[ox-en] Kleiner-Bauwens debate about Benkler, part 4
- From: Stefan Meretz <stefan.meretz hbv.org>
- Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 15:21:29 +0200
The Benkler/Lessig Bauwens/Kleiner debate, part four
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=514
Dmytri Kleiner sends us a new reaction:
Thank you Michel, it is a great pleasure to discuss this topic with you,
I am not sure however, that your last contribution can be seen as a
response to my comments, which you appear more or less to agree with
some part of, so much as an expression of your own somewhat related
thoughts, and adding references to things like “intersubjective
typology” and “authority ranking,” which, though perhaps interesting,
are not in your text connected to the points I make, thus simply left
as dangling allusions.
As I certainly understand the differences between commons-based peer
production and a Maussian gift-economy, and other issues your raise, so
it seems you are talking passed me, or around me, rather than engaging
with specific arguments and criticisms I am making, so I will address
only the areas that I think directly relate to our discussion.
Your example of the dynamics of the family is actually one I use quite
often myself as well, however with a rather more critical conclusion. I
agree that what I have described as the poverty of the network or the
fact that free culture is bankrupt does have a quite similar dynamic to
the poverty of mothers, and the terrible economic situation of children
and their primary care-givers.
Rejoicing in the growth and realization of a child is quite rewarding,
not only for the parents, but most people would consider children to be
part of the wealth of the entire community.
However like the wealth of the information-commons, this wealth has only
use-value, not exchange value, and thus the mother or primary
care-giver is unable to provide for her or the child’s material
subsistence as a result of this value, and certainly she can not
accumulate wealth in this way.
The mother is in this way subordinated to an outside “provider,” either
a husband or the State, and too-often finds herself powerless, isolated
and living in poverty.
In this way, the peer-producers of free culture are indeed very similar
to care-giving parents. There work creates use-value, but they can not
capture any exchange value from their labour.
However, those that have Property can create such exchange value from
this labour, by employing either the child or the information-product
in production, and compensating such productive inputs with no more
than their direct subsistence/reproduction costs.
Neither the mother, nor the free culture producer, has anyway to
directly acquire Property from their contribution to the common wealth.
Your belief that “peer production is indeed immanent within the current
meta-system, but that it, at the same time, significantly transcends it
as a post-capitalist mode” is quaint, but ignores the Real Politik of
power.
So long as peer-producers works on a common stock with no reproduction
costs, all the surplus wealth created will be appropriated by Property,
and applied towards using the economic and physical violence of the
state to obliterate or co-opt any prospect of a change in the mode of
production.
Whatever portion of his product the worker allows property to
appropriate, will return in the form of his own forced subjugation.
I absolutely agree with your statement “in the meantime, it (we)
co-exist with the world as it is, and the expansion of passionate peer
production is still a fundamentally positive thing.” As a parent, free
software user and developer and producer of free culture, I strongly
endorse the creation of communal use-value.
However, this does not blind me to the way that community-created value
is captured by Property, so I absolutely disagree that
therefore “Benkler and Lessig are allies in the expansion of it, with a
lot more power and influence, and potential for good, that either
Kleiner or myself.”
Benkler and Lessig are the vanguard of Capital, whatever part of the
free culture movement Property will not simply obliterate, law
professors and other members of the liberal capitalist intellectual
elite will simply co-opt and defuse of any genuinely revolutionary
content.
The fact that they have “a lot more power and influence” is exactly
because there is no “potential for good” in their work, at least not
any idea of “good” than can be seen as a threat to the dominant mode of
production and resulting wealth accumulation model.
You also continue to insist that peer-production is based on abundance
and can not be applied to a commons of scarce resources, when I have
already explained that there are models for common ownership of scarce
resources, listing Georgist/Gesselian Rent-Sharing models as my
preferred methods, and you seem to be favourable to this — so I am
unclear on why you continue to argue as if the non-rivalrous basis of
the commons is an agreed upon fact, when in fact it is the basis of my
disagreement with both you and Benkler.
I also strongly disagree in your idea that regarding
property-enforcement “we have to let people in a pluralist economy free
to choose.”
Please consider if you would you say that in slave society! Should we
leave slave owners free to “choose” the degree of freedom to give their
slaves?
The fact is, which you (and also Sam Rose in his comment to your first
Blog post) seem to want to ignore is that it is Property that violates
freedom, not its absence.
By nature, I am already free to use what ever information-products I
have perceived or have access to, no force or violation of freedom is
needed to achieve this. It is those that want to stop me from
using “their” information-products that require invasive force to do
so, specifically the force of State violence enforcing their
State-granted “Copyright.”
You can not have the “freedom to chose” the freedom of others, unless
you have already violated it.
As to your question whether there is “anyone who can claim to ‘know the
answer’” — this is nothing other than a banality, you are simply trying
to avoid making a prescriptive statement, which was exactly the basis
of my “seeing what sticks” criticism, that your positive suggestions
amount to no more than a random string of buzzwords unconnected to the
actual topic being discussed, and are not only not prescriptive, but
actually neither predictive nor actionable either.
I can not say whether or not anyone can claim to “know the answer,” but
in the context of a discussion, at least an answer can be proposed and
logically examined.
You propose we “look at what social movements are doing,” yet we are
those social movements, and it is our discussions that govern our
actions, social movements are not something to be studied as if
watching from another planet, they and the answers to social problems
they represent are driven by critical discussion of prescriptive,
actionable “answers” not evasions and allusions.
Now, taking a look at social movements, there are three kinds; the
marginal, the dead and the false. This may seem harsh, but any social
movement that is not marginal is either destroyed by Property or
co-opted by it.
Why?
Because no major social movement has created a new mode of production
that allows it to accumulate enough wealth to subsist and defend
itself.
Nothing will change until such a mode of production is realized.
I believe that commons-based peer-production can and will be that mode
of production.
We both agree that “we start bottom-up from the existing pluralism of
alternatives” thus we should both be aware of the fact that we will
face top-down resistance and be prepared to recognize it by not
forgetting the core of the arguments: property is theft, intellectual
property is fraud, political power is extension of economic power.
To protect our bottom-up revolution, we need to be wary of those who try
to define a commons in such a way that it is the “producer” and not the
user who’s freedom is protected and characterized as a right to control
others, or those that want to replace the commons with a false commons,
containing nothing but immaterial “property” with no reproduction
costs.
In 1649, Gerrard Winstanley and his followers took over vacant or common
lands in Surrey, Buckinghamshire, Kent, and Northamptonshire and began
cultivating the land and distributing the crops without charge to their
followers. Local landowners took fright from the Diggers’ activities
and in 1650 sent hired thugs to beat the Diggers and destroy their
colony.
Lessage and Benkler, apologist for Capitalist Property-privilege, would
support the dispossession of Winstanley and his Diggers, on the grounds
that land is scarce and/or it is the “right” of the landlord to decide
how “his” land should be used. They deny the fact that the entire
natural world is in fact a commons. One that has been stolen. You will
not win it back by instead retreating into an imaginary commons of
smoke and hot air.
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