Michel Bauwens challenged my claim that markets are totalitarian:

well, this is absolutely factually and historically incorrect … even in tribal times, there have always been a multitude of exchange and reciprocity mechanisms, except for perhaps really small bands who had no contact with outsiders […]. market mechanisms were used with strangers and enemies in tribal societies …

Which however missed the point of my remark, since actually I had written:

Market production is totalitarian: if some goods (e.g. health care in your example) are only available on the market (by paying for them), then everybody must remain a market producer (engaging in some form of paid work or else living from the work of others), since otherwise how would they get the necessary money?

Clearly, reciprocity (possibly in the form of generalized reciprocity) exists in every society, as I pointed out before. And if “exchange” means relations of the form “if you do/give me this, I’ll do/give you that” (e.g. a little boy saying to a little girl [or vice versa]: “show me yours and I’ll show you mine”), then exchange will also exist in any society. That’s uncontroversial, and pretty uninteresting.

If we want to learn something about specific forms of society, we have to be more specific. Modern market-based societies have the following traits, which I would consider as necessary when we want to reasonably talk about “market production” (as opposed to: some other form of production, in which markets might have played a side rule):

1. Most people’s livelihood depends on their being able to acquire goods on the market. (As I said above: some goods [that are essential for people’s survival] are only available on the market.)
2. Most people are free to sell their own labor power, as well as the results of their labor. (In other words: there is a job market.)

In tribal, feudal, and most other non-capitalist societies, neither of these conditions was true. Maybe a whole tribe actually needed exchange with outsiders to get what they couldn’t produce themselves, but people’s individual survival depended first and foremost on the tribe. Likewise in feudalism, different manors might have needed trade, but the survival of individual serfs depended on their own subsistence production and the protection they received from their lord of the manor. Also, serfs might have had the right to sell surplus produce on the market, but they certainly had no right to sell their labor power. And tribe members wouldn’t have been able to sell their labor power without leaving the tribe, probably forever.

So whenever we look at a society, whether real or imaginary, we have to ask whether these two conditions, especially the first one, hold. (Obviously, if the first condition was true but not the second – you need access to the market to buy necessary goods, but you have nothing to sell – only misery would result. Indeed that’s the situation of a majority of the world’s people today: while nominally free to sell their labor power, they cannot find a capitalist interested in buying it, and they lack the means to successfully run their own business.)

I predict that whenever these conditions are true, the resulting society will look pretty similar to what we have today, since the basics of market competition are then in effect. (You are forced to out-compete others in order to successfully sell your labor power or some other goods; you can grow your market niche and possibly expand your market share [thus increasing your likelihood of long-term economic success] by destroying non-market access to the goods you would like to sell; etc.)

And yet people tell me we can get out of capitalism without overcoming condition 1, people’s dependence on the market. I won’t believe that for a second.

what makes you believe that faced with healthcare issues, I will find with certainty a right doctor and equipment willing to take care of me … since I’m facing this kind of issues right now as a peer producer without health insurance, I’d be more than happy to follow your instructions …

As I understand it, his reasoning goes like this:

1. If I had enough money, then I could afford to pay for health insurance which would allow me to pay for any doctors I need (or I could just pay them directly).
2. If doctors, like me, need to earn money, they’ll offer me (and everybody else who can afford it) their services in exchange for money, so I can find some suitable doctor willing to treat me if I can offer them my money.

These assumptions, while accurately reflecting the current situation, also indicate what’s wrong with it:

• Everybody is forced to work, or at least to try to find (paid) work. Not only are people forced to work (or otherwise get income) in order to get the money that grands them access to the services provided by doctors (as well as to most other essential and nonessential goods which our society has to offer). But also, looking at the same problem from the other side, doctors must be forced to work, since otherwise they apparently wouldn’t offer the services we need, so our money wouldn’t do us any good here.
• Since you must work, and everybody else must too, you are constantly forced to compete against others. You compete for paid work you could do; more general, you compete trying to sell commodities (your labor power is one of them) while others try the same. It may be less apparent that this situation will always produce winners (who find paid work) and losers (who don’t), since it might seem that there could miraculously be enough paid work for everybody, but such a scenario would indeed be “miraculous” and has always been very far from reality.
• Additionally, in such a situation any peer production (generally unpaid, voluntary, self-organized) is the enemy of those whose livelihood depends on being paid for doing roughly the same. The livelihood of people working for Encyclopædia Britannica and Brockhaus has been endangered by Wikipedia, professional musicians’ livelihoods are endangered by all the free music that is shared (legally or illegally) on the Internet, journalists are endangered by blogs etc.
• Moreover, automation now becomes your enemy rather than your friend. A lot of jobs have been made superfluous by computers and other machines. If one thinks (like me) that everything which people do should preferably be fun or satisfying for them, then automation of tasks that aren’t is a good thing. But if your livelihood depends on performing some more or less annoying and unpleasant job, then you won’t want it to be taken over by a computer or machine, even if you otherwise wouldn’t mind being rid of it.

Because of these conflicting tendencies, I don’t think that a long-term, more or less peaceful co-existence of peer production and market production is a credible scenario. Market production is totalitarian: if some goods (e.g. health care) are only available on the market (by paying for them), then everybody must remain a market producer (engaging in some form of paid work or else living from the work of others), since how would they otherwise get the necessary money? The only conceivable exception is a market for luxury goods which nobody needs absolutely (i.e. not health care and other essentials).

What are the alternatives? Either turning peer production into a form of market production, yielding some income to those engaged in it. Then ultimately market production would win and the specific characteristics of peer production would be lost. You would have to compete against others in order to keep or gain market share. You would no longer work voluntarily since your income now depends on your continuing to work. You would be forced to keep some secrets from others to prevent them from competing effectively against you. And so on.

The better alternative is to make people’s dependency of income superfluous, so that nobody needs to find paid work in order to live a good life. This means finding answers to all the hard questions: “If we cannot pay doctors to care for us, how else do we get them to do it?” would be one of them. The basic form of the question is the same as in: “If we cannot pay people to write an encyclopedia for us, how else do we get them to do it?” That latter question has already been answered, though finding the right answer was far from easy.

The history of the Nupedia is an instructive example of the trial-and-error process that preceded the successful setup of the Wikipedia – trying to follow the processes of existing encyclopedias too closely was among the biggest sources of mistake, I believe. Similar trial-and-error processes will be needed for all other areas of life. I suppose that trying to follow the example of capitalist enterprises too closely will be a source of many other mistakes and that peer-produced health care, education, furniture production, computer manufacture, or whatever, will look more different from the currently used processes than we can imagine.

Meanwhile, for a long time we’ll remain in some kind of hybrid situation, where many people will be engaged in some kind of peer production, while still needing some kind of paid work (part-time maybe, like me) to get the money necessary to buy what peer production cannot yet provide.

[Next article in series: In what sense are markets “totalitarian”?]

[via]

While in my book I describe what could be characterized as “open sharing communities requiring reciprocity” (you are required to contribute in order to benefit), my more recent work is about “open sharing communities facilitating reciprocity” – where contributing in some ways is easy and encouraged, but it is not required in order to benefit. When we look at existing successful peer communities, we see that they tend to follow the latter model, hence the change.

The old model was more concerned about lifting the protestant work ethic into a context of peers (as opposed to the buyer/seller relation of capitalism). Work is considered a necessary evil that people will only do if required (forced) to do so, hence contributions must be required or they won’t be done. But actually, successful peer production is more about extending and generalizing the hacker ethic – turning work into something that is fun, pleasurable and rewarding in itself. If you manage to do this, requiring contributions or giving additional external rewards is no longer required and indeed often harmful (the crowding-out effect described by Benkler and others).

Michel Bauwens inquired if it’s not more reasonable to have an “integrative approach” which goes from “one special case, the need for reciprocity, to another, that doesn’t require it.” But actually, I never said anything against reciprocity per se. Reciprocity exists in either case, both in my old approach of “requiring reciprocity” as well as in the newer approach of “facilitating reciprocity.” I do something for others, and others do something for me. Indeed, that’s true of any society.

Also, it’s noteworthy that in both models, reciprocity is indirect – I do something for the community (= other community members) and the community (= other community members) does something for me. But the community members that do something for me will generally not be those that I do something for. In my old “task auctioning” model this indirect reciprocity was enforced and measured – I had to give back (in general) the same amount of labor that was needed to produce the goods I consume.

Society-wide, that relation will always hold – only the goods that have been produced can be consumed. But meanwhile I think it no longer necessary to enforce this on an individual level. If you stop considering consumption as “the good” (that everybody wants to increase as much as possible) and production as “the bad” (that everybody wants to avoid), instead considering both as necessary, interwoven, and potentially pleasant aspects of life (as the hacker ethic does), then enforcing something becomes much less important. After all, you wouldn’t force people to consume, so why force them to produce?

That still leaves the question of how to minimize possible mismatches between consumptive and productive desires. I think that stigmergy, automation and re-organization are the best responses here:

1. Announce the tasks necessary for your consumptive goals, and wait for volunteers.
2. If there aren’t enough, try to automatize the task, i.e. let machines do it. Getting there will usually need other tasks, so go back to step 1 for them. (I think it will often be easier to find volunteers to automatize something than do it manually.)
3. If automation is not (or only partially) possible and there still aren’t enough volunteers, think about how to re-organize the task in such a way that it becomes more attractive for potential volunteers. (Indeed, potential volunteers will do this themselves and might decide to re-organize tasks in ways you didn’t foresee.)

After all this, a pool of (apparently quite unpleasant) tasks which nobody wants to do might remain. For these, I would first consider voluntary distribution among the community members, where (more or less) everybody does a small part of them now and then, without something very bad happening if you don’t. (Though you could get some bad looks or nagging from other community members, if community expectation of doing these tasks is high and you refuse. Hence the line between voluntary and enforced can be quite blurred.) If that doesn’t work, i.e. if too many people opt out, the community would doubtlessly agree on more formal sanctions, such as restricting the consumptive options of those who refuse. In this case, the task pool would revert to my old model of required reciprocity.

I certainly won’t rule out that that can happen, so in that sense I haven’t “given up” my old model. I just don’t consider it the best, or even the most likely scenario. Lets see how far we get with solutions that follow the hacker ethic, or “peer spirit” – stigmergic, self-organized, voluntary. We can figure the rest out later if and when needed.

[Continued by: Why not just pay someone when needed?]

Read more about the relationship between occupation movements and the commons in an interview with Saki Bailey, director of the documentary.

A. The social logics of peer production

It is important to see the value inversion that occurs in peer production. Though it is integrated in the dominant economic model and embedded in the strategies of business firms, there are numerous inversions in the logic of value and production:

• Beyond Exchange: Commons-based peer production is not about exchange. Giving and taking are not coupled with each other.
• Beyond Scarcity: Peer production is marked by anti-rivalry (sharing does not produce a loss, but a gain), i.e. because the knowledge, code or designs are shareable they can be used,copied and modified by everyone.
• Beyond Commodity: Because the result of the production is shareable and anti-rival, and there is no tension between supply and demand, there are not produced for exchange value directly, but for use value.
• Beyond Money: Money is only one of the possible drivers for the contributions, many other motivations become productive factors.
• Beyond Property: Peer production uses licenses that make the contributions available to all possible users, creating a new form of universal common property; this means that there are no direct returns for property.
• Beyond Labor: Because of the multiplicity of motivation, and production for need and use, peer production is not marked by labor for gain.
• Beyond Classes: Contributions become agnostic to whether waged labour is involved; traditional division of labour and the command and control exercised by the firm is secondary; new meritocratic and ad hoc hierarchies replace them (cfr. supra returns on property are inoperable).
• Beyond Exclusion: Peer production systems are designed to enable the maximum number of contributions with the lowest possible treshold of participation.

However, none of these social logics operate in isolation from the larger economy. The participating companies operate in a commodity (I. exchange) economy and seek to create strategies based on market scarcity within the field of abundance created by their commons. These companies pay salaries to their developers or freelancers sell their labor and generate monetary income. These corporations are still generally owned by shareholders hence operating within the classic class dynamics. Meritocratic selection has its own exclusion biases, and many open source companies use dual licensing and other strategies to protect their property. Hence, every non-market social logic operates in relation to market dynamics.

B. Innovative Aspects of Peer Production Practice

Peer production carries with it many different fundamental innovations, that are starkly different from traditional business practice. Here are a number of these practices, contrasted with the practices of the market and the business firm:

• Anti-Credentialism, refers to the inclusiveness of peer production: What matters is the ability to carry out a particular task, not any formal apriori credential (≠ credentialism).
• Anti-Rivalry, see also Anti-Rivalness of Free Software: Sharing the created goods does not diminish the value of the good, but actually enhances it (≠ rivalry).
• Communal Validation: The quality control is not a ‘a priori’ condition of participation, but a post-hoc control process, usually community-driven (≠ hierarchical control).
• Distribution of Tasks: There are no roles and jobs to be performed, only specific tasks to be carried out (≠ division of labor).
• Equipotentiality: People are judged on the particular aspects of their being that is involved in the execution of a particular task (≠ people ranking).
• For Benefit (benefit sharing, benefit-driven production): The production aims to create use value or ‘benefits’ for its user community, not profits for shareholders (≠ for-profit).
• Forking: The freedom to copy and modify includes the possibility to take the project into a different direction (≠ one authorized version).
• Granularity: Refers to the effort to create the smallest possible modules (see Modularity infra), so that the treshold of participation for carrying out tasks is lowered to the lowest possible extent.
• Holoptism; transparency is the default state of information about the project; all additions can be seen and verified and are sourced (≠ panoptism).
• Modularity: Tasks, products and services are organized as modules, that fit with other modules in a puzzle that is continuously re-assembled; anybody can contribute to any module.
• Negotiated Coordination: Conflicts are resolved through an ongoing and mediated dialogue, not by fiat and top-down decisions (≠ centralized and hierarchical decision-making).
• Permissionlessness: One does not need permission to contribute to the commons (≠ permission culture).
• Produsage: There is no strict separation between production and consumption, and users can produce solutions (≠ production for consumption).
• Stigmergy: There is a signalling language that permits system needs to be broadcast and matched to contributions.

The headline taken from Bauwens article is somewhat vague, because it is not clear what type of value is meant there. In the text he distinguishes between use value and exchange or monetary value. He explains, that the more use value is produced by way of open source and peer production, the more exchange value has been removed from the market:

Thus, the open-source economy destroys more proprietary software value than it replaces. Even as it creates an explosion of use value, its monetary value decreases.

This process does not only happen in the realm of immaterial goods, but also with physical products. Examples mentioned are Wikispeed, Local Motors, Arduino and Open Source Ecology. Additionally different approaches of a sharing economy like collaborative comsumption (shared use of tools etc.) will lead to a lesser sales of the respective commodities. Bauwens:

Such developments are good for the planet and good for humanity, but the larger question is: are they good for capitalism?

The answer is: no, it accelerates the crisis of capitalism. His preliminary conclusion:

The solution involves an adaptation of capitalism to peer production, but also opens up the avenues for a transcendence of capitalism.

A follow-up article is announced.