Re: [ox-en] Kleiner-Bauwens debate about Benkler, part 1
- From: Michael Bouwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com>
- Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2006 17:29:45 -0800 (PST)
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Stefan: great and interesting comments. I hope you don't mind I reproduce them in my blog.
I agree with most of what you said, with the exception of the following:
1) I think we can have exchange regimes, fair trade, social trade, natural
capitalism, living economies, divorced from infinite accumulation and generalized wage labour. They have existed before capitalism, and I see no reason why they cannot exist after.
2) I think that peer production does rely on a abundance of intellect. Free
software and other modes of peer production does not rely exclusively on bright
developers, but on a wide variety of equipotential contributors, who can self-select the granular and modular tasks, and whose contributions are then communally validated. But there is a vast amount of excess creative capacity that can be used in abundance.
Michel
Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de> wrote: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hi Michel, Dmytri, list!
2 weeks (18 days) ago Stefan Meretz wrote:
Hi, from Michel's Blog I picked the three parts of a debate between
Dmytri Kleiner and him, Michael Bauwens, about Yochai Benklerùs
conception of Social Production. Quite interesting:-)
Thanks, StefanMz, for picking this up :-) .
Dmytri Kleiner's critique of Yochai Benkler
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=494
First I need to say that I didn't read Yochaï until now. Therefore I
can't comment on Yochaï directly.
...D. Kleiner offers a critique of Benkler's theory of commons-based
peer production being limited to the immaterial sphere. He writes:
»Yochai Benkler's conception of Social Production, where a network of
peers apply their labour to a common stock for mutual and individual
benefit, certainly resonates with age-old proposed socialist modes of
production, particularly in the libertarian socialist tendencies, where
a class-less community of workers ("peers") produce collaboratively
within a property-less ("commons-based") society. Clearly, even Marx
would agree that the ideal of Communism was commons-based peer
production.
Well, I think what Dmytri describes here is quite interesting. It
mirrors the separation of (somehow alienated) work and free time. Much
of the worker movement's vision about a society were about how to
distribute work. This is also true for the anarchists directions
though many of them distributed agricultural work rather than
industrial work.
The problem is that all these movements had work in mind - not
productive Selbstentfaltung. And in a way this is clear: The
activities necessary to operate (early) industrial machinery are not
only alienated because they are paid. They are also alienated because
they require only a very small part of the human and thus give little
room for Selbstentfaltung. This is the concept of work as pain and it
is not by chance that payment is necessary to compensate for this
pain. Also the notion of a "common stock for mutual and individual
benefit" to me sounds like this work as pain concept.
Insofar I don't think GPL society resonates well with worker
movement's ideas. To me one of the big advantages of the Oekonux
debate is to discover that with the contemporary means of production
for the first time in history productive Selbstentfaltung has the
potential to overcome this industrial work-as-pain concept on a level
of the whole society. IMHO *this* is one of the main differences
between worker movement idea(l)s and the Oekonux debate.
The P2P Foundation researches, documents and promotes peer to peer alternatives.
Wiki and Encyclopedia, at http://p2pfoundation.net; Blog, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net; Newsletter, at http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p
Basic essay at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; interview at http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/09/p2p-very-core-of-world-to-come.html; video interview, at http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/09/29/network_collaboration_peer_to_peer.htm
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