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As knowledge became a major factor of informational capitalism a draconian copyright regime grew dramatically (Lessig, 2005 ). The GPL/GNU pioneered a juridical-productive strategy for producing global commons of knowledge and protecting them against the invasion by capitalism. In this sense, Stallman’s initiative was a major milestone in the struggle of knowledge workers against informational capitalism

The production of Linux was truly a revolution in the organization of cooperation among a large number of producers. Marx argued that any scientific knowledge was a product of collective work (Marx, 1981: 199 ), as each scientist built upon the achievements of previous ones. But this collective aspect of science was not a result of conscious and simultaneous cooperation among scientists but of contingent transfer of knowledge along a time and space axis.

The combination of GPL license with the Linux mode of cooperation represents the gist of the P2P mode of production, which coincides with the general principles of advanced form of communism, described by Marx.

1) There will be no equivalence, between each individual’s contribution to social production and their share from the total social products. They will contribute according to their ability and will use products according to their needs. Money as the quantitative measure of value will disappear (Marx, 1978b). Money does not play any role in internal P2P system, though it still constitutes its external context and inserts pressure on it.

2) In Marx’s advanced communism the division of labor, and with it the state and market vanish (Marx, 1978 a, b). In P2P the division of labor is replaced by the distribution of labor (Weber, 2004) and the logics of state and market are questione

3) Advanced communism, Marx (1978a) envisaged, would transcend alienation not only by abolishing the logic of quantitative equivalence in the realm of exchange between individual and society, and among individuals, and the division of labor, but also by allowing and enabling individuals to use socially produced means of production to materialize their own creative powers. My ethnographic findings show that creativity and peer recognition are among the strongest motivations of P2P producer

At this point we can raise the following questions: 1-Is P2P really a new historical mode of production, or just an appendage to the capitalist mode of production? 2-What is its relation to the capitalist mode of production? 3-To what extent can P2P be applied to material production? 4-What are the possibilities that it will replace or displace the capitalist mode of production altogether

The P2P production productive forces correspond to what Manuel Castells (2010/1996:70-72) defines as the Information Technological Paradigm (ITP). The all-encompassing ITP emphasises informal networking, flexibility, and is characterised by the fact that technology acts on information, information acts on technology, as well as by the integration of various technologies such as micro-electronics, telecommunications, opto-electronics and computers in a larger system. It is important to emphasise that knowledge workers themselves are an important component, or the most important components, of ITP productive forces.

Yet capitalism prevents the free flow of knowledge in all directions in the net. It is true that the capitalist mode of production, adapting itself to ITP, has become global, and has increasingly adopted a network form. However, the sum of all potential links in the net exceeds dramatically the sum of links of the global networks of capital. Hence, the potential of the net, as a paradigmatic productive force of our time, exceeds the capitalist mode of production (Hardt and Negri, 2000)

I described briefly above major aspects of P2P that accord to Marx’s understanding of communism. All these aspects contradict the logic of capital. Here I will show how the logic of P2P profoundly contradicts the capitalist division of labour, because division of labour is the key component of any mode of production. Let me emphasize that in P2P we have a distribution of labour and not a division of labour

The scholars of post-Fordism argue that post-Fordism has transcended Taylorism by enhancing workers’ skills and involving them in decision making

Such claims are at best controversial (Castells, 2010/1996). Many argue that Taylorism is still the dominant form of the organization of the labor process

Post-Fordism has replaced the Taylorist impersonal and mechanized despotism with new forms of personal enslavement. Individual producers do not choose their tasks, or the pace, time and place of their work. In other words the work process is micro-territorialized both spatially and temporally. In this sense the contrast with P2P cooperation cannot be stronger. In P2P cooperation the work processes are globally de-territorialized, in terms of both time and space.

Brook (1975) showed that in a centralized organization the increase of the number of engineers who work on a particular software problem decreases the efficiency by creating unnecessary complexities at an exponential rate. Raymond (2001) demonstrated that this was not true of de-centered networked cooperation of P2P. Here, the increase in the number of workers increases efficiency and improves the product. This hypothesis can be true of all forms of cognitive production.

The commercial use of P2P’s products does not make them commodities because the user does not pay for them and therefore they do not enter the costs of his own commodity. From this follows that the total labor which is globally spent today on different forms of P2P is outside the capitalist social division of labor and circumscribes it.

A fully fledged P2P society is not compatible with money and commodity. The commodity form inherently circumscribes the freedoms that are guaranteed in the GPL

To sum up, the ITP productive forces combined with the de-centered network-based form of cooperation, the absence of wage labor, voluntary contribution, and the commons form of products constitute the main features of the P2P mode of production

Although the P2P mode of production is still an emerging phenomenon, its logic is clearly different from that of capitalism and has been created as a response to the requirements of the new productive forces. Therefore, its historical significance, urgency and novelty can hardly be exaggerated. The capitalist mode of production is a barrier to the realization of the potentialities of knowledge in the era of Internet. It limits human creativity and the development of knowledge workers in general. Therefore, it is no coincidence that a section of knowledge workers have rebelled against capitalist relations of production by lunching P2P. As Söderberg (2008) argues this is a form of class struggle.

The new social production consists of islands in the sea of the capitalist mode of production. The relation between the two, as pointed to above, is one of mutual dependence and antagonism. The social production depends on capitalism for acquiring some of the means of production and wages of its contributors, whilst capitalism on the other hand uses the commons of social production for free.

The social formation is an integrated socio-economic-ideological/cultural system. It may consist of more than one modes of production. However, one mode of production dominates the others and its imperatives define the overall characteristics of the social formation. In this sense we can speak of feudal and capitalist social formations as distinct from feudal and capitalist modes of production. Although the dominant mode of production dominates other modes of production, it cannot erase their specific logics. The continuous tension and dependency between the dominant mode of production and subordinated ones make social formations dynamic, uneven, and complex phenomena.

The capitalist social formation has gone through three partially overlapping phases: the emerging, the dominant and the declining ones. In the emerging phase (1850-1950) the capitalist mode of production dominated the feudal, domestic and other pre- capitalist modes of production worldwide, extracting labor and value from them (Mandel, 1972: chapter 2 ). In the second phase (1950-1980) the capitalist mode of production eroded the pre-capitalist mode of productions profoundly, and replaced them with the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism expanded both intensively, penetrating new domains of productive activity such as services, and extensively, conquering the whole globe. The third phase (1980- onwards) is characterized by the emergence of the ITP paradigm and the social mode of production within the capitalist social formation. This period has been described in terms such as “Network Society” (Castells, 2010/1997 ), “Empire” (Hardt and Negri, 2000), etc.

Although the P2P mode of production is still under the sway of the capitalist mode of production, its standing vis-à-vis capitalism is different from that of pre-capitalist modes of productions. While in the two first phases capitalism represented the new productive forces, in the third phase P2P is the new and emerging mode of production and capitalism is the declining one.

If P2P dominates capitalism we will have the emerging phase of P2P social formation. I do not want to give the impression that the victory of P2P over capitalism is either a smooth evolutionary process or inevitable. It is fully contingent upon the orientations and consequences of the current social struggle, particularly the struggle of P2P communities.

Automation will be a pillar of this transformation, though automation is not a necessary pre-condition for material P2P. In a fully automated production, the P2P production of cognitive factor (research and development, design and software) will bring material production under the sway of P2P.

The natural limit to raw material will also place a limit on material wealth and will require rules of distribution. But the criterion for distribution in the global community and within each local community cannot be the contribution of labor by individuals and communities, because cognitive work is globally collective, has no exchange value and does not produce exchange value. Only the needs of communities and individuals defined democratically among and within communities can be the criterion for distribution

the success of state and capital in preventing P2P from becoming the dominant mode of production is not guaranteed beforehand. Things can go either way depending on the consequence of social struggles. The P2P movement, if supported by all other social movements of the multitude, may prevail. Social struggle will also determine what type of P2P society we will have.

What then are the possible scenarios for P2P production to become the dominant mode of production? Will it grow parallel with capitalism until it overtakes it? Or, will its path of development be much more complicated, marked by ebbs and flows, and temporary setbacks? Will a social revolution that expropriates strategic means of production from capitalists be a prerequisite for P2P production to become the dominant mode of production? What will be the role of social struggle and human consciousness in advancing P2P production

“the idea of communism” is becoming appealing again. However it is not enough, though really necessary, to say that “another communism is possible” (Harvey, 2010:259) but to imagine the general contours of communist production. Herein lies the historical and political significance of P2P production. It represents, though in embryonic form, a model for communist production and distribution.

What then are the strengths and weaknesses of the P2P production social movement?

Its weakness, as Söderberg (2008) argues, is that most of the participants in the P2P production lack an explicit anti-capitalist consciousness, let alone a communist consciousness

However, the majority’s involvement in production is motivated by personal reasons, such as doing something exciting and creative, and improving their own skills. However participants are aware of, and value the fact, that they are producing commons.

No doubt the formation of a solid collectivist and progressive culture which grows organically around P2P production and other social movements will be essential for the formation of a communist society. Despite the significance of this progressive culture-in-making, it cannot remedy the lack of a clear programmatic communist vision and sustained theoretical critique of capitalism among the participants.

The lack of a clear collectivist vision combined with the dominant capitalist environment makes P2P production vulnerable to invasion by capitalism

No doubt there is a self-conscious communist section among the producers in P2P production. This communist section must carry out an uncompromising theoretical and critical theoretical struggle within the P2P production movement. However, this struggle should be conducted in friendly terms and avoid sectarianism. Communists should not position themselves against non-communist participants in the P2P movement. Actually, as Barbrook (2007) argues, all contributors to P2P production are involved in a communist material practice, regardless of their attitudes to communism.

In addition to the lack of class consciousness among P2P producers, and perhaps as a result of this, the absence of sustained connections/alliances between P2P producers and other progressive social movements is another weakness of the P2P movement. This is also a weakness of other social movements

The very fact the Occupy Wall Street was initiated by Adbusters and Anonymous, and that its de-centered/network form of organization, alongside that of Indignados, is very similar to that of P2P, is indeed very promising.

The academic and the activist left, on the other hand, have not yet grasped the historical novelty and significance of P2P production.

The reaction of Stuttgart workers to the destruction of public services and the perversion of co-determination indicates that austerity measures are coming slap-bang up against the legacy of two periods of democratic and egalitarian reform. The first is post-war reconstruction, including the welfare state. The second is the system of co-determination, which was strengthened in response to rebellions in the 60s and 70s. However, the resistance now, in Stuttgart as elsewhere in Europe, is not simply over the erosion of the institutions created in these periods of reform – after all, that erosion has been taking place for at least a decade. It is a profound and uncertain clash of cultures, expectations and increasingly activities, shaped by these periods of reform and rebellion, across generations. People’s expectations, or at least sense of legitimate claims, are for cultural equality as well as moves toward economic equality, and for meaningful and dignified work to match the decades of expansion of higher education.

There are also the spreading networks of autonomous hackers and geeks creating open, non-proprietorial, software and therefore effectively creating a key part of the infrastructure of today’s society as a digital commons

They all involve forms of labour which cannot be understood in the same terms as the conventional wage contract

nd the list also includes trade unionists who are taking on the role of organising for the common good in defence, or for the improvement of public services, or to push their company towards climate jobs.

All kinds of co-ops, cultural and social centres have emerged or been strengthened by these combinations of refusal and creation.

What this variety of activity has in common is that it is based on collaborative forms of creativity

and more recently ‘The coming of the commons’

can the public sector be transformed in a democratic, open and egalitarian direction against the forces of marketisation? If so, it can be a major economic player, especially in urban centres, with considerable bargaining power as contractor, as employer, and as trend-setter and creator of new communicative infrastructure.

The spread of information, knowledge and communication technologies not only enables theoretical expertise and practical knowledge to be shared on a previously unimaginable scale, but also creates tools for co-operation and self-managed co‐ordination of the most complex, multi-actor, transnational processes.

All these developments also illustrate the significance of democracy – transparency, participatory decision- making, the recognition of and means of sharing plural sources of knowledge – as a source of productivity, a base for a new economics.

What would it mean to think about industrial policies not so much in terms of the goal of nudging the private sector to invest, but more in terms of how to release, develop and extend the creativity of labour in its broadest sense?

How to expand and strengthen ‘productive democracy’? How to enhance the capacities of those whose ‘only’ means of production is their creative potential – and the social co-operation through which they can develop and realise this potential?

First, it’s come from the kinds of challenges that the trade union movement is facing in defending jobs in manufacturing as well as public services.

The second sphere for the rethinking of labour has been through the renewal of the co-operative movement. And a third development is the powerful and ambiguous trend opened up by the new technology towards new kinds of collaboration is the peer to peer, distributed productions and the digital commons, as referred to earlier. This ‘sphere’ is not separate: it could expand both the transformative power of workers already rethinking labour in conventional employment, and the scale and reach of co-operatives.

One increasingly significant context of convergence is over ‘climate jobs’. We’ve noted already the growth of co‐operatives creating and distributing renewable energy. The ravages of climate change are leading some trade unionists to demand that workers, whether currently unemployed or employed in high-carbon industries, be allowed to deploy their know-how to manufacture wind turbines, solar water heaters and other parts of the infrastructure of a low-carbon economy.

Another potential focal point for the mutual reinforcement of different forms of productive democracy is cities.

They illustrate ways in which labour could be self-organised, on the basis of social values underlying its purpose, use or context.

The implication of my argument here is that policymakers now need to work on how to support the economic creativity of millions of people, whether in existing workplaces or working precariously outside the formal labour market. At present these capacities are being wasted.

They need specific forms of support, some of it from the state, and some of it from organisations that share or could be persuaded to share their goals. These could include the trade unions, the co-operative movement, some parts of the church, foundations, and the growing experiments in crowdfunding, democratically controlled loan funds and so on.

As far as existing workplaces are concerned, we need states to not only restore and extend rights that protect trade unions in their struggles over wages and conditions, but also to give workers rights to control the purpose of their labour: for example, a legal prohibition on closures or redundancies without alternatives being publicly explored, and in the case of large companies, public inquiries at which alternatives would be presented. Labour is a commons – it should not be wasted. We need a new kind of ‘industrial strategy’ – one designed to support the creation of value that is not only monetary and requires autonomy from the pressures of the labour market. These should include a basic ‘citizen’s income’ (see page 34). Shorter working hours would be another measure that would serve a similar end.

We also need a regional policy that gives real support to cities as hubs of economic development, through direct public employment, and through support for co-ops involving regional banks. These could learn from the operations of the Mondragon bank and become a source of support and co‐ordination to networks of co-ops and other collaborative means of nurturing and realising the creativity of labour, rather than operating as banks of the traditional kind.

These are mere illustrations of industrial policies which recognise the capacities of generations shaped by expectations of cultural as well as political and economic equality. To realise these capacities as a resource for a new model of economic development requires rebuilding the distributional gains of the welfare state – but it also requires going further than that. We need to create not simply full employment, but the conditions by which people can creatively collaborate to meet the needs of a changing society and a precarious planet.

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.

Communisation must remain a hypothesis, but surely so must the possibility of other outcomes in the heat of crisis – including a rise in populist nationalism, racism and/or religious fundamentalism, incorporating elements of a reactionary ‘anti-capitalism’.

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.

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.

Communisation resulting in a classless society is only one of the possibilities on the horizon, and those who advocate it need to reflect more on some of the other potential outcomes and how to avoid them.

In 1960 the French Bordigist journal Programme Communiste published the notorious article ‘Auschwitz, or the Great Alibi’ which suggested that the mass murder of Jews was not the result of anti-Semitism but simply a moment in the eradication of the petit-bourgeoisie as a result of the ‘irresistible advance of the concentration of capital’.

Interestingly it was in this very milieu that the current notion of communisation first emerged: ‘It is not sure who first used the word… To the best of our knowledge, it was Dominique Blanc: orally in the years 1972-74… Whoever coined the word, the idea was being circulated at the time in the small milieu round the bookshop La Vieille Taupe (‘Old Mole”, 1965-72). Since the May 68 events, the bookseller, Pierre Guillaume, ex-Socialisme ou Barbarie and ex-Pouvoir Ouvrier member, but also for a while close to G. Debord (who himself was a member of S. ou B. in 1960-61), had been consistently putting forward the idea of revolution as a communising process’

The strength of the historic ultra-left in all its forms has been its refusal to support capitalist currents of any kind – no ‘critical support’ for social democratic politicians , no defending Stalinist police states, no cheerleading for national liberation dictatorships in waiting. It has correctly argued that misery, exploitation and war continue under the guise of ‘socialism’, anti-fascism and democracy as well under fascism and military rule.

There is though a permanent danger with this position of seeing all forms of capitalist rule as identical, and of misunderstanding everything that happens under capitalism as simply determined by the logic of accumulation without reference to any other historical or political factors.

the issue isn’t just how the state and capital might respond under threat, but how the very dynamic of social antagonism and crisis might give rise to fascism or some 21st century version from below. If it is true that capitalism’s inability to guarantee social reproduction can only prompt various kinds of collective attempts to secure a life worth living, there is no immediate reason why these attempts should take an expansive, internationalist direction. The historical experience would suggest that it is just likely that many people could fall back on some kind of limited national, religious, racial or extended family/clan identity and seek to secure the survival and reproduction of their self-defined group – if necessary at the expense of others.

One possible outcome of crisis is a kind of plunder-state in which capital effectively throws one part of the population to the wolves to ensure its survival, suspending the normal rules of property to enable the looting of the resources and personal effects of marginalised communities.

many German people, including proletarians, were able to materially benefit from the plunder of the Jews and other minorities.

Another possibility is an extension beyond a state-managed plunder towards localised insurrectionary movements with a racist dimension.

If more modern revolutionary movements have generally avoided this, mass participation in ethnically-based massacres in the past 25 years in the ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda suggests that this is always a possibility.

Even a racialized partial communisation is conceivable, in which one part of the community establishes internal relations of equality and sharing of resources while simultaneously ‘ethnically cleansing’ people defined as outsiders. Such a vision is, for instance, promulgated by the thankfully marginal ‘National Anarchist’ scene with its call for racially pure village communities to replace capitalism and the state.

At the heart of this contradiction is the fact that capitalism is increasingly unable to guarantee social reproduction, unlike in the past when it largely did so through the wage.

It may be true that no localized racist or nationalist ‘anti-capitalism’ could create a lasting alternative to capitalism – social reproduction today cannot retreat from a global human society. Astarian is not alone among the pro-communisers in assuming that any such contradictions can only be temporary diversions on the road to a better future: ‘When the counterrevolutionary proletarian alternatives have demonstrated their ineffectiveness by failing to deliver the economic salvation of the proletariat, communisation will bring about the leap towards the non-economy’

But the last hundred years, and indeed much of human history, suggests that in times of crisis the road forward can be terminally blocked by desperate inter-communal violence and the spiral of massacres and reprisals – or when one group is particularly marginalized, massacres without even the fear of reprisals.

Countering this possibility does not mean signing up to some state/media/celebrity ‘anti fascist’ popular front, but it does mean being permanently aware of the potential for even apparently radical, insurgent movements to take a terrible direction. It also means challenging potential manifestations of this at every turn within the real movements around us, whether it be the emergence of nationalist anti-migrant sentiments in workplace struggles (e.g. ‘British jobs for British workers’) or rebranded anti-Semitic notions of saving the ‘real economy’ from ‘cosmopolitan’ money lenders (e.g. the dubious ‘moneyless’ notions of the ‘Zeitgeist Movement’ on the fringes of the Occupy actions).

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?

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

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

the housing rights activist and feminist Ada Colau – took control of the Catalan capital

citizens started to wonder what would happen if the movement tried to occupy the institutions too

From the beginning, this was not a simple return to electoral politics but an experiment in transforming local institutions. It was to use municipal institutions not instead of movement organising but to support, expand and generalise the movement.

it’s about the blossoming of examples around the world where citizens are successfully winning their cities.

internationalist

the list of radical civic platforms standing up to entrenched political interests continues to grow.

there are a number of principles and practices that the new municipalist movements share

The political theorist Margaret Kohn once defined municipalism as ‘a politics of everyday life concerned with the issues that immediately affect citizens, including education, policing, jobs, culture and services. Municipalism is a political approach to community.’

The role of the municipality was to foster associations that challenge concentrations of power in the hands of a small elite. Capturing the city hall was never an end in itself but rather one method in expanding the scope of experiments in popular participation.

the continued erosion of basic living standards and increasing inequality driven by the myth that there is ‘no alternative’ has increased awareness that revolutionary change extends beyond ‘economics’ to every aspect of our lived experiences.

the new municipal citizens’ movements have arisen out of the failure of national political parties or street-based organising to deliver transformative change

This new municipalism may be picking-up where the alter-globalisation movement left off, retaining and reinvigorating the concepts of prefiguration, experimenting with ‘diagonal’ methods for dispersing power, and fuelling the expansion of non‑state, non-market ways of organising our societies.

This provides fertile ground for the development of a progressive post-capitalist politics that can win.

Women are at the forefront of many of these citizens’ movements

The feminisation of politics means encouraging a political style that openly expresses doubts and contradictions – backed by a values-based politics that emphasizes the role of community and ‘the commons’.

open spirit is at the centre of the new political culture

The commons is much broader than an economic strategy for resource management; it’s about building forms of autonomy and social solidarity as the substance of our day-to-day lives.

the Commons Lab

Department of the Commons

These are not occupied but liberated spaces.

social centres

‘citizen patrimony’, which would formalise and expand a network of spaces across the city where the municipality provides greater resources and public infrastructure for self-managed common use.

The collaboration between citizens’ groups, cooperatives and municipalities is also at the heart of many of the attempts to return public services to public ownership.

There are many reasons why cities and regions want to take services back under public ownership, but reducing cost (especially for poor people), improving the quality of services, and increasing financial transparency are recurrent themes. Efforts to create better conditions for workers are another key driver. In the energy sector, which accounts for around a third of the cases where services have been returned to public ownership, the shift is often driven by efforts to tackle climate change.

Taking control of the energy supply also means that the council can better coordinate efforts to reduce energy use.

A number of French municipalities have taken back control of school meals from corporations to protect local agriculture and improve the quality of meals.

Increasing citizens’ control is not just about taking over existing institutions, but building new democratic processes that involve citizens in the day-to-day decision making of their cities.

it involves changing how citizens interact with the city government.

participatory budgeting

These municipalist projects are beginning to define new ways for progressive movements to organise, challenging and moving beyond dichotomies that have traditionally haunted the left.

The objective is to use municipal institutions as part of a project of autonomy – to expand the commons, to build non-state institutions and to empower citizens (not their representatives) to control the collective conditions in which they live their lives.

The new municipalism isn’t about winning elections; it’s about building, transforming and distributing power.

We must do it ourselves. It’s time to win back our cities.

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

Monotheism arose

Merry Mount became a refuge for Indians, the discontented, gay people, runaway servants, and what the governor called "all the scume of the countrie."

it was always a celebration of all that is free and life-giving in the world. That is the Green side of the story. Whatever else it was, it was not a time to work.

Therefore, it was attacked by the authorities. The repression had begun with the burning of women and it continued in the 16th century when America was "discovered," the slave trade was begun, and nation-states and capitalism were formed.

The people resisted the repressions. Thenceforth, they called their May sports, the "Robin Hood Games." Capering about with sprigs of hawthorn in their hair and bells jangling from their knees, the ancient charaders of May were transformed into an outlaw community, Maid Marions and Little Johns.

Thus began in earnest the Red side of the story of May Day. The struggle was brought to Massachusetts in 1626.

Thomas Morton settled in Passonaggessit which he named Merry Mount. The land seemed a "Paradise"

With the proclamation that the first of May At Merry Mount shall be kept holly day

The Puritans

the Puritans were the imperialist, not Morton, who worked with slaves, servants, and native Americans

May Day became a day to honor the saints, Philip and James, who were unwilling slaves to Empire.

The Maypole was cut down. The settlement was burned.

On 4 May 1886

In England the attacks on May Day were a necessary part of the wearisome, unending attempt to establish industrial work discipline. The attempt was led by the Puritans with their belief that toil was godly and less toil wicked. Absolute surplus value could be increased only by increasing the hours of labor and abolishing holydays.

Two bands of that rainbow came from English and Irish islands. One was Green. Robert Owen, union leader, socialist, and founder of utopian communities in America, announced the beginning of the millennium after May Day 1833. The other was Red. On May Day 1830, a founder of the Knights of Labor, the United Mine Workers of America, and the Wobblies was born in Ireland, Mary Harris Jones, a.k.a., "Mother Jones." She was a Maia of the American working class.

The history of the modern May Day originates in the center of the North American plains, at Haymarket, in Chicago

in May 1886.

Virgin soil, dark, brown, crumbling, shot with fine black sand

a green perspective

The land was mechanized. Relative surplus value could only be obtained by reducing the price of food.

It became "Hello" to the hobo. "Move on" to the harvest stiffs. "Line up" the proletarians. Such were the new commands of civilization.

Thousands of immigrants, many from Germany, poured into Chicago after the Civil War. Class war was advanced

Nationally, May First 1886 was important because a couple of years earlier the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, "RESOLVED... that eight hours shall constitute a legal day's labor, from and after May 1, 1886.

Haymarket Square

Thomas Morton was a thorn in the side of the Boston and Plymouth Puritans, because he had an alternate vision of Massachusetts. He was impressed by its fertility; they by its scarcity. He befriended the Indians; they shuddered at the thought. He was egalitarian; they proclaimed themselves the "Elect". He freed servants; they lived off them. He armed the Indians; they used arms against Indians.

176 policemen charged the crowd that had dwindled to about 200. An unknown hand threw a stick of dynamite, the first time that Alfred Nobel's invention was used in class battle.

All hell broke lose, many were killed, and the rest is history.

May Day, or "The Day of the Chicago Martyrs" as it is still called in Mexico "belongs to the working class and is dedicated to the revolution," as Eugene Debs put it in his May Day editorial of 1907.

As the small crowd marched to Meusa and Wheeler’s new home, for instance, people chanted, “Empty houses and houseless people — match them up!” This was a refrain that echoes the rallying cry commonly used by J.R. Fleming, chairman of Chicago’s Anti-Eviction Campaign. (His wording is to match “homeless people with peopleless houses.”)

Similarly, in Woodland, activists covered Alma Ponce’s lawn with tents — an allusion to the fall 2011 occupations that has also been used in eviction blockades in Alabama and Georgia over the last year.

With the continued onslaught of foreclosures across the United States, the question remains: How much will these movements have to scale up to make structural changes, rather than just individual changes?

“Housing is a human right, not for the banks to hold hostage,” Michelene Meusa said a few days after the action, when, at M&T Bank’s request, the Atlanta Police Department arrested her and three others for criminal trespassing. When she refused to leave, she made an explicit comparison between her civil disobedience and the actions of the civil rights movement.

The shift towards a human-rights framing of the housing movement and away from following the Occupy movement’s focus on economic unfairness — i.e., “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out” — is significant. The human rights framework is often more powerful in movements led by people of color, drawing strength, as Meusa did, from the civil rights era and cutting through the class divisions that plague housing in a way that movements focused only on mortgage loan modifications cannot.

One important shift evident on the anniversary is that Occupy Homes groups have started rallying more and more behind a rights-based framework to explain why they are pursuing direct action.

Housing organizing during the Great Depression provides some instructive parallels. The economic devastation since 2008 has been quite similar to what the nation experienced throughout that period. In 1933, for example, banks foreclosed on an average of 1,000 homes every day. In 2010, the rate of displacement was comparable: The average number of foreclosures was more than 2,500 homes a day, and the population has increased two-and-a-half fold.

The scale of housing organizing during the early 1930s, however, dwarfs what we have seen so far today. Crowds of hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of people, mobilized to stop evictions in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Gary, Youngstown, Toledo and other urban centers, mostly under the direction of the Communist Party. As in much of current housing organizing, women were often on the front lines. Masses of these women filled the streets as others climbed to the roofs and poured buckets of water on the police below. Women beat back the police officers’ horses by sticking them with long hat pins or pouring marbles into the streets. If the police were successful in moving the family’s furniture out to the curb, the crowd simply broke down the door and moved the family’s belongings back inside after the police had left.

Rural communities also formed anti-foreclosure organizations, combining the fight for housing with the fight for fair wages, especially in the sharecropping South. Hundreds of thousands of farmers came together to form anti-eviction and tenants-rights groups

This movement achieved substantial legislative gains. Housing policy became a major part of the New Deal, culminating in the National Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to provide affordable loans to spur homeownership, and the Housing Act of 1937, which established public housing authorities across the country.

the establishment of public housing systemically changed the landscape and ideology around housing in the United States and was “one of the most successful federal programs in the 20th century,” according to Damaris Reyes, the executive director of the public housing advocacy group Good Old Lower East Side.

By this measure, the Occupy Homes network and aligned housing movements still have light-years to go — a reality that many organizers acknowledge. Yet the conditions have changed since 1930s, suggesting that what we need are not massive federal construction and lending programs, but rather a shift in the way housing rights are perceived and enacted in the U.S. Rather than coping with the scarcity of the 1930s, the United States now confronts vast, unprecedented wealth and gaping economic inequality — a condition that is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that there are upwards of a dozen empty and unused houses for every homeless person in the nation.

With more than enough wealth and roofs to provide safe and dignified homes for the country’s population, the challenge today is to demonstrate that this situation of desperate need coexisting with wasted excess is not one we need to accept.

Option 1: Euro-reformism

One (fast receding) option is the standard variety of euro-reformism, practised typically by social democrats who argue for ‘more democracy’,

dynamic analyses

The EU’s institutions are incapable of being reformed through the standard process of inter-governmental deliberations and gradual treaty changes.

Option 2: Lexit

This (Lexit) option raises concerns regarding its realism and probity. Is its agenda feasible? In other words, is it a realistic prospect that, by (in Kouvelakis’ words) calling for referenda to leave the EU, the Left can block “the forces of the xenophobic and nationalist Right from winning hegemony and diverting the popular revolt”? And, is such a campaign consistent with the Left’s fundamental principles?

the EU was constructed intentionally as a democracy-free zone designed to keep the demos out of decision-making

Given that the EU has established free movement, Lexit involves acquiescence to (if not actual support for) its ending and for the re-establishment of national border controls

the Left should demand common minimum wages in exchange for its support for the Single Market

xenophobic Right

do they truly believe that the Left will win the discursive and policy war against the fossil fuel industry by supporting the re-nationalisation of environmental policy?

Option 3: DiEM25’s proposal for disobedience

Instead, DiEM25 proposes a pan-European movement of civil and governmental disobedience with which to bring on a surge of democratic opposition to the way European elites do business at the local, national and EU levels.

national parliaments and governments have power

a progressive national government can only use this power if it is prepared for a rupture with the EU troika.

a clash with the EU establishment is inescapable.

wilfully disobeying the unenforceable EU ‘rules’ at the municipal, regional and national levels while making no move whatsoever to leave the EU.

Undoubtedly, the EU institutions will threaten us

Consider the profound difference between the following two situations: The EU establishment threatening progressive Europeanist governments with ‘exit’ when they refuse to obey its authoritarian incompetence, and Progressive national parties or governments campaigning alongside the xenophobic Right for ‘exit’.

It is the difference between: (A) Clashing against the EU establishment in a manner that preserves the spirit of internationalism, demands pan-European action, and sets us fully apart from the xenophobic Right, and (B) Walking hand-in-hand with nationalisms that will, inescapably, reinforce the xenophobic Right while allowing the EU to portray the Left as populists insufficiently distinguishable from Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen etc.

The Left’s traditional internationalism is a key ingredient of DiEM25, along with other constituent democratic traditions from a variety of political projects (including progressive liberalism, feminist and ecological movements, the ‘pirate’ parties etc.).

DiEM25 proposes a rebellion to deliver authentic democracy at the levels of local government, national governments and the EU.

This leftwing objection to DiEM25’s call for a pan-European movement is interesting and puzzling. In effect, it argues that democracy is impossible on a supranational scale because a demos must be characterised by national and cultural homogeneity.

The Left, lest we forget, traditionally opposed the bourgeois belief in a one-to-one relationship between a nation and a sovereign parliament. The Left counter-argued that identity is something we create through political struggle (class struggle, the struggle against patriarchy, the struggle for smashing gender and sexual stereotypes, emancipation from Empire etc.).

in order to create the European demos that will bring about Europe’s democracy

Only through this pan-European network of rebel cities, rebel prefectures and rebel governments can a progressive movement become hegemonic in Italy, in Greece, in England, indeed anywhere.

The question for Europe’s Left, for progressive liberals, Greens etc. is, now, whether this struggle, this project, should take the form of a campaign to leave the EU (e.g. Lexit) or, as DiEM25 suggests, of a campaign of civil, civic and governmental disobedience within but in confrontation with the EU

to those who berate DiEM25 and its call for a pan-European democratic movement as utopian, our answer is that a transnational, pan-European democracy remains a legitimate, realistic long-term goal, one that is in concert with the Left’s time honoured internationalism. But this objective must be accompanied by pragmatism and a precise plan for immediate action:

Oppose any talk of ‘more Europe’ now

Present Europeans with a blueprint (a comprehensive set of policies and actions) of how we plan to re-deploy Europe’s existing institutions

ensure that the same blueprint makes provisions for keeping internationalism alive in the event that the EU establishment’s incompetent authoritarianism causes the EU’s disintegration

“The EU will be democratised. Or it will disintegrate!”

We cannot predict which of the two (democratisation or disintegration) will occur. So, we struggle for the former while preparing for the latter.

DiEM25’s Progressive Agenda for Europe will be pragmatic, radical and comprehensive. It will comprise policies that can be implemented immediately to stabilise Europe’s social economy, while:

affording more sovereignty to city councils, prefectures and national parliaments, proposing institutional interventions and designs that will reduce the human cost in case the euro collapses and the EU fragments, and setting up a democratic Constitution Assembly process that enables Europeans to generate a European identity with which to bolster their reinvigorated national cultures, parliaments and local authorities.

Conclusion:

The EU is at an advanced stage of disintegration. There are two prospects. The EU is not past the point of no return (yet) and can, still, be democratised, stabilised, rationalised and humanised The EU is beyond the point of no return and incapable of being democratised. Therefore, its disintegration is certain, as is the clear and present danger of Europe’s descent into a postmodern version of the deflationary 1930s

So, what should progressives do?

Campaign vigorously along internationalist, cross-border, lines all over Europe for a democratic Union – even if we do not believe that the EU can, or ought to, survive in its current form Expose the EU Establishment’s authoritarian incompetence Coordinate civil, civic and governmental disobedience across Europe Illustrate through DiEM25’s own transnational structure how a pan-European democracy can work at all levels and in all jurisdictions Propose a comprehensive Progressive Agenda for Europe which includes sensible, modest, convincing proposals for ‘fixing’ the EU (the euro even) and for managing progressively the EU’s and the euro’s disintegration if and when the Establishment brings it on.

the state and institutions must take an active role in supporting commoning and to support the creation of new Commons.

But the sphere of Commons is broader still, sometimes even tied to specific projects, as normally occurs in the case of digital or non-material Commons.

Commons must be defended by the legal system and safeguarded through particularly stringent protective norms which can ensure the collective enjoyment and use of them, also for the future. Commons also need a specific form of self-governing by the commoners themselves, which must also be strenuously defended

This active role must translate into forms of public-common partnership, where the institutions enable and empower the collective/social peer-creation of common value.

Governments could also provide seed funding

, incentives and grants for Commons and commoning, just as it currently provides research and development support and assistance to businesses and corporations (6).

The legal recognition of the sphere of Commons must lead to a delegation of authority and power by the state to commons-based institutions.

Current debates (and experiments) focus on Trusts, Foundations, for-benefit institutions etc.

Such trusts can be located either inside the boundaries of one state or be trans-border, according to the size and range of the resource and/or of its relative community of interest.

Just as it is true that commoning normally produces use value which cannot be accounted for in monetary terms (values which are part of the range of positive social or environmental externalities) one should construct a special legal form which could recognise and protect a similar type of enterprise or “project” (a common social enterprise) and protect a similar form of production of use value of collective use, which will help build another type of economy.

The software was met with enormous interest

Another crucial factor is the community that coordinates the development of the operating system. The open, decentralized, and seemingly chaotic way of working together pioneered by Torvalds and his collaborators became known as the “bazaar” model of software development (Raymond 2001)

With free software, there is no strict boundary between users and developers. Many participants simply use the software, but some help to improve it, either occasionally or even regularly and intensely. The participants themselves decide whether and how to contribute. Participation is not obligatory, but quite easy if you want to get involved.

Linux and Wikipedia are important examples of two communities – the free software movement (also called open source movement) and the free culture movement

The GNU/Linux story reveals the essential characteristics of peer production. Peer production is based on commons: resources and goods that are jointly developed and maintained by a community and shared according to community-defined rules.

If I modify and distribute a GPL’ed software, I must publish my own version under the GPL. This principle is called “copyleft” since it turns copyright on its head. Instead of granting exclusive rights of control and exploitation to the authors, it ensures that all versions of the software will remain in the commons forever.

While production for the market aims to produce something that can be sold, the usual goal of peer production is to produce something useful.

In contrast to companies and entities in planned economies, peer projects don’t have command structures. That does not mean that they are unstructured; on the contrary, most projects have “maintainers” or “admins” who keep the project on course and decide which contributions to integrate and which to reject.

The success of GNU/Linux is based on the fact that – like all free software – it is a commons that everybody can use, improve and share. The freedoms that make free software a commons were first defined by Richard Stallman in the 1980s. He designed the GNU General Public License (GPL) as an exemplary license to legally protect these freedoms.

Open hardware projects design physical products by freely sharing blueprints, design documents, and bills of materials.

No production is possible without means of production. The RepRap 3D printer has received a lot of attention because it can “print” many of its own parts. Other free 3D printers are the Fab@Home and the MakerBot, around which a large community has formed. Thingiverse is a platform for sharing 3D designs for such printers. Projects such as FurnLab and CubeSpawn design CNC (computer-controlled) machines for processing wood and metals; their aim is to facilitate “personal fabrication.

You cannot create things from designs and blueprints alone – physical resources and means of production are needed as well. Technological advancements have made various production processes less expensive and more accessible.

It makes more sense for productive infrastructures to be community-based, i.e., jointly organized by the inhabitants of a village or neighborhood. There are already examples of this.

Community-organized production places are emerging as well.

Fab Labs are modern open workshops whose goal is to produce “almost anything.” That’s not yet realistic, but they can already produce furniture, clothing, computer equipment (including circuit boards), and other useful things.

Their goal is the creation of an entirely commons-based production infrastructure, a network of free and open facilities that utilize only free software and open hardware.

But can peer production really get that far in the physical world? Won’t it be stopped by the fact that natural resources and the Earth’s carrying capacity are limited?

Digital, Internet-based peer production has produced astonishing amounts of software and contents – a digital plenty that benefits us all. In the physical world, a similar plenty for everyone must seem impossible if one equates plenty with lavishness and wastefulness. But plenty also has another meaning: “getting what I need, when I need it.

Commons-based peer production brings such a needs-driven conception of plenty for everyone into reach.

Physical production is impossible without natural resources. Therefore, peer production won’t be able to realize its full potential unless access to resources is managed according to its principles. Digital peer production treats knowledge and software as a commons. Likewise, physical peer production needs to manage resources and means of production as commons, utilizing them in a fair and sustainable way and preserving or improving their current state.

The challenge is huge

For the future of commons-based peer production it will be very important to bring together the perspectives and experiences of commoners from all areas – whether “digital,” “ecological,” or “traditional.”

the underlying architecture has potentials not only for the future of money, but also for the future of networked cooperation.

Blockchain-based technologies may still have a role to play.

Just as Bitcoin makes certain financial intermediaries unnecessary, new innovations on the blockchain remove the need for gatekeepers from other processes

The broader implication is that the blockchain could support the activities and resources necessary to the commons

A lot of what follows is pretty speculative, but worth discussing in the context of peer-production.

The blockchain is the distributed ledger that keeps track of all transactions made using the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Arguably this is Bitcoin’s key innovation