes are replaced by state systems, based on the logic of “plunder and redistribute” or “rule and protect”. This allows scaling to inter-tribal and inter-community levels and, thus, creates a world of world-empires that compete with each other.
- A third transition occurs when these systems are replaced by the market form as the dominant form of exchange. This creates a global world-market system in which nation-states compete with each other, which Karatani characterizes as a world-economy.
- Finally, he posits, and we agree with him, a new transition towards mode D, a mode of exchange that integrates the preceding ones but is dominated by the pooling that was originally dominant in the early nomadic groups. Karatani calls this modality “associationism”.
It is important to stress the following point made by Karatani. To begin with, all systems are multimodal.The four modalities (or five according to our adaptation of Karatani’s scheme) exist in some form in all systems and it is only their mutual configuration which changes. This means that transitions depend on struggles for dominance among these modalities.
This opens up thinking about the value shift or value transition, not just as the replacement of one system by another, but as an ongoing inter-modal struggle. The question then becomes, How can we think about a commons transition as a way for the commons to engage the other modalities? Just as the logic of capitalist markets attempts to commodify, the logic of the commons is an effort to commonify. There is evidence of this type of value shift in the current practices of peer to peer based, commons-producing communities.
The Current Value Shift
The first underlying operating concept here is a quest for ‘value sovereignty’. Just as there is no consensus on what constitutes good food, so communities must decide for themselves how to regulate food provisioning, through ‘food sovereignty’. Similarly, communities that are already engaged in the value transition are opting for practices that advance their ‘value sovereignty’.
An example of this is the open and contributory value accounting approach of Sensorica, an open scientific hardware community in Montreal, Canada. Its main aim is to create a wall between the various forms of income generated through the market or grants, and the actual distribution of it, i.e. a de-coupling of internal and external value. The aim is also to avoid rent extraction, not just by external forces, but by privileged internal forces, since the commons also have internal power dynamics. Thus, the system allows the identification of all types of contributions, in time, effort, but also for those contributing ‘space’ , or time on their instruments, etc. All contributions, all ‘capital’ is recognized, and through a combination of self-logging and peer review, contributors are given “karma points” to document their contributions. The social contract is that all external revenue shall flow back to all contributors, not just those directly connected to the market or government partners. It should be noted however, that the linking of contributions to income is controversial. Other approaches would de-link entirely the contributory sphere, and link income streams exclusively to the ‘added value’ services performed around the commons, in the cooperative sphere.
A slightly different approach is used by Ethos in the UK. Ethos recognizes two types of shares. Regular shares are given to those that directly create recognized market value, but virtual shares are granted to those who contribute in a generic way to the common resources that are used in specific projects. The social contract here is that these virtual shares will be recognized as legal shares in five years time, sold to the market, and therefore also realize (monetary) value. Thus the value is here eventually shared with all contributors. None of these solutions is of course perfect, but they attempt to create a form of value sovereignty, even as their members are obliged to engage with the market in order to create livelihoods.
Note here, though, an important shift — from the use of commodified labor to produce commodities sold on the market, to contributions that create common, shared value.
A second approach has been theorized by the Telekommunisten group in Berlin and by their main authors Dmytri Kleiner and Baruch Gottlieb. They propose an inter-modal approach of ‘reverse cooptation’ of value streams, called ‘transvestment’, i.e. the transfer of value from one modality of value creation to another. An example of this is the ‘capped returns’ model of the ethical entrepreneurial coalition Enspiral in New Zealand. In this model, a wall is created between the investors, whose returns are capped, and the autonomy of the purpose-driven social entrepreneurial ventures. Through this mechanism, external and potentially extractive capital is ‘subsumed’ and disciplined to become “cooperative capital.” Significantly, once the capped return contract has been fulfilled, the resources are then ceremoniously given to the commons.. We believe that the Rooted Internet model with Pedro Jardim, is linked to this practice as well. Investors in Rooted Internet ventures also are confined to capped returns, and cannot influence the management of the participating purpose-driven entities. It should be noted that in the introduction to the special issue of The Commoner on Care Work, Silivia Federici et al. mention very similar practices in the sphere of the social commons.
Silke Helfrich, in her keynote at the Urban Commons conference in Bologna last year, described the emergence of pooling strategies for material provisioning, called Pool&Share, which combine user communities with specific types of payment for goods and services. The goal is to prevent the creation of a producer-consumer divide. A well-known example of this are the Community-Supported Agriculture models, which create a solidarity between producers and consumers engaged in one joint network.
It should be stressed that these examples are not just marginal, but part of a broad gamut of self-organized civil initiatives. This has been shown by recent surveys by Tine de Moor, for the Netherlands (in the booklet ‘Homo Cooperans’), and confirmed by Oikos, a Belgian think tank, for the Flanders, which have seen an explosion of new provisioning systems and value practices.
However, it is clear that the individual initiatives we have described in this emerging sphere of a ‘commonified’ economy, and its value regimes, have as yet to reach a working rapprochement with the dominant extractive regime. And also, while it can recognize a much wider variety of contributions, it cannot as yet recognize the general conditions in which it has to operate, and that includes the unrecognized care work that commoners themselves benefit from. While grassroots experimentations can be imagined, this it seems to us, remains a job for the wider polity.
So we conclude with one of the leading questions: Can we imagine a value regime that seamlessly recognizes all contributions, direct and indirect, which create and maintain the wellbeing of all human subjects, and the wider natural environment that is the condition for human life?
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]]>A note on the post-capitalist strategy of the P2P Foundation
How to create a Post-Capitalist strategy? As expressed in our previous posts — where we describe the work of Kojin Karatani— we agree that the present system is based on a trinity of capital-state-nation, and that this reflects the integration of three modes of exchange. Capital represents a particular market form based on the endless accumulation of capital. The state is the entity that keeps the system together through coercion, law and redistribution (Karatani calls this function ‘rule and protect’), and the nation is the ‘imagined community’ that is the locus of the survival of community and reciprocity. A post-capitalist strategy must necessarily overcome all three in a new integration.
Disrupting Capital Accumulation
Overcoming the capitalist form of the market calls for a disruption in capital accumulation. This can and must be done in two ways:
First of all, as the capitalist market requires labor as a commodity it then follows that overcoming capitalism means refusing to work for capitalism as commodity labor. This is why we strongly advocate for Open Cooperativism: entrepreneurial vehicles where commoners work for themselves and the common good of the larger community and society. This work takes place in democratic associations that create autonomous livelihoods around commons which are, in turn, protected from value capture through membranes such as reciprocity-based licenses. These organizations, focused on commoners and their livelihoods, rather than engaging in capital accumulation, foster cooperative accumulation in service of the commons, through mechanisms in which individual, collective and societal interests converge.
Commons-based open contributory systems are designed so that commoners’ personal motivations can actively contribute to the creation of a common good; as opposed to this being the hypothetical and accidental derivative of generalized selfishness. Measures like a basic income — in conjunction with “commonified” social services— would also substantially remove the compulsion for workers to sell their labor power, while strengthening the capacity to create alternative economic entities. However, in the meantime, we must proceed with the reality that exists today, and create our own funding and resource allocation mechanisms.
The second way to withdraw from capitalism and capital accumulation is by removing our cooperation as consumers. Without workers as producers and workers as consumers, there can be no reproduction of capital. As consumers, we need to design and implement new forms of consumption derived from the creation of open cooperatives. When workers and commoners mutualize their consumption in pooled market forms such as community-supported agriculture and the like, they are not buying products which bolster capital accumulation. Instead, the contribute to the cooperative accumulation discussed above. Therefore, to the degree that we systematically organize new provisioning and consumption systems outside of the sphere of capital, we also undermine its reproduction and capital accumulation. In addition, we create ‘transvestment’ vehicles, which allow for the inclusion of capital but subordinated to the new commons and market forms developed through peer production; this creates a flow of value from the system of capital to the system of the commons economy. Faced with a crisis of capital accumulation, it is entirely realistic to expect new streams of value seeking their place within the commons economy. Instead of the cooptation of the commons economy by capital, in the form of the netarchical capitalist platforms which capture value from the commons, we co opt capital into the commons by subjecting it to the rules of the Commons. Current examples of transvestment strategies are the capped returns model pioneered by Enspiral, or the open value accounting system created by Sensorica.
The Post-Capitalist State
We can also achieve similar transvestment effects with the state! Our strategy for a ‘partner state’ is to ‘commonify’ the state. Imagine that we are able to transform state functions so they actually empower and enable the autonomy of the citizens as individuals and groups. As such, they’d have the tools to create common resources, instead of being passive ‘consumers’ of state services. We abolish the separation of the state from the population by increasing democratic and participatory decision-making. We consider the public service as a commons, giving every citizen and resident the right to work in these commonified public services. We make public-commons agreements so that stakeholder communities can co-govern the public services that affect them. But we don’t ‘withdraw’ completely from the state because we need common good institutions for everyone within a given territory, institutions that create equal capacities for every citizen to contribute to the commons and the ethical market organizations.
From Nations to Commons
In a previous article we have argued that the capital-state-nation trinity is no longer able to balance global capitalism, because it has created a very powerful transnational financial class, which is able to move resources globally and discipline the state and the nations that dare rebalance it. Our answer is to create translocal and transnational civic and economic entities that can eventually rebalance and counter the power of the transnational capitalist class. This is realistic given that peer production technologies create global open design communities which mutualize knowledge on a global scale, and because global and ethical market organizations can be created around such communities. Even as we produce locally, we can also organize trans-local productive communities. These trans-local productive communities, no longer bound by the nation-state, project the need for and require forms of governance able to operate on the global scale. In this way, they also transcend the power of the nation-state. As we explained in our strategy regarding the global capitalist market, these forces can operate against the accumulation of capital at the global level, and create global counter-hegemonic power. In all likelihood, this will create global governance mechanisms and institutions that are no longer inter-national, but transnational (while also avoiding the patterns of transnational capitalism).
The New Integrative Trinity
In conclusion, our aim is to replace the dysfunctional capital-state-nation trinity with the creation of a new integrative trinity: Commons – Ethical Market – Partner State. This new trinity would go beyond the limitations of the nation-state by operating transnationally, transcending the older and dysfunctional trinity and avoiding global domination of private capital. Citizens could develop cosmopolitan subjectivities through these processes, as well as an allegiance to local and transnational commons-oriented communities of value creation and value distribution.”
- This is the third in a series of articles by Michel Bauwens exploring the current thinking of the P2P Foundation. To see the rest of this series, click here. To read more of our original writing, see our original material category.
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]]>“SENSORICA is not a corporation, it is not a coop, it is not an non profit, it is not an LLP. It is an open value network. From a legal perspective, it is a non-registered association. It is an open network of freelancers that coordinate and co-manage their work using some IT tools (the NRP-VAS) and some special governance. If you still don’t understand what SENSORICA is and how it operates please don’t panic. It is something new and it takes a bit of time to get accustomed. It is new, but at the same time it is very similar to other new things that have emerged recently, like Bitcoin for example. We can say that
Tiberius and his colleagues try to explain how Sensorica succeeds in transferring value from the classic economy to the new peer production economy.
Excerpted from Tiberius Brastaviceanu, Scott Laughlin, and Jim Anastassiou:
“How do you sign a contract with a loose network of individuals? Who is going to show up to do the work? How can we guarantee that a swarm of people converging on tasks from all four corners of the planet via the Internet will deliver on time, and with the required specifications? Who is responsible and accountable?
In our opinion, SENSORICA is the most advanced commons-based peer production network applied to hardware production, using infrastructure and methodologies that have been specifically tailored for open networks. We claim that the OVN model is able to sustain deterministic economic processes and accountability, while preserving the open and fluid nature of networks, while maximizing individual autonomy. This new ability of open innovation and peer production networks to generate predictable outputs, demonstrated by SENSORICA, was the main topic of the meeting with Jenn Gustetic from the White House, in June of 2015.
The role of SENSORICA in the service cases enumerated earlier shaped as the interface between the crowd and the classical institution. In other words, input from the crowd can be structured and channeled towards solving someone’s problem, through SENSORICA’s infrastructure, methodologies and governance. But let’s not get confused, we are not talking about a crowdsourcing platform. So what is the difference? A crowdsourcing platform like Upwork is an intermediary between companies and the crowd: the company posts a problem with a prize for someone who can provide the solution; the platform takes a cut. Taskrabbit is the Uber of cheap labor, connecting people who need chores done with people who can do them, while taking a cut from their transactions. In both cases, the intermediary platform is owned by a company and those who supply the work aren’t organized, they respond individually to demands. In the SENSORICA model, no one in particular really owns the platform. Affiliates of the network organize, they form groups to tackle complex problems for long periods of time. In the cases discussed here, the size of a project is comparable to a startup, reaching up to 10 individuals. The longest duration of steady work is 6 months and ticking. These are the first pilot projects, but the potential is for thousands of individuals per project, which amounts to a large size enterprise, for long-term projects that can take years. SENSORICA is really showing the signs of a new system of production that can operate at large scale. But as an R&D service provider, it can be already be seen by classical institutions as R&D on demand, as an adjacent, very cohesive R&D operation open to the crowd, funneling in low cost and rapidly evolving open innovation. Practically the entire revenue generated is split among participants, with only 5% going to maintain and to develop the infrastructure, which is under the total control of participants.
At the third iteration, the service beneficiary gets a fast paced innovation at a quarter of the normal cost. Even more interestingly, the cost cuts aren’t transferred to those who provide the service. They are actual cost savings that result from a heavy use and rapid remix of open source, from the mutualization of resources within the network, from the collaborative nature of activities, from the elimination of bureaucracy, and other inefficiencies that come from lack of motivation. On the contrary, everyone is paid with the same measure, according to the Canadian labor market, no matter where the contributor lives. More precisely, within SENSORICA those who live in Pakistan aren’t paid less. And if that wasn’t enough, on top of providing rapid innovation at a fraction of the cost to classical institutions, so that they can maintain jobs, at the same time sensoricans increase the value of the global commons, because everything they do is open source. All the data about the economic activity within SENSORICA is open to the public, we can’t make this up!
This mutually beneficial economic relationship between classical institutions and SENSORICA, as an open innovation and peer production network, can be seen as a bridge between the classical capitalist economy and the p2p economy, as a channel for transfer of resources from the old economy to the new.”
Example 1: The Barda case
The Barda periscope project was the first implementation of a new open project development methodology designed by Fernando, Tiberius and Lynn, in the context of a service provided to a client. This methodology was formalized in SENSORICA’s network resource planning (NRP) software through a concept named Workflow recipes, which are time-dependent and deliverables-dependent bundles of Processes associated with a Project (a context of work). This methodology consists of the following steps: Project initiation, Design considerations, Design, Prototyping, and Product. All the contributions to the Project were logged within this structure.
In order to reduce the perceived risk for the client, the Project was divided into milestones. A cost estimation was produced for the client for every milestone. The agreement was to get paid at the end of every milestone. Every milestone was to be delivered with complete documentation, open source style. The client could stop the process at the end of any milestone and decide to switch to another organization to complete the Project. The documentation provided a guarantee for rapid continuation. The burden was on SENSORICA to provide a good service, at the level of satisfaction of the client, in order to complete all the milestones.
Moreover, the activity logs in the NRP and the associated documentation provided the client with full and real time access to the process. Coordination on different issues and tasks took place in context, directly in the working documents, and the client was invited to provide feedback.
A problem emerged during this project: very rapidly, the work documents became long and the client’s ability to follow the process was hindered. We spent time formatting the documents to make their content more transparent, but these measures didn’t diminish the time spent by the client to effectively follow the process. The situation was more complex, because this was a three parties relation, between the SENSORICA team, Barda and Parcs Canada, Barda’s client. Information produced by sensoricans had to be reformatted to match Barda’s project management structure and the language used between Barda and Parc Canada. In the end, Barda provided sensoricans with a template for 3-way communication, based on their own open issues and tasks.
The Barda periscope project was a small project, involving only a few contributors (see project in SENSORICA’s NRP-VAS). Coordination was fairly easy at this small scale.
Example 2: The Queen’s University case
Joshua Pearce is a professor at Queen’s University and Michigan Tech University. He is dedicated to open science and sustainable technologies, and had been following SENSORICA since 2013. He is the author of the Quantifying the Value of Open Source Hardware Development paper. For years, Joshua’s team has designed multiple scientific instruments by building on various open source projects. These instruments have been released under open licenses. In 2015, he decided to take a risk and transfer to the SENSORICA network the task of designing an instrument used in the characterization of photovoltaic materials. This was an important shift in Joshua team’s approach, from in house development with inspiration from open source projects to crowdsourcing development through the SENSORICA distributed network. The main goal was to create an instrument with a community around it, which would increase the speed of innovation, insure continuity of the product, and increase its diffusion rate to universities around the world. At the same time, the PV characterization project was also seen as a pilot project to build an interface between the crowd and a classical institution, Queen’s University, through SENSORICA’s p2p infrastructure, open project methodologies, and governance.
The open science movement is building momentum. It started with open publications, increasing access to scientific knowledge. This initiative became more nuanced, proposing early stage sharing of data and information (prior to the publication), sharing of unpublished past results and even sharing of lessons learned from failed experiments. In parallel with the development on the distribution side, the movement also built infrastructure for data sharing in resource-intensive domains of inquiry, like genomics for example, as well as social networking platforms designed for scientists and scientific projects (like Research Gate). Recently, we have seen initiatives for redesigning scientific instruments that are in tune with the open science philosophy. New instruments are acquiring new characteristics: they become shareable, they facilitate socialization of scientific activities, they become modular and interoperable, as well as easily serviceable and upgradable. Efforts also go into redesigning scientific labs, making them more collaborative, interconnected, accessible through teleproxmity, etc. SENSORICA leads the way to open science, as one can see in this presentation. The PV characterization project incorporates many of these new aspects.
This project was started by incorporating all the lessons learned in the Barda periscope project. There was a difference in scale: more individuals contributed to the design and the prototyping of the PV characterization device (11 affiliates and over 200 logged contributions). The requirements for accountability and responsibility were also higher, since we were now dealing with a University. All this put more pressure on our support processes. We created a Project responsible role, to be the interface between the University and the SENSORICA OVN. Financial incentives were attached to it. Moreover, the roles of outreach (find skills), orientation (help new affiliates get accustomed), coordination (make sure that all affiliates are on the same page) and facilitation (make sure that all affiliates get the help they need) became very important. We experimented with new tools for orientation that proved to be more effective. A specific forum was created for the project, in order to focus discussions. The PV project was also more complex, its documentation proliferated faster, which lead to the need of content maps in order to ease the navigation.
During the course of the project we noticed that the outreach function was very important and not so easy to finetune. The answers to our signals propagated on social media were slow to come and the conversion to an active contributor was low. We attributed part of that to a poor general understanding of SENSORICA’s OVN model, including its system of incentives. At the beginning of the project, we grossly underestimated the efforts required for outreach, for generating the content to be broadcasted, for establishing a constant social media presence, for mapping the open source ecosystem, targeting specific pools of talent, and establishing trust relations. The project was run below the critical mass of open projects and therefore required a more centralized form of governance.
Example 3: The IoT for heavy industry case
NOTE: We cannot publicly disclose the name of our sponsor in the IoT for heavy industry applications case.
In December 2015, sensoricans were contacted by a Montreal-based company to help develop an IoT solution for applications in heavy industry. They wanted to make their product “smart” and able to predict its life expectancy. The requirements consisted of a mesh network of sensors that send data to a cloud for analysis, in order to predict failure. The race to be first to market set the pace for fast innovation and low cost. The company crafted a business model based on services, not on selling the hardware, which is fully compatible with the open source development that SENSORICA can offer. The agreement was that everything that SENSORICA develops can be released under an open source licence, with no restrictions for Sensoricans to remix this technology in other projects, including commercial ones.
Thus, the company became the sponsor of an open source IoT applications development project. CAKE, the custodian of the SENSORICA OVN takes in financial contributions from the company and distributes them to network affiliates, as a reward for their involvement to the project, as fiscal sponsorship. The company is not a client of CAKE, since this a three party relationship, between the company, CAKE and the world, the later benefiting from the open source IoT applications design, and not simply a one-to-one service exchange between two organizations, even if the company can draw a direct benefit from this relationship.
The Sensor Network project started almost in free form. The first tacit agreement was that the sponsor informs development based on their knowledge about these applications. Decisions on development were to be made during scrum meetings between Sensoricans and employees of the sponsor, Sensoricans would work on tasks, log their time contributions and get some financial compensation every two weeks, relative to their efforts. As the project unfolded, we felt the need for better planning and cost estimation. The first improvement was to manually create a map of content generated by SENSORICA’s R&D activities. This brought the idea of being able to generate dynamic content maps, either from the NRP-VAS (every development process has R&D documents as deliverables) or from our CRM (content management system), which is not yet implemented. In order to allow the sponsor of the project to follow almost in real time metrics about the project, we created an experimental dashboard. In the end, we realized that we needed to synchronize the sponsor’s ERP with SENSORICA’s NRP. We crafted a shared language and project development structure, and the agreement was to keep track of work in both places. This brings the need to create interfaces between the two management systems, which hasn’t yet been implemented. Moreover, we also decided to produce cost estimates for future tasks, to allow the sponsor to better plan its budget. All these measures had a positive impact on our relationship by making our activities much more predictable and auditable, and by increasing the level of reliability of the network.
As the value created during this project increased, the project sponsor realized its first-to-market advantage was in potential danger if the technical work was put in the context of their direct business interest in a public way. This sparked an interesting debate on openness (access to participation) and transparency (access to information). We drew on SENSORICA’s past experience with a project that was sensitive to transparency, and implemented an open and semi-transparent project model. In more concrete terms, anyone can join the project, which preserves the openness aspect. Most of the technical information generated is public from the start, but some documents that contain information about how different components can be used in an application similar to the business case of our sponsor were made non-public. Project affiliates need to sign a non-publication agreement for these documents clustered into a separate folder, but there is no restriction related to the use of this information in any other project. All these non-public documents have a date for publication, which is related to the sponsor’s market deployment strategy and pace. We believe that in through this arrangement we preserved the nature of the SENSORICA OVN, while mitigating the risks perceived by the sponsor, which led a stronger synergy between the two entities.”
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