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Re: Raoul Victor * Money and Peer Production (was: [ox-en] Conference documentation)



excelent article, but I do not agree with central  aspects of it.

1) Money is not the universal way of exchange value, in all societes
there exist others way of exchange value, but ok, thats not the
central argument, that could be changed in the article, without change
in its nature

2) Societies grow, so not all human actions are equal value exchange,
in fact if all exchanges are of equal value (no comercial injustice)
(if value could be defined without doubts), there are other acts that
are not exchange

That acts are central to all societies, and not only relevant in peer to peer

all social production in all growing societies are "not balanced"

we are living stuff, we become, more, bigger, (better?)

peer production also produces more than it spends, (and could do it,
even with balanced exchanges!)

its part of nature

its social

3) when we gives software to the world, we receive

we receive "attentional power"

that is what drives knowledge societies, as capital drives industrial ones

attentional power could be easely exchanged for "money", for example publicity.




2010/1/23 Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>:
Hi list!

Here is the text from Raoul's presentation.


                                               Grüße

                                               Stefan

=== 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< ===

=========================
Money and Peer Production
=========================

I'll try to deal with the question of the relations between this two
realities: money and Peer Production. What are these relations today
and what they might be in the future? Especially if one thinks that
Peer Production is a germ of the future society.

The question is not so simple, first of all, because money and Peer
Production relay on different and antagonistic principles.

Money is based on exchange, on symmetric exchange. I give you
something and you give me something of equivalent value. Money, as an
universal equivalent of value, is used

1. to allow that exchange,

2. to measure the value of what is exchanged and

3. to hoard the value of what is exchanged.

On the contrary, Peer production is not based on any symmetrical
relation. There is not exchange of equivalents at any level of the
process of production. There are different definitions of Peer
Production, insisting more or less on different aspects of it. I'll
use here something close to the Michel Bauwen's definition of P2P
which refers to the three moments of the process.

1. Input, raw material is "open" and "free", gratis.

2. The process of collaboration is based on "voluntary participation"
  and not on wage or coercion relationships.

3. The output, the result of the collaboration is "universally
  available", free, gratis.

How these two antagonistic realities can relate to each other? The
answer depends on the historical framework we consider. If we think
that one day a full developed Peer society will exist, it is clear
that things will be different according to the advancement of the
process which leads to such a situation. Thus, I will deal with three
specific moments:

1. within the framework of dominant capitalism

2. in a period of "transition" defined by the fact that Peer
  Production has started to extend to the material (non digital)
  domain

3. in a full developed Peer Society

I had thought at the beginning (as I wrote in the abstract of this
workshop) that I would follow here the Germ form theory and its 5 step
model (of Stefan Meretz and Stefan Merten) to distinguish the
different moments of that evolution. But I realized that it would have
been too long to describe that theory. So I choose to use a more
simplified presentation.

But, before going forward, I think it is necessary to say a few words
about the frequent idea that money and symmetric exchange are
something "natural", almost inherent to human nature, which has always
been naturally accepted and that therefore which will always exist.

Symmetric exchange did not exist within the old primitive communities.
Within these communities there was no private property nor exchange.
Production and distribution were organized as in a big family.
Exchange developed first as a marginal activity at the fringes of
these communities, through the exchange between them under the form of
direct barter. Animals furs against salt, for example. That was a
collective exchange, between communities. The first forms of money
appear later under the form of "commodity money". A specific good,
common and directly useful to all is used as mean of exchange. Many
goods have been used as such: shells (in the 5 continents), grains,
oil, cattle (the Roman word for money, "pecunia" derives from "pecus",
meaning cattle). Later precious metals silver or gold have been used
as money. It is only around the 6th century BC that fiat money, State
money appears in Greece and probably a little bit later in China.

But exchange through money will remain essentially marginal during
almost one thousand years, before the development of capitalism. Under
the slave societies, Greece, or Roman Empire as in the feudal society,
the main economic activity remains agriculture. At that level, between
the slave and his master, between the serf and his lord, the economic
relations are mostly based on direct contributions under the form of
products or labor. It is only under capitalism that money plays a
dominant role in social life. Capitalism places money at the heart of
the two main dimensions which define a mode of production: the goal of
production and the way the producers participate to production. Profit
under the form of money becomes the real goal of production. At the
same time, wages, paid with money, become the medium for most workers
to participate to production. The labor force becomes a commodity by
itself and has a money price in a specific market.

The tendency to imagine that the present use of money is something
natural coming from the beginning of humanity is completely wrong.

Another common and wrong idea is that symmetric exchange and money
were naturally accepted since the beginning of their existence. In
fact the rejection and the mistrust of money are very old. In the 4th
century BC, Aristotle, made a pitiless criticism of money, of exchange
itself, opposed to "household management" logic. He wrote, for
example:

 There are two sorts of wealth-getting, (...); one is a part of
 household management, the other is retail trade: the former is
 necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is
 justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain
 from one another.

He also said:

 All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

In the Christian Bible you can also find a denunciation of trade and
money with the famous passage about Jesus chasing the merchants from
the temple. More generally, it is the same mistrust which explains
that in the "heavens" described by religions, money is absent. With
the development of capitalism criticisms of money became more
frequent. Thomas More in the 16th century in his Utopia. The Diggers
in England, in the 17th century who said:

 When humanity started to sell and buy, it lost its innocence.

The anti-capitalistic socialist movements that appear as from the 19th
century naturally develop and radicalized that rejection.

No. Symmetric exchange and money are not natural and have not been
easily accepted by humans along history.

That was a long parenthesis, but I think it is important to see how
the absence of symmetric exchange and money in the Peer Production
relationships are an achievement of an old human ambition.

But let's go back to the main question: the relations between money
and Peer Production.

And let's deal first with these relations within the framework of
dominant capitalism.

I. Money and Peer Production within capitalism
==============================================

In a capitalist society, Peer Production is inevitably dependent
direct or indirectly on capitalist money, since hackers, and all "peer
producers", need to make a living, and, in such a society, one needs
money to get food or computers. Money can be accepted in order to
develop a Peer Production project, but in that case the main
preoccupation must be to prevent money from subverting the core logic
of it.

What can be said at that level is that the main effort to develop Peer
Production in these conditions is to try to prevent money from
subverting the core logic of it.

But things are not so simple. Capitalism has understood the profit it
can get from forms of Peer Production and has developed hybrid forms
where capitalist relationships are mixed with Peer Production. One of
the most significant examples is the participation of capitalist
corporations (as IBM) to the production of free software, as for
Linux. If we refer to the 3 main characteristics of Peer Production
(free and open input; free volunteering production; universally
available output), one can say that in this case we have hybrid
aspects at the three moments of the process:

1. at the level of the input: raw material is partly capitalistic as
  the computers, the offices, etc. are privately owned by the IBM)
  corporation, but, at the same time, for software production,
  free/open software is also a "raw material"

2. at the level of production, this is not based on free volunteering,
  but some aspects of the production are new, non capitalistic, as
  the cooperation between programmers of antagonistic
  corporations

3. at the level of the output, the result can be oriented by
  corporations more towards their own needs (commercial management
  software, for example) but the output remains universally
  available.

The "social networking" also generates hybrid forms. Let's consider
MySpace or YouTube:

1. the input is partly capitalistic (the infrastructures and the
  financing by advertising), but for the rest most of the input
  (videos, blogs, etc.) are free and open

2. the production process is based partially on capitalist wage
  relations for the infrastructure management, but the rest is based
  on free volunteering

3. the output is supposed to be universally available, but
  corporations impose limits and try to extend these limits,
  provoking open conflicts with users/producers. (See for example the
  site: "why-i-am-deleting-my-myspace-account-and-you-should-too".

Hybrid forms also developed in the past transitions between modes of
production. Between the 6th and the 10h century, many landlords,
including the Church, had simultaneously slaves and serfs (or "coloni"
which were the first form of serfs). Between the 12th century and the
19th century many hybrid forms developed especially in the cities
where capitalism developed within feudal relationships.

In the past, the evolution of these forms has been often slow, with
periods of acceleration but also periods of recession. The example of
the Arsenal of Venice, which in the early 16th century employed some
16,000 people and could produce almost a ship per day using
production-lines, something not seen again after until the industrial
revolution, illustrates how non-linear this evolution can be.

The dynamic of that evolution depends on many factors. The evolution
of technologies is one of them, but it is far from explaining
everything. Here the social consciousness, the social and political
conflicts play a crucial role. For example, in the past, the European
wars of religion after the 16th century and the bourgeois revolutions
of the 17th to 19th century, where indirect or direct expressions of
the conflict between the old feudal logic and the raising capitalistic
one.

To day in the present conflicts concerning the use of Peer Production
aspects by capitalist corporations, we are witnessing the same kind of
conflict between the old logic and the new. The dynamic of that
conflict depends and will depend not only on material-technological
realities but also on social and "political" struggles, at micro and
macro scales. And things should become harsher when peer production
will pretend to extend to the realm of material production.

Finally, just a remark about the role of advertising in the financing
of some hybrid forms of Peer Production.

Hegel said that History advances by its "dark side". The reality of
the relations between some forms of Peer Production and capitalism are
a good illustration of that. Many free, gratis services offered in the
web are financed by advertising. But, advertising is based on
techniques developing pavlovian reflexes in the population in order to
make them buy specific goods. It is based on the famous Goebbels
formula:

 A lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth.

To a certain extent the development of non market relations remains
dependent on one of the darkest side of capitalist totalitarian
manipulation.

As long as the material means of production remain under the
capitalist logic governance, the peer production realities will be in
a way or another limited.

But let's consider what could be the relations between money and Peer
Production in a situation where the material means of production begin
to be collectively owned, put into the commons. As I said at the
beginning of this presentation, this would be the start of a new
period of transition.

II. Money and Peer Production in a transitional period
======================================================

I won't really deal here with the question of how the material means
of production will become part of the commons. Some people think that
this will be the result of a pacific evolution of capitalism led by
enlightened sectors of the ruling class. Others that it will come from
the cooperation and the aggregation of small communities. I'll just
say here that I think that it will be mainly the result of global
social and political struggles where the main protagonists will be the
working pepole, the population directly exploited by capitalist
relationships. But let's leave here this problem aside.

The situation would be the following. A significant share of material
means of production (factories, power plants, oil fields, land, etc.)
become collectively owned in one or several countries. But, because we
are just coming out from a world dominated by scarcity or limitedness,
it is impossible to apply immediately the principle: *To each
according to his needs/desires* without limits. The question is then:
how can be organized the distribution of goods collectively produced?
Since symmetric exchange and money have been the most efficient
"necessary evil" to manage situations where scarcity exists, are they,
here, an inevitable necessity?

I must say clearly that I don't pretend to have a definitive answer.
But I will propose three kind of remarks in order to deal with the
problem. The first ones concern some lessons from history; the second
deals with the classic "Marxist" answer based on the principle *To
each according to his work*; the third concer a proposition of
solution.

1. Some lessons from history
----------------------------

We need to be careful not to have a fetishistic vision of money. You
cannot "abolish" money without eliminating the necessity of symmetric
exchange. The Argentinian experience in 2001, where the State was in
bankruptcy and became unable to issue normally official money, shows
how in a situation of scarcity, if official money disappears, money
re-emerges "spontaneously" from the need of exchange to survive.
During the second world war cigarettes were used as money by prisoners
and are today used as a form of money in U.S. prisons. On a much
larger scale, during the 20th century they were many situations,
especially during the first years of the Russian Revolution or in
periods of war, where governments tried to ban free exchange and
restrict the power of money in order to impose rationing solutions.
The result has always been that market and money reappeared in their
worst form: black market.

Symmetric exchange and money will disappear only when the need for
them has disappeared, when abundance or rather "ampleness" has been
reached for produced goods, as for air or sea water. In the internal
world of Free-Software and Peer Production, money has disappeared not
only because of ethic convictions but because of the intrinsic nature
of digital goods which makes them abundant as soon as they are
created.

If symmetric exchange is needed, money is required. And if money is
needed we must assume it and try to find the ways to prevent all its
most negative aspects, and in particular the possibility to accumulate
money and the power of the issuing organs. "Newly designed money",
electronics and P2P open here a lot of possibilities. But in any case,
that would be a provisional solution, a *lesser evil*. That would not
be a "Peer" solution. "Peer Money" is a contradiction in terms.

2. The classical Marxist solution: "To each according to his work"
------------------------------------------------------------------

The classical Marxist solution, as defined by Marx in his *Critique of
the Gotha Program*, for the distribution of products in a situation
where ampleness is not yet reached, can be summarized by the formula:
"*To each according to his work*".

In principle, that would be an overcoming of capitalism, since it
represents an overcoming of the basic foundation of capitalism: wage
labor and its rule "*To each according to the value of its labor
force*".

But, in order to function, that system needs a complex and huge effort
of measuring. On the one hand it must measure the value of each
producer's "contribution", calculated in abstract/simple-labor hours.
On the other hand, the value of each product. That poses difficulties
at a qualitative and a quantitative level. At a *qualitative* level it
poses 2 important problems. First, the question of making a
distinction between "work" for necessity and "work" for pleasure.
Second, the measuring of work in abstract terms which needs the
transformation of "complex work", the work of experienced or more
educated workers, into simple abstract work. That is a hazardous if
not an impossible task.

At a *quantitative* level, measuring how many hours everyone is
working and on the other side what is the "value" of each product and
each service, all that implies a quantity of effort which one can
wonder if its not a hindrance rather than a factor of fluency.

All this remains under the logics of exchange and measuring exchange
values. Things would be much more easier - especially with Internet
and P2P - if the distribution and production where evaluated in
use-values, needs and possibilities in physical terms

Another critique is necessary to the systems based on the principle
"*to each according to his work*". The measurement of labor
contributions, is supposed to create a motivation for participating in
social production. But as such, this "motivation" is based on the old
bourgeois principles: if you do not work, you do not eat; if you don't
work enough, you won't have enough, and this, regardless of the social
material possibilities. To learn to participate to the social
production in a different way than under the whip and the blackmail of
individual starvation, under economic coercion, is a basic need as
soon as the main means of production become collectively possessed.

The history of Peer Production realities brings here evidence that
this is not Utopian, that this is not an impossible dream. Who would
have said only 20 years ago that products like Linux or Wikipedia,
representing millions of hours of "work", could have been realized
without any economical coercion? Why would it not be the case with
material production? The social atmosphere created by the fact that
the means of production are on the hands of society, in the commons,
should engender an enthusiasm and a collective spirit which could be
the most powerful motivation to participate to production, without
individual economic coercion.

But most important: in a society where the means of production are not
privately owned any more, the organization of production in every
place can be the task of the producers themselves. Further, the design
of the produced means of production can be essentially specified
according to the pleasure they can offer to their users. Producers are
the "end-users" of the means of production. Transforming the world of
production in order to make it a pleasant one should be a top priority
since the beginning of a post-capitalist transition. As far as things
will depend on humans will, we should rather bet on such a method than
on individual economic coercion as an incentive to participate to
production.

3. Another possible solution
----------------------------

As far as there is still not a sufficient ampleness of goods and
capacities of production in order to allow free and unlimited
distribution, how to restrict the consumption to the prevailing
possibilities of production? If we abandon the wage principle: "*to
each according to the value of his labor force*"; if we refuse the
principle: "*to each according to his work*", what principle to use? I
only see one possibility: *to each according to the social
possibilities*. It is a sort of "*to each according to his
needs/desires*" but limited, restricted by what is really possible, as
in the household/domestic economy, or as in a fishers village where
after drawing collectively the net, fishes are shared between the
population. This is a conscious, direct way of dealing with
limitedness in terms of use-value. It is the logic consequence of the
fact that the means of production are collectively possessed (in the
Commons). If we participate to production as collective possessors,
production can be distributed collectively, taking into account
permanently and dynamically what is possible and what is needed. As
already said, P2P networks make possible instantaneous and ubiquitous
availability of the necessary information for such a system.

The question is then: will consumers respect voluntarily the
restrictions when they exist? Is not such a system going to collapse
because of multiple abuses? Such a system means a great degree of
collective consciousness, of self responsibility. That may seem
wishful thinking when envisaged from the point of view of the
capitalist social jungle. But we should not underestimate the change
in mentalities which would be induced by a society where production is
oriented directly and exclusively towards human needs, where
orientation of production is permanently collectively agreed. One of
the most important contributions of Free Software and peer-production
has been to prove with facts that humans can cooperate, share and
produce the most complex things without money profit incentive and
without State coercion.

Some people thought that Wikipedia would never develop because it
would be permanently destroyed by "vandals". The intelligence of
Wikipedia has been to have confidence in the collective spirit of
contributors, to base its rules on the needs of that confidence and
not on the danger represented by vandals. Vandals existed ever since
the beginning of Wikipedia, but they remain a small minority and the
care of the majority has allowed to neutralize their negative action.
Collective consciousness will be a key element in managing the
transition into a post-capitalist society.


III. Money and Peer Production in a full developed Peer society
===============================================================

I'll be very short here. I don't see any reason for the existence of
money in a full developed Peer Society where generalized abundance is
a reality. Maybe some people might like to "play" with money and
exchange. But in that case they can play Monopoly.

Conclusions
===========

I'll draw two conclusions.

The first is about the fact that, historically, symmetric exchange
developed first not at the center of the primitive communities but at
their fringes, through the trade between them. Its movement was from
the periphery to the center. The disappearance of exchange and money
should follow the reverse process, from the center to the periphery.

The second conclusion is about the existence of two contradictory
tendencies in the present society.

One towards a deeper penetration of market relations in all domains of
social life. Introducing property and money everywhere. I recently
read, in the P2P foundation blog, that even Yoga is being privatized,
especially in the US where more than 2500 copyright patents concerning
Yoga have been taken!

The other tendency is towards the elimination of property and money, a
tendency towards what could be called GRATICISM. The development of
the Peer Production reality is the main aspect of that tendency. But,
as Hegel said:

 Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality.

In front of the collapsing and devastating reality of capitalism, it
is urgent to develop, to support the dynamic force of that
contradiction, the movement towards a full developed Peer society.

The question of knowing what could be an alternative to the capitalist
society is crucial for all the social movements which develop and will
develop in the future against the existing order. It is at this level
of consciousness that the Peer production reality should play a
determinant role. Even if it will certainly be in the long run...

Raoul Victor

28mar09




-- 
Diego Saravia
Diego.Saravia gmail.com
NO FUNCIONA->dsa unsa.edu.ar
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Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



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