Group items tagged

the long term replacement of capitalism--an economy which socializes costs and privatizes benefits--with an economy of democratic cooperation

n economy is an ecosystem, a cyclical whole that includes processes of creation (the "original production" of natural resources by geological, biological, and energetic forces), production (human transformation of resources into goods and services), exchange, consumption (perhaps more appropriately called "use"), the processing of waste, and the recycling of surplus (sometimes called "investment").

The worker coop movement must work to build broader alliances, holistic economic and social visions, and contribute to the creation of not only more worker coops, but a transformative social movement capable of changing the culture and economy--the "social ecosystem"--in which worker coops struggle to exist.

Operating successfully in a capitalist market, worker coops can support movements for social and economic transformation

a cooperative solidarity economy

Worker cooperatives are a particular--and effective--structure for democratically organizing the production of goods and the provision of services.

link these interventions together--at every point of the economic cycle

But even a solidarity economy movement cannot succeed without being intimately linked to broader social change work. It is our connections with the work of anti-racism, feminism, queer liberation, environmental justice, ecological sustainablility, immigrant's rights, counter-recruitment and peace advocacy, labor organizing, grassroots community development, and other movements for cultural and insitutional change that will generate the collective power and momentum needed to effect long-term transformation and generate widespread, committed support for worker cooperatives as economic and social-change insitutions.

Indeed, to create conditions under which their success is increasingly possible, worker cooperatives must work to generate, sustain and support institutions at all other points of the economic cycle.

constructing reliable markets

for goods and services produced by worker cooperatives.

from a passive place of "entering markets" to an active place of constructing them

What does this "movement building" look like?

the creation of a shared story and through this, the development of long-term solidarity between worker cooperatives and other groups working for democratic, community-based economies such as local currencies, consumer cooperatives, housing coops and intentional communities, economic justice advocacy groups, neighborhood associations, local food system projects and more

solidarity economy

Further examples from the solidarity economy movement outside of the U.S. abound. I delve into some of these more deeply in GEO's recent collaborative issue with Dollars and Sense (see Ethan Miller, "Other Economies Are Possible".)

We must, instead, work to transform the very terms of the economic game.

Green Worker Cooperatives

Red Emma's

Wooden Shoe Books

Electric Embers

Riseup

Gaiahost Collective

Brattleboro Tech Collective

pioneers of cross-sector movement-building

it is the work that we as cooperators must embrace if we choose to believe that another economy, and another world, is possible

Entrepreneurs could sidestep the VCs by turning to a “swarm” of small investors — and maybe supplant the entire VC system. By the end of the summer, he’d raised more than a million dollars in cryptocurrency. The legality of the model is uncertain,

High hopes for a liberating Internet have devolved into the dominance of a few mega-companies and the NSA’s watchful algorithms. Platforms entice users to draw their communities into an apparently free and open commons, only to gradually enclose it by tweaking terms of service, diluting privacy, or charging fees for essential features.

Facebook started flocking to Ello

The line between workers and customers has never been so blurry. Online platforms depend on their users

looking for ways to build platforms of their own.

VC-backed sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber have caused trouble for legacy industries, but gone is the illusion that they are doing it with actual sharing.

OuiShare, which connects sharing-economy entrepreneurs around the world

it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.

Loomio is now being used by governments, organizations, and schools; a significant portion of the current usage comes from Spain’s ascendant political party, Podemos.

new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between.

aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.

Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “zero marginal cost society” in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations.

People are recognizing that doing business differently will require changing who gets to own what.

form of ownership

Cooperative intelligence

Occupy’s kind of direct democracy and made it available to the world in the form of an app — Loomio

It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus — though they prefer the term “collaboration” — about decisions that affect their lives.

Enspiral, an “open value network” of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.

Rather than giving up on ownership, people are looking for a different way of practicing it.

The worker cooperative is an old model that’s attracting new interest among the swelling precariat masses

Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits

multi-stakeholder cooperative — one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once

“It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”

Sensorica pays workers for their contributions to the product. Unlike Sovolve, they participate in the company democratically. Everything from revenues to internal criticism is out in the open, wiki-style, for insiders and outsiders alike to see.

Only one device has been sold

Bitcoin

makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs,

The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum,

to develop decentralized social networks,

even an entirely new Internet

Swarm’s competition makes it hard not to notice the inequalities built into the models vying to disrupt the status quo. Bitcoin’s micro-economy holds the dubious distinction of being more unequal than the global economy as a whole. On a sharing platform, who owns, and who just rents? In an economy of cooperatives, who gets to be a member, and who gets left out?

Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes — it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows. This recognition has been built into some of the most significant efforts under the banner of the so-called “new economy” movement. They’re often offline, but that makes them no less innovative.

connecting them to large anchor institutions in their communities; hospitals and universities with deep pockets can help a new enterprise become viable much more quickly than it can on its own

Government is an important source of support, too. Perhaps more than some go-it-aloners in tech culture might like to admit, a new economy will need new public policies

The early followers Francis of Assisi at first sought to do away with property altogether

There are many ways to own. Simply giving up on ownership, however, will mean that those who actually do own the tools that we rely on to share will control them.

changing what owning means altogether.

reliance on horizontal networks and distributed power within communities

opposed to the competition between hierarchical organisations

inequality

contradictions

Empowerment in an era of growing inequalities

the exact opposite of capitalism

the exact opposite of homo economicus’ iconic egotism

Two main groups of criticism have emerged: one on ownership structures and the other on employment.

Growing economic inequalities

fueled both by patrimonial inequalities

income inequalities

If we want to assess whether it should be seen as the first part of a new economic paradigm or as capitalism’s latest trick to survive at all costs, we have to analyze its likely effects on inequality.

From a collective standpoint, it might well be better to have access to a resource rather than owning it.

But if someone asks you to free yourself from all earthly possessions, you should always ask: if it’s not mine, then who owns it?

Sometimes, owning is a way not to be owned!

sharing economy: after all, it mostly consists of venture capitalist-backed startups

Employees and customers are but a mean to an end, and in general, a good way to maximize return on investment is to get your customers to pay as much as possible (non-price competitiveness) and on the other side to pay your employees as little as possible (price competitiveness).

shareholders are not peers (from Latin par, “equal”), but overlords

your business model is based on your ability to sustain a community

This point is the most controversial of all. Sharing economy services could accelerate the phenomenon of job destruction.

Despite all those nice speeches about empowerment and entrepreneurship, people in the sharing economy are nothing but an extreme precariat

Real wages started stagnating while productivity per capita continued to increase.

a new deal had to be made: people would no longer be paid according to the value they actually produced, but they would get — seemingly — unlimited access to credit.

computers and robots will soon replace most human labor anyway. Wage labor cannot be saved, and rather than fighting long-lost battles, people should start thinking seriously about solutions such as Universal Basic Income.

neo-liberal revolution has left the basic structures of welfare

relatively untouched

If you cannot predict something with a reasonable amount of certainty, stop arguing endlessly about it and start acting towards the outcome you would like to see

What happens next, no one can tell. Are Silicon Valley venture capitalistss currently being fooled into creating the embryo of a P2P economic paradigm, in which they will lose most of their influence? Or are the enthusiasts talking about empowerment being tricked into creating a new kind of serfdom?

ancient Skeptic philosophers

epoché

remarks

I will make two

First, we should avoid using the concept of a “sharing economy”

Men are both altruistic and egoistic, and that’s perfectly fine.

Will big companies be able to face new competition from startups and win over new customers? If that is your main concern, you should probably stop talking about communities and peers. If the collaborative economy cannot help you solve our growing inequality problem, it should be of no interest to you.

"humanizing" the capitalist economy

a struggle seeking to build an economy and culture of solidarity beyond capitalism

often considered part of the social economy,

"économie solidaire"

An organisation seeing itself as part of the solidarity economy generally goes beyond achieving purely social aims: it aims to put right an injustice by expressing solidarity

Miller, Ethan.

Grassroots Economic Organizing

“Intellectual property”

continuous capital accumulation

overuse and depletion of natural resources

Scarcity Engineering

Scarcity engineering is what we call this continuous attempt to undo natural abundance where it occurs.

We could call this pseudo-abundance,

the ability of this privatized knowledge to create profits

A good recent example of this “patent lag” effect is the extraordinary growth of 3D printing, once the technology lost its patents.

Perpetually Increasing Social Injustice

The global open design communities engaging in peer production and mutualization of productive knowledge have no such perverse incentives. These communities design to ensure participation and are “naturally” inclined to design sustainable products and services.

To what degree does the Commons and peer-to-peer production function as a potential solution for these three interrelated structural crises of capitalism?

Digital networks (such as the internet) have recently enabled a new type of Commons where the knowledge required for human action and value creation has been mutualized. This has led to global open design communities, which jointly create open knowledge pools (e.g. Wikipedia), free software (e.g. the Linux Operating System) or open designs to enable physical production

Commons-based peer production emerges when technology enables the creation of open, contributory systems that create Commons.

more and more wealth into fewer hands through compound interest, rent seeking, purchasing legislation, etc.

The privatization and patenting of knowledge and technical solutions hampers the widespread distribution of necessary innovations. No such impediments exist in the open contributory systems of peer production communities, where innovation anywhere in the network is instantly available to the whole.

Peer production, independent of the profit motive, invites and facilitates the creation of solidarity-based forms of economic entities. Being generative towards human communities, these entities are more likely based on socially just forms of value sharing.

The Revolution Is Already Happening

responses take three forms:1. The sustainability and ecological/environmental movements, attempting to find solutions for the planet’s survival;2. The “Open,” “Commons” and “Sharing” movements, stressing the need for shareable knowledge and mutualized physical resources;3. The cooperative and solidarity economy, focusing on fairness.

The good news is that Commons-based peer production is the best way to bring these three necessary aspects together into one coherent system. However, for this to happen, the various movements need enabling tools and capacities. An example is the open source circular economy

Similarly, open and platform cooperativism — the convergence of socially just forms of production with shareable knowledge — allows all contributing citizens to create fair, generative livelihoods around the shared resources they need and co-create.

We’ve seen post-capitalist practices emerging since the late 20th century — for example, the 1983 invention of the universally available browser. Citizens have been empowered to create value through open contributory systems; these create universally available knowledge, which in turn can be used for material production.

emerging globally

new types of investors, operating along principles of ethics or sustainability, or working on moving properties off the market.

inventing new ways to enable, finance and govern community-run spaces.

European municipalities responded to this challenge in a variety of ways.

The question if community capital can really cure the voids left behind by the welfare state has generated fierce debates in the past years.

crowdfunded urban infrastructures.

in the course of the economic crisis, many European cities witnessed the emergence of a parallel welfare infrastructure:

This collection brings together protagonists from various cities to help shaping a new European culture of urban development based on community-driven initiatives, civic economic models and cooperative ownership

participatory budgeting,

crowdfunding

community organisations

invest

pre-financed

some cities chose to support local economy and create more resilient neighbourhoods with self-sustaining social services through grant systems

priority neighbourhoods

The granted projects, chosen through an open call, have to prove their economic sustainability and have to spend the full amount in one year.

the public sector plays an important role in strengthening civil society in some European cities, many others witnessed the emergence of new welfare services provided by the civic economy completely outside or without any help by the public sector

n some occasions, community contribution appears in the form of philanthropist donation to support the construction, renovation or acquisition of playgrounds, parks, stores, pubs or community spaces. In others, community members act as creditors or investors in an initiative that needs capital, in exchange for interest, shares or the community ownership of local assets

Besides aggregating resources from individuals to support particular cases, community infrastructure projects are also helped by ethical investors.

Creating community ownership over local assets and keeping profits benefit local residents and services is a crucial component of resilient neighbourhoods.

complementary currencies

The fact that many of the hundreds of projects supported by civic crowdfunding platforms are community spaces, underlines two phenomena: the void left behind by a state that gradually withdrew from certain community services, and the urban impact of community capital created through the aggregation of individual resources.

In October 2009, we co-promoted the first Free Culture Forum (FCF)

The FCF released a Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge

The Charter lists a variety of ways of achieving sustainability developed by initiatives based on free culture principles, some more consolidated, some still experimental

The Charter also promotes the principle of combining several sources of finance, as a way of guaranteeing independence of the creators.

What we call the Free Culture Movements comprises a wide range of experiences mainly emerging in the framework of the internet and the digital revolution.

We are still living in a capitalist society; and in the last twenty years, one major change has been the qualitatively new importance of information, communication and knowledge both in the economy and in society at large.

communities of highly individualised members

the potential opened up by the new technologies

This goes together with a second question we have often dealt with, that is, why these ‘networked forms’ are emerging in so many movements and indeed in so many aspects of present-day society.

these forces have one of their fundamental roots in the movements of the 1960s and 70s and specifically in two salient facts: the shake-up of the Fordist, patriarchal, hierarchical institutions of post-war capitalism and the (connected) repercussions of the massive expansion of higher education.

We need to better conceptualise the anthropological transformation which underlies these new patterns of social relationships

Which leads us to a third area of issues: the movements we analyse have been emerging from the very core of societal innovation of the last decades. What do we call this? Post-Fordism? The knowledge economy? Informationalism? Cognitive capitalism?

When we started Networked Politics, we wanted first of all to deepen the comprehension of the problems that had emerged in the innovative forms and principles of organisation in the global movements. It was in this way that we came to discover parallels with the organisational forms that had emerged in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement, as well as with various experiences of web communities of collaborative production

as producing common resources.

logics based on openness to the ‘outside’

the logic behind the internet itself

But there is also another aspect of this social nature of production that needs to be noted: in many senses, the flows of production appeared to shift away from the formal boundaries of what is traditionally considered productive work, to spread into society at large.

the social nature of these processes seems to put pressure on any regulatory, governance and accounting system closed within the boundaries of formally isolated organisations.

this configuration also brings people to questioning the adequacy, legitimacy and efficiency of property regimes as we know them, be they private or state mechanisms.

The increasing rediscovery of the notion of commons by these movements and many beyond them – has its roots here.

When we look at the qualities which need to be mobilised and at the forms of organisation of production in these spheres, we observe an increasing importance of attitudes and capacities

creativity, flexibility, development of information, continuous learning, problem-solving, initiative, communicational and relational skills, decision-making, attention, experiential/practical/”tacit” knowledge.

embedded in individuals and are not easily reproducible and controllable through planned command or automated mechanisms.

depend on motivations which are not easily reducible to the monetary

a blurring of entrepreneurial and managerial functions and of dependent work

another dimension where the experience of the FC-movements is interesting. There are experiments of a different kind around these problems

related to the meshing and mobilisation of different motivations, non-hierarchical division of labour, collaboration and coordination, and so on.

working on the basis of a distributional/sharing

First, where knowledge, information and communication play a central role, the processes of production appear intrinsically and more immediately social. They benefit and rely on flows and networks of production which go beyond the formal boundaries of any specific organisation (not to say single individuals).

a third cluster of problems

The increased immaterial and social nature of the processes of production and of products is creating a series of problems in the systems of measures.

Such problems are evidently further complicated by the digital revolution, which made it possible that a digital product, once created, can be potentially reproduced “easier, faster, ubiquitously and almost free”

In this lies another clue that fundamental difficulties are emerging, which point toward what could be called a crisis of the system of value – which, indeed, has many other roots, well beyond this realm.

Fordist forms of production, to be deployed in a non-destructive way, required the invention of a new institutional framework, which crystallised in the Keynesian revolution; which, in turn, to be effectively deployed required the invention of a new system of (public and private) measures and accounts, which culminated in the famous – and today widely contested concept of – Gross National Product. Doesn’t this resonate with the present?

Moreover, the algorithm was written in such a way as to guarantee a steady ‘production’ of these strings, or bitcoins, over time and in response to the computing power devoted by users in order to help track transfers and, thus, in order collectively to maintain The Ledger.

Lastly, to cap the supply of bitcoins, and thus safeguard their value, the algorithm guaranteed that the maximum number of these strings, or bitcoins, could only grow (given the algorithm’s structure) to 21 million units by the year 2040. Once it reached that quantity, its ‘production’ would cease and the users of bitcoins would have to do with these 21 million units.

the new currency on the basis of faith in the crudest version of the ‘monetarist’ Quantity Theory of Money (i.e. the idea that the value of money depended solely on the quantity of money supplied to the public) and, thus, aimed at creating the digital equivalent to… gold.

ust like gold, there are two ways in which bitcoins can be acquired: One is to buy them using dollars, chickens, silk, honey, whatever… The other is to ‘dig’ for them like 19th century gold diggers dug for gold. To that intent, Mr ‘Nakamoto’ designed his brilliant algorithm in a manner that allowed for ‘bitcoin digging’.

bitcoin users must make available computing power to the bitcoin users’ community so that everyone can ‘see’ the Ledger, in order to ensure perfect community ownership of the transactions’ record, as opposed to trusting some government agency (e.g. the Fed) or some private corporation that may have its own agenda.

here are two insurmountable flaws that make bitcoin a highly problematic currency: First, the bitcoin social economy is bound to be typified by chronic deflation. Secondly, we have already seen the rise of a bitcoin aristocracy

First, deflation is unavoidable in the bitcoin community because the maximum supply of bitcoins is fixed to 21 million bitcoins and approximately half of them have already been ‘minted’ at a time when very, very few goods and services transactions are denominated in bitcoins.

the available quantity of bitcoins per each unit of goods and services will be falling causing deflation.

Secondly, two major faultlines are developing, quite inevitably, within the bitcoin economy. The first faultline has already been mentioned. It is the one that divides the ‘bitcoin aristocracy’ from the ‘bitcoin poor’, i.e. from the latecomers who must buy into bitcoin at increasing dollar and euro prices. The second faultline separates the speculators from the users

; i.e. those who see bitcoin as a means of exchange from those who see in it as a stock of value.

in the case of bitcoin speculative demand outstrips transactions demand by a mile.

Can these two flaws be corrected? Would it be possible to calibrate the long-term supply of bitcoins in such a way as to ameliorate for the deflationary effects described above while tilting the balance from speculative to transactions demand for bitcoins? To do so we would need a Bitcoin Central Bank, which will of course defeat the very purpose of having a fully decentralised digital currency like bitcoin.

The Crash of 2008 has infused our societies with enormous scepticism on the role of the authorities, both government and Central Banks. It is quite natural that many dream of a currency that politicians, bankers and central bankers cannot manipulate; a currency of the people by the people for the people. Bitcoin has emerged as the great white hope of something of the sort. Alas, the hope it brings to many people’s hearts and minds is false. And the reason is simple: While it is true that local communities have, in the past, generated successful communitarian currencies (that enabled them to improve welfare in their midst, especially at a time of acute economic crises), there can be no de-politicised currency capable of ‘powering’ an advanced, industrial society.

The 1920s thus demonstrates the impossibility of an apolitical money supply. Even though the monetary authorities were insisting on a stable correspondence between the quantity of paper money and gold, the financial sector was boosting the money supply inexorably. Should the authorities stop them from so doing? If they had, the Edisons and the Fords would have never flourished, and capitalism would have failed to produce all the goodies that it did

To the extent that bitcoin attempts to emulate the Gold Standard, if a large portion of economic activity is denominated in bitcoin, the dilemmas of the 1920s will return to plague the bitcoin economy.

The reason that money is and can only be political is that the only way of steering a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of dangerous ponzi growth and stagnation is to exercise a degree of rational, collective control over the supply of money.

And since this control is bound to be political, in the sense that different monetary policies will affect different groups of people differently, the only decent manner in which such control can be exercised is through a democratic, collective agency.

collectively our choices and agency are the ultimate guarantors of any values we may wish to secure

They can create their own cultural spaces to deliberate, collaborate and share resources without market and state structures that are often cumbersome, expensive, anti-social or predatory. 

A key political challenge of our time is to figure out new ways to preserve and extend the democratic capacities of ordinary people and rein in unaccountable market/state power, otherwise known as neoliberalism. 

Neoliberal economics and policy insist upon debt-driven economic growth, extractivist uses of the Earth, consumerism and nationalism

the creative use of new digital technologies on open network platforms could inaugurate liberating new forms of “open source governance.”

The superstructures of law and governance can achieve only so much without the consent of the governed.

Benkler

Rifkin

Tapscott

Mason

Bauwens

potentially transformative Commons Sector

the innovations now unfolding in various tech spaces suggest the outlines of new post-capitalist institutions

new types of group deliberation and governance software platforms such as Loomio and Co-budget; digital platforms that enable better management of ecological resources; and “blockchain ledger” technology, which is enabling new forms of network-native self-organization, collective action and “smart contracts”

online guilds

commons

open design and manufacturing communities

citizen-science

a process of commoning

to create functioning commons

The collaborative communities now emerging on digital platforms do not worry so much about resource-depletion or free riders – problems that affect the management of water, fisheries and land – as how to intelligently curate information from the multitudes and design effective self-governance structures for virtual collaboration.   

The point of the commons paradigm, despite its many different flavors, is this:  It provides “protected” space in which to re-imagine production and governance. 

“digital divide”

more accessible and transparent than conventional state democracy and more solidly grounded through bottom-up participation and ethical accountability

Digital networks are becoming deeply entangled with all aspects of life

our lives with digital technologies are profoundly affecting how we regard property, political life, and economic life

Facebook, Google, Uber, Airbnb and other corporate “gig economy” players

Unlike these capital-driven enterprises, the collaborations that I am describing are fundamentally non-market and socially mindful in character. They are less defined by technology per se than by the new social forms and political /cultural attitudes that they engender. 

to move people beyond the producer/consumer dyad and formalistic notions of citizenship, and enable people to enact a more personal, DIY vision of self-provisioning and governance. 

The state, having cast its lot with capital accumulation and growth, is losing its credibility and competence in addressing larger needs. 

With the rise of market-centrism and rational choice economics, government was devalued and allowed a role only in cases of ‘market failure.’ 

standard economics today largely ignores the fundamental, affirmative role that government plays in facilitating functional, trustworthy markets.

popular distrust of government has soared.  And why not?  Government has lost its actual capacities to serve many non-market social and ecological needs. 

Given this void and the barriers to democratic action, many citizens who might otherwise engage with legitimate state policymaking have shifted their energies into “transnational, polycentric networks of governance in which power is dispersed,”

the solidarity economy, Transition Towns, peer production, the commons

Thus the impasse we face today:  The neoliberal market/state agenda is inflicting grievous harm on the planet, social well-being and democracy – yet the market/state remains largely unresponsive to popular demands for change.

The (Still-Emerging) Promise of Open Source Governance

commons based on open tech platforms will play a central role in transforming our politics and polity

Electronic networks are now a defining infrastructure shaping the conduct of political life, governance, commerce and culture.

many legacy institutions and social practices continue to exist.  But they have no choice but to evolve

online commons are lightweight social systems that, with the right software and norms, can run quite efficiently on trust, reciprocity and modest governance structures

that enable users to mutualize the benefits of their own online sharing

Rifkin notes that the extreme productivity of digital technologies is lowering the marginal costs of production for many goods and services to near zero.  This is undercutting the premises of conventional markets, which are based on private owners using proprietary means to extract profits from nature, communities and consumers.

We are glimpsing at the outlines of a new economic system based on sharing and the collaborative commons. It is the first new paradigm-shifting system since the introduction of capitalism and communism. 

The “collaborative commons” that Rifkin describes is a hybrid capitalist/commons economy that is able to exploit the efficiencies and higher quality produced on open networks. 

“prosumers”

are able to create their own goods and services

But when some good or service is offered for at no cost, it really means that the user is the product:  our personal data, attention, social attitudes lifestyle behavior, and even our digital identities, are the commodity that platform owners are seeking to “own.”  

To combat corporate exploitation of open platforms, many efforts are now afoot to establish digital commons as viable alternatives.  The new models are sometimes called “platform co-operativism.

Digital commons are materializing in part because it is easier and more socially satisfying to participate in a commons

the most valuable networks are those that facilitate group affiliations to pursue shared goals – or what I would call commons

Open source tools and principles could unleash this value – but it would subvert the business model.

“hacktivists,” makers, software programmers and social media innovators who are consciously attempting to build tech platforms that can meet needs in post-capitalist ways, often via commons

For Marx the rational creative society is a self-owned one based on democratic control i.e the recreation of the commons.  The working class can through revolutionary action transcend capitalism and create a communist society.  Its about commons for Marx not top down bureaucracy

the salaries of chief executives rising by more than 300 times than that of the average US worker

USA

ichest 1% (not including capital gains) equals that of the bottom 90%

“Citizens know that the establishment has either lied to them or been totally incompetent. They feel that the economic system is rigged. They have lost trust in government and in the fairness of the political and economic system.”

I believe we can construct a world where the economy performs better for all, based on solidarity”.

“Some governments cut down on social security to grow GDP,” he said, “but the really important aspect is well-being. People actually feel better when they co-operate rather than being selfish.”

“There is going to be volatility, and co-ops are better able to manage risks than the private sector,”

Asked how much co-operatives could achieve while surviving in competitive markets, Prof Stiglitz warned that they “cannot ignore the laws of the economy”.

government regulation

t isn’t just the issue of government vs private sector.”

Nor has the euro reduced inequality among European countries.

The prolonged depression has helped fuel the rise of right-wing nationalists and Euroskeptics. In Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, radical right-wing parties now enjoy more success at the polls than at any time since the 1930s.

Trust in EU institutions,

has fallen through the floor.

The reason currency pegs often depress economic growth lies in the essential nature of monetary arrangements.

Varoufakis

Galbraith

Stiglitz

All three would prefer that the system be reformed.

Galbraith offers the most succinct explanation of why the system has benefited Germany at the expense of weaker economies:

The Greek story is properly a European story in which, as in all European stories, Germany takes the leading role.

Varoufakis, Galbraith, and Stiglitz differ on the details, but they all blame the euro system and, especially, Germany.

Stiglitz shows that international systems of pegged currencies, of which Europe’s single currency represents only an extreme example, “have long been associated with recessions and depressions.”

Most observers now attribute these troubles to the euro.

In the real world, however, countries have diverse market positions and domestic institutions, which means that macroeconomic convergence is hard to come by.

a currency peg prevents the governments of countries that run trade deficits and incur debt from pursuing healthy economic policies to correct the problem.

normally loosen domestic monetary policy (thereby lowering interest rates and stimulating investment), let its currency depreciate (thereby boosting exports, reducing imports, and transferring income to the sector of the economy that produces competitive goods), and increase government spending (thereby stimulating consumption and investment).

Deficit countries are thus left with only one way to restore their competitiveness: “internal devaluation,” the politically correct term for austerity

permanent austerity becomes the only way to maintain international equilibrium.

Citizens grasp at increasingly radical new parties and lack the faith in Europe required to enact needed reforms.

Germany has emerged almost unscathed—at least so far.

Yet the costs of a flawed monetary system may eventually boomerang and depress growth even in Germany. Austerity is slowly reducing Germany’s ability to sell its goods to other European countries,

Despite the EU principle of free movement, many informal barriers to mobility still protect special interests.

to force the German economy into line

the EU could discourage trade surpluses by imposing a tax on them

Another set of structural policies would encourage large fiscal transfers and migration in order to offset the inequities that the euro has induced. In essence, this would replicate the movements of capital and people that make single currencies viable within individual countries.

fiscal transfers from creditor countries such as Germany to deficit countries such as Greece and Italy.

Stiglitz proposes, Germany and other surplus countries could do more to accept and encourage continuous migration flows from deficit countries.

Germans are unlikely to renounce the export-led growth that has stemmed from their 60-year tradition of high savings, low inflation, and modest labor contracts. They are even less likely to accept massive fiscal transfers to other countries.

Stiglitz offers the most thorough evaluation of the possible options. There are three. The first entails reforming the fundamental structure of the euro system so that it generates growth and distributes the benefits fairly. Stiglitz details how the EU and the European Central Bank might rewrite tax laws, loosen monetary policy, and change corporate governance rules in order to boost wage growth, consumer spending, and investment.

Political opposition to immigration is already strong in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, and these countries would not tolerate many millions of additional foreigners.

a second policy option: muddling through. In this scenario, member states would strengthen the EU’s ability to manage the crisis.

European Stability Mechanism,

The burden of the current system on deficit countries must also be eliminated—a change that requires far more serious reform. Eventually, Europe would have to restructure its debt,

GDP-indexed bonds

eurobonds

the solvency of national banks,

Yet Germany and other creditor governments are naturally hesitant to accept financial responsibility for debtor countries.

Such reforms would also require the EU to massively expand its oversight over national financial systems,

If neither of the two options to save the single currency and restart growth is viable, this leaves only a third option: abolishing the euro.

Although Stiglitz would prefer that the euro be reformed, he admits that “there is more than a small probability that it will not be done” and therefore argues for breaking up the system.

from Grexit to his preferred alternative of breaking the eurozone into several subgroups, each with its own currency.

Yet even the radical step of breaking up the eurozone, Stiglitz makes clear, would probably help deficit countries only if Germany agreed to increase domestic spending, rein in speculation, and reduce deficits.

Abolishing the euro might slightly improve the options for deficit countries, but absent deeper structural reforms, it would not eliminate the underlying problem.

depressing reading, because in the end, they suggest that there is no easy way out of Europe’s predicament, given the current political constraints. In the long run, muddling through may be the worst outcome, and yet it is the most likely.

In response to such a bleak prognosis, many European federalists, particularly on the left, contend that Europe’s real problem is its “democratic deficit.” If only EU institutions or national governments were more representative, they argue, then they would enjoy sufficient legitimacy to solve these problems. The EU needs more transparency in Brussels, more robust direct elections to the European Parliament, a grand continent-wide debate, and political union, the argument runs, so that the resulting European superstate would be empowered to impose massive fiscal transfers and macroeconomic constraints on surplus countries. Alternatively, if more radical alternatives could be fully debated in national elections, then member states might muster the power to pull out of the eurozone or renegotiate their terms in it.

everything comes down to choices made by self-interested sovereign states. Governments have little incentive to make charitable and risky concessions, even in a united Europe with economic prosperity on the line. Politicians simply lack the strength and courage to make a genuine break with the status quo, either toward federalism or toward monetary sovereignty.

we aim for a fair synthesis

Our main counter-argument is this: under capitalist conditions, peer production is not capable of self-reproduction and therefore not a full mode of production or value creation. We make an important distinction between the self-reproduction capability of a peer production project as a whole, and the social reproduction at the individual level. The reason is that there is no real universal possiblity for the reproduction of the human life of peer producers under capitalist conditions.

We would characterize Yochai Benkler’s vision as a reformist or meliorist approach, seeking to improve and balance some of the negative aspects of capitalism through increased peer production dynamics.

2. Oekonux: free software as a germ form that is prefigurative of a peer production society

free software production is a full mode of production that is born within capitalism but destined to supersede it, based on a understanding of germ form theory.

The description of Meretz considers free software as a full mode of production, prefigurative of a wider transformation of the current capitalist mode of production.

We would characterize the main argument as stating that the deep lowering of transaction/coordination/communication costs, creates the possibility for a new mode of production next to the market and the firm, which produces value through ‘social allocation’.However, for Benkler, the new modality exists ‘in addition’ and in complementary with market dynamics.

On the collective level, we can see that peer production occurs when a pool of voluntary contributors can create commons-oriented value, under conditions of participatory governance, i.e. through the social, and not market or hierarchical, allocation of productive resources. This can occur on a collective level, but only if we abstract from the need for the social reproduction of the individuals who contribute.

there is no autonomous social reproduction within the commons itself

3. Dmytri Kleiner’s Venture Communism

For Kleiner, peer production can only occur if commoners also own the common stock of production.

Kleiner proposes that peer producers would create common stock cooperatives, and use a specific licence, the Peer Production or Copyfarleft license, to protect their shared innovation commons from private appropriation by capitalist forces.

Like with the P2P Foundation’s approach, Kleiner also recognizes the continuation of the politics of class, as long as we live in a class-based society.

Our contrasting peer production IS a proto-mode of production, which means that indeed value is created in a radically different way in peer production, but that it’s lack of self-reproduction capabilities makes it dependent on capitalism.

Kleiner’s strategy is exactly what can make it independent and capable of self-reproduction since its combination with common-stock physical production entities, would guarantee the self-reproduction capability of individuals and collectives contributing to the commons.

creating a real counter-economy

4. George Caffentzis and the Anti-capitalist commons

two kinds of commons, i.e. anti-capitalist commons which exist to produce value in a different way, and which function against capitalism, and commons which are used by capital for its own self-reproduction and act in favour of capitalism

Politically, pro-capitalist commons are represented by the neo-Hardinian school of Elinor Ostrom

while the basic premise of the existence of capitalism-compatible commons is correct, the making of a radical dichotomy, based on the necessity to struggle against capitalist commons, is absolutely counter-productive.

Our approach stresses that it is more productive to focus on the post-capitalist potentialities of peer production, and make them real and concrete, than to fight against commons that are compatible with capitalism.

it makes only sense to undertake efforts to make the commons more autonomous from profit-maximizing entities and the system as a whole. This can be done through strategies such as those proposed by Kleiner and the P2P Foundation.

In the interpretation of the P2P Foundation, social change occurs because proto-modes of production, which are initially embedded in a dominant economic system, and benefit that system, become gradually more efficient, and capable of self-reproduction, and therefore create the conditions for a phase transition to occur, in which the new emergent mode of production, achieves its independence over the formerly dominant model.

For the P2P Foundation, an integration needs to occur between the new prototype model, i.e. the field of peer production proper, as it emerges in multiple social fields and attempts to become more autonomous; the social mobilization of progressive social forces (i.e. politics and even ‘revolution’ are crucial remaining aspects of social evolution), and political/policy oriented movements that are capable of creating new institutions.

Politically, § we differ from the Benklerite approach because we believe peer production has the potential to succeed capitalism as the core value and organisational model of a post-capitalist society § we differ from Oekonux by stressing the lack of autonomy of peer production under current conditions § we differ from the Telekommunisten approach by stressing it a proto-mode of production § we differ from the Caffentzis approach by stressing a post-capitalist approach centered on the autonomy and self-reproduction needs of peer producers, rather than guided by a core hostility to capitalism

P2P Foundation also has an integrative and integral approach, this means that despite differences, we seek commonality around aspects of our friends and allies that we may differ from in other aspects.

§ we agree with Benkler and similar approaches that peer production improves on the current conditions of capitalism, i.e. we generally support the spread of commons and p2p-oriented practices § we agree with Oekonux that peer production carries within itself the seeds of a post-capitalist value system § we agree with Kleiner’s proposal for a peer-based counter-economy § we agree with Caffentzis that we need a preferential treatment towards autonomous commons approaches that create a counter-logic within the present system

The Barmbys’ use of the term to describe the process of the creation of a communist society is not a million miles away from its current usage, but it has acquired a more specific set of meanings since the early 1970s when elements of the French ‘ultra-left’ began deploying it as a way of critiquing traditional conceptions of revolution. Communism has often been conceived of by both Marxists and anarchists as a future state of society to be achieved in the distant future long after the messy business of revolution has been sorted out. For advocates of communisation on the other hand, capitalism can only be abolished by the immediate creation of different relations between people, such as the free distribution of goods and the creation of ‘communal, moneyless, profitless, Stateless, forms of life.

There is what might be termed a ‘voluntarist’ conception of communisation

It is voluntarist because there is an emphasis on people choosing to take sides and fleeing capitalist society

What I would term the ‘structuralist’ inflexion of communisation is particularly associated with the French language journal Theorie Communiste (TC). More recently its ideas have been elaborated and extended in discussions with like-minded groups including the English language Endnotes and the Swedish journal Riff Raff. Together these collectives have recently collaborated to produce ‘Sic – an international journal of communisation’ (issue number one was published in 2011). I term this approach as ‘structuralist’ because there is much more emphasis on how the possibility of communisation arises from the structural contradictions of a particular stage of capitalism.

Unfortunately the historic ultra left does not offer many useful tools for understanding fascism and similar movements. By the ‘ultra left’ I mean those currents that trace their origins to the various groups that broke with the mainstream Communist International in the 1920s, including the ‘council communists’ and ‘left communists’ in Germany, Italy and elsewhere. In the 1960s and 70s newer groups emerged that combined ideas from these currents with elements derived from the Situationist International, Socialisme ou Barbarie and others.

In response to the crisis of profitability in the 1970s, capitalism has restructured itself. The old notion of a ‘job for life’ has been scrapped. For many, access to a ‘living wage’ is sporadic and precarious.

In shifting the focus from communism as a distant future ideal state to immediate practical activity, the notion of communisation can help us to think about what could happen in the event of such a scenario.

The problem with much communisation theory though is that it often seems to assume that under pressure of events, large scale efforts at communisation are inevitable even if their success is not guaranteed.