Michel
PROPOSED EXCERPT:
(...)A lesson what we can learn from several historical trials is,
that we
cannot start from the question of ownership: first conquer the
ownership, then build a new society -- no, this does not work. We can
learn, that ownership is a result of the development of the way to
produces our lives and of the productive forces, it was always in
history in this sequence.
I don't think this is totally correct. It is true that, at least in the
French case, it is during the period of political revolution (1790s),
long after the bourgeoisie had begun to establish its mode of
production, that the question of ownership was broadly posed:
possessions of the Church and the emigrated nobles were confiscated by
the State and sold to the "people"... (in fact to the new bourgeoisie,
the rich merchants, bankers and manufacturers who had previously
developed and were the only ones who could buy them). But if the
bourgeoisie had had the capacity to develop the new production
relations before that moment, it was because it had since the
beginning the ownership of crucial means of production, merchant ships
and commodities, banks and manufactures, for example.
If you consider the transition between slavery and the first forms of
feudalism, at the end of the Roman Empire (III-V century), the basic
change consisted since the beginning in a question of ownership, that
of the slaves (who were also the main "mean of production"). The
"coloni",
the first form of "serves" were emancipated slaves. They ceased to be
the property of their old owners. They remained attached to the land
(which was sold with its coloni) but a part of their production became
their own property.
That is for the past. But it is the same if you consider the present
transition. Free Software was also confronted a question of ownership
(copyright/copyleft) since the beginning. "Peer production", and more
generally "peer X" has developed using means of production (software
like Linux or Apache, for example) which were "non-proprietary"
software, the results of fights to prevent any private appropriation of
them.
Production needs to have the "possession" (not in the sense of "private
ownership" but in the sense of having the control of something, as for
example a primitive man needed to "posses" a "non-proprietary" stone to
drive a stake into the land). How could new relations of *production*
develop without dealing since the beginning with the question of
possession of the means of *production*, even if it is only in an
incipient form?
That being said, it is true that the question can be posed in a more
global and definitive form when the new relations of production have
developed. This is so because it is only *social practice* which can
"convince" the majority of society to accept and develop the new forms
of ownership/possession. For example, the bourgeoisie could obtain the
support of small peasants, artisans and new wage-earners workers when
expropriating the Church and the nobles, because the new production
relations appeared to bring in practice more liberty and wealth.