see also blog of the P2P Foundation and IBICT where it was originally published
Abstract:
Abstract:
The first Dutch book on P2P “Save the World” by
Michel Bauwens had a good reception in Flanders. Even for the critics, the
emerging way of ‘getting things done’ through global cooperation on “what is
light” and re-localisation of “what is heavy” is making a lot of sense and is
indeed the way to go. In this article, we examine two criticisms of the book: the
feasibility of an unconditional basic income within the present system and the
possibility to move gradually to a P2P society without “overthrowing”
capitalism.
Apart from the “low road” to peer-to-peer (after
an economic collapse) and “the high road to peer-to-peer” (through
neo-Keynesianism) a third way could open up, based on a reformed partner state
facilitating peer production. Our conclusion is that under the present
circumstances, with exponentially growing bottom-up initiatives, open source
alternatives and the Internet as a new means of production, value creation and
distribution, past failed experiences of ‘socialism in one country’ could today
have more chances of succeeding on condition that a progressive government arms
itself with a commons transitional plan. Such a transitional government would
undoubtedly face many difficulties, but it would at least open the horizon for
a better future. And it would certainly enjoy a wave of solidarity throughout
the world.
Full article:
The first Dutch book on P2P “Save the World” by
Michel Bauwens had a good reception in Flanders, but there was also some
criticism. We examine two of them: the feasibility of an unconditional basic
income and the possibility to move gradually to a P2P society without
“overthrowing” capitalism. The Greek experience learns us a lot about the need
to, under the present social and political circumstance, carry out a transition
process between the “high road” to P2P, and the “low road to P2P (1).
The first edition of the Dutch book on
peer-to-peer “De Wereld Redden” (2) (full English title: “Save The World – With
Peer to Peer to a Post Capitalist Society”) was published almost two years ago.
This book was based on twelve in-depth interviews that I had with Michel
Bauwens in January and February 2013. After two reprints and a successful
translation into French (print run 20.000) (3), we are preparing a new edition for
an English speaking audience. The new book will explain the basic ideas of peer
to peer and stressing the importance of peer production as a transformative
force towards a new stage in human civilization, but will also dig deeper into
P2P theory based on new insights and practices.
Save the World
The basic idea presented in “Save the World” is
quite simple, but at the same time very profound: peer-to-peer carries the
seeds of a new societal model in which commons based peer production will move
to the core of a new post-capitalist economic order. In this future society,
capitalist production will to a large extent be replaced by peer production,
private (capitalism) or state (socialism) ownership of the means of production by
peer property and traditional hierarchical governance of organisations by peer
governance. These developments will affect every single aspect of human life
and thought, including politics, philosophy and even spirituality. Finally,
this future society is not the product of wishful thinking or rooted in some
utopia, but based on emerging practices made possible by network technology, a
subject that has been widely covered in former editions of this magazine. This
transition however, will not necessarily be automatic.
Oddly enough and contrary to our expectations,
the rather self-indulgent title of the book (Save the World) and its core idea,
summed up in the baseline “With P2P Towards a Post-capitalist Society” received
hardly any criticism. This suggests a broad consensus (at least amongst the
readers and reviewers) that the world indeed needs saving, but more
importantly, that this emerging way of ‘getting things done’ through global
cooperation on “what is light” (immaterial commons of code, knowledge and
design) and re-localisation of “what is heavy” (material production) is making
a lot of sense and is indeed the way to go.
Michel Bauwens puts forward different scenarios
and develops political and programmatic proposals to make the phase transition
towards P2p as smooth and efficient as possible. The P2P-model is based
on a hyper productive civil society contributing voluntary and passionately to
the production of immaterial commons of software, design and knowledge. Around this
core, an entrepreneurial coalition of corporations contributing to these
“collaborative commons”, are still competing and using the market to allocate
the scarce added value products and services they produce on top of these
commons. Instead of cooperation on
a corporate level within competition, we get competition within collaboration
on a commons level. The commons become the centre, the market moves to the
periphery.
These model is rooted in emerging practices as
more and more citizens are taking their own initiatives, are mutualising
knowledge and physical infrastructures (the real sharing economy) and are
contributing to all sorts of commons. But more broadly and fundamentally,
people are especially looking for practical solutions for the problems of our
time: the economic crisis, climate change, raising inequality and insecurity,
soil depletion, health problems due to cheap and unhealthy food, etcetera.
Political impact
P2P Book in Flanders
The P2P-book was a modest success in sales, but
had a significant and still growing cultural and political impact in Flanders. After
the release Michel Bauwens not only received a lot of media attention, but the
book was also mentioned by mainstream politicians such as the former Belgian Prime
Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene (Christian Democrat), who declared, just a couple of
weeks before his unexpected death, in an interview with the progressive
newspaper ‘De Morgen’ the following:
“Maybe the
solutions are outside politics. This occurred to me when I was reading the book
‘“Save the World” by the Belgian philosopher Michel Bauwens, momentarily one of
the 100 most prominent thinkers in the world. He doesn’t develop a theory, but
his ideas are based on an existing practice called peer to peer. He sees the
emergence of new groups through the Internet, outside traditional circuits.
Wikipedia is a powerful example. It’s the result of contributions of people who
have no profit motive.
On the local
level, we will see more and more sharing, group purchases, group production.
New groups will develop within society playing a similar role as the trade
unions, cooperatives and mutual insurance companies within industrial society.
And build new things out of this role. You can call it a new form of community building,
which is not commercially steered, although it can be commercially active. A
system to which everybody in the world can contribute...” (4)
Since this interview, different leading politicians
and political parties invited Michel Bauwens to speak at workshops or as a
keynote speaker at internal and public meetings. With the exception of the
conservative Flemish nationalists (the biggest party in Flanders) and the
extreme right Vlaams Belang, all the parties in Flanders showed more or less a
genuine interest, from the small Pirate Party over the Greens to the Social
Democrats and the Christian Democrats, the second main party. The book received
also a quite positive review in “Liberales”, a publication of a think tank of
the liberal party.
This positive reception reflects the potential
of one of the basic political proposals presented in the book: under cognitive
capitalism and a knowledge-based economy, which is more and more dominated by
networks, a new progressive political majority must be constructed around the
commons, not purely on labour as was the case in the past.
A first very important breakthrough has been
achieved very recently in the city of Ghent, which is already presenting itself
as a ‘sharing city’. Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation was asked to develop
a commons transition plan for Ghent in order to become a “commons city”. This
plan will be mainly inspired by the FLOK Society project (5) that was launched
in Ecuador last year.
Main criticisms
Nevertheless, despite the good reviews, the book
was also criticised. The main criticism however concerned issues that were not
or hardly mentioned in the book, such as the introduction of an unconditional
basic income. Another issue, mainly put forward by the (far) left, concerned
the nature of the transition process: will it be smooth, gradual and peaceful,
or will it be painful, abrupt and violent?
Having said that, the core ideas of the book are
often misunderstood. Even after reading, a lot of people still don't seem to differentiate
between P2P marketplaces and peer production of commons, despite the graphical
overview, represented by a quadrant around two axes: a vertical axe moving down
from centralised P2P systems to distributed P2P systems, and from a global level
towards a local level, and a horizontal axe moving from for-profit on the left to
for-benefit to the right (6). Many consider Über and Airbnb as prominent
examples of the sharing economy, although these companies are just a new form
of capitalism, with the platform standing between supply and demand, taking an
ever-bigger part of the revenue and transforming protected workers into
precarious freelancers.
Apart for those misunderstandings I would like
to go into more detail on two main criticism mentioned above, that are also interlinked.
Basically, they have a lot to do with two transitional scenarios, described by
Michel Bauwens as “the high road to P2P” and the “low road to P2P” (1). But let
us take first a closer look to the unconditional basic income.
Unconditional
Basic Income
The idea of providing every citizen with an
unconditional basic income would without any doubt significantly stimulate peer
production, as citizens would not be dependent on a job to earn their living. Most
of commoners are indeed not paid for their contributions to the commons so they
need to earn an income in the ‘old’ economy, by working for a private company,
for the government or as a freelancer. Small scale experiences with an
unconditional basic income showed very positive results, but how realistic is
introducing this on a national level?
A documentary broadcasted on Flemish television (Panorama)
showed that an unconditional basic income of 1500 euro per (adult) citizen
would be entirely possible. Here’s a detailed overview of how this basic income
would be financed:
Cost basic Income:
·
1500 euro/month for each adult above 18 years of age:
157.6 billion
·
200 euro/month for minors under 18: 5 billion
·
Personal insurances: 19 billion
·
Capital insurances: 4.8 billion
·
TOTAL COST: 187.4
billion.
Savings
·
No more pensions: 41,2 billion
·
No more unemployment benefits: 11,2 billion
·
No more child benefits: 6.4 billion
·
No more other social grants: 11,9 billion
·
TOTAL SAVINGS:
80,7 billion
Balance: 187.4 - 70.7 = 116.7 billion
Rationalising
Public Sector:
Less administration (controls), logistics,
subsidies etc. = 25.5 billion
Balance: 116.7 - 25.5 = 91.2 billion.
How to finance this 91.2 billion deficit?
Extra income:
·
Average increase VAT to 25%: 16 billion
·
Augmentation of registration fees to 25%: 5.3 billion
·
Property tax of 25%: 29.2 billion
·
Personal income tax reform: 22.9 billion
·
Corporate tax reform: 4.2 billion
·
Tax on real estate reform: 2.8 billion
·
50% recovery on social and fiscal fraud: 12 billion
Balance: 91.2 - 95.4
billion = 4.2 billion profit
Realistic or unrealistic?
These calculations show that Belgian society is indeed
rich enough to give everyone a decent income, but they don’t show how this can
be carried out in practice. In this model, 91.2 billion extra income is needed,
mainly by extra taxes (on VAT and property). But why would such a tremendous tax
shift and/or a tax reform that put more burdens on the rich be successful in
the context of the introduction of an unconditional basic income? Not even a
fraction of that extra needed money can be found today to improve the present
welfare system. The slogan “take the money where it is” is simpler said than
done.
Another problem with this very generous proposal
is that it would divide the producing classes between all those who would be
better off and a lot of others who would lose a lot. Let’s take pensions. The
average pension in Belgium is well under 1500 euro, but the average pension of
public servants for instance is more than 2000 euro. In this proposal, pensions
would stop to exist all together (saving 44 billion). They would be replaced by
a basic income of 1.500 euro. This would of course be unacceptable for all
pensioners getting more than that amount. And although it is true that the huge
army of civil servants managing and controlling the social security system
costs loads of money, simply laying them off because they have what David Graeber
calls “bullshit jobs” (7) would provoke very heavy resistance. You could argue
that these civil servants should be re-orientated towards useful ans social
necessary jobs, but then the bill wouldn’t add up anymore (25.5 billion savings
in administration costs would be replaced by other expenses).
Off course, an unconditional basic income would
be great for the precariat, freelancers who are not covered by the social
security system based on wage labour (and for whom private insurance is too
expensive), young people who leave school, don’t find a job and don’t receive
any allowance, the unemployed in general (with the exception of those who
receive more than 1500 Euros in the first months of unemployment), and, last
but not least, the hundred of thousands of workers earning the minimum wage
which is less than 1500 euro. In fact, with the introduction of an
unconditional basic income, everyone would enjoy a wage increase of 1500 euro! For
a lot of people that would mean a doubling of their wage. Furthermore, unconditional
means that also well-off people including the 94 500 Belgian dollar
millionaires (8) would receive a state allowance of 1500 euro a month, which
would undoubtedly be questioned among the population.
And finally, who would get it? The basic income
couldn’t be limited to people carrying the Belgian nationality because this would
be in conflict with the European legislation. To give it to everyone living on
Belgian soil is impossible in the context of migration. Reality is more complex
than a simple budget calculation. A more realistic alternative therefore would
be the introduction of a transitional income for commoners. This could be
partially financed by unemployment benefits and present budgets spend on
controlling the unemployed to ensure they are looking for a job and forcing
them to follow training schemes to prepare for jobs that don’t exist.
Power shift
But let’s take this idea of an unconditional
basic income a little bit further. The capitalist system is based on wage
labour: people sell their labour to make a living. The social welfare system
has blurred this capitalist logic somewhat, but the core idea remains that wage
labour is the norm, and social benefits are nothing more than insurance money against
unemployment, sickness, disablement or old age. In addition, social welfare in
Belgium at least is financed practically exclusively through taxes (called
contributions) on labour. So in reality, social benefits are a part of unpaid
wages, needed for insurance. Therefore cuts in benefits are in reality wage cuts.
As people contributing to a commons are
generally not paid and need other resources for their livelihood, an
unconditional basic income would undoubtedly stimulate p2p enormously. So there
is no question that an unconditional basic income would mark in reality the end of wage labour, in other words, the end of
capitalism. Then the question arises: if “we” would have the power to introduce a generous
unconditional basic income, wouldn’t we have the power to reform society much
more fundamentally? Or is it possible to enter a new growth cycle of
capitalism, based on neo-Keynesian politics and positive social and ecological
reforms?
The impotence
towards climate change
As I stated in the beginning, the
uncontroversial character of the title of the book suggests a growing
consciousness that the capitalist system as it is today is at a dead end. This
decaying system is not only destroying the planet, it increases inequality to a
pre-20th century level, as shown by Thomas Piketty in Capital
(9). In addition, the system does not seem to be able to carry out any positive
reforms anymore, neither social, neither ecological.
Take climate change. Multiple studies published
in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that at least 97 percent of actively
publishing climate scientists agree: climate-warming trends over the past
century are very likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the
leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements
endorsing this position (10). Already 27 years ago 99% of NASA was convinced
that the burning of fossil fuels causes rising global temperatures. But in
January this year, although the US Senate voted virtually unanimously that
climate change is occurring and not, as some Republicans have said, a hoax –it
defeated two measures attributing its causes to human activity (11). Despite
all the alarming reports on the consequences of climate change, nothing
substantial has been done so far.
Compare the
impotence towards climate change with the problem of ozone holes that has been
more or less solved by collective global measures taken more than 25 years
ago. Since the Montreal Protocol
agreement in 1987, the emissions of damaging chemicals have been in decline, as
ozone-friendly alternative chemicals have come into common usage. Nasa reported
in a new study that the ozone holes, which were once arguably the highest
profile environmental issue around, would be smaller than 8 million square
miles within the next three decades. The evidence now suggests that the hole
-currently 12 million square miles- will be fully recovered by the end of the
21st century (12).
No more social reforms in the West
The incapacity to carry out positive social reforms
has been demonstrated over and over again in the last three decades of
“counter-reforms” in Western Europe and the USA, but was even more painfully
illustrated by the humanitarian crisis in Greece. Despite more than 20 general
strikes, the Occupy movement of Syntagma Square and the tremendous electoral
victory of Syriza (combined with the near collapse of all main political
parties and the rise of the fascist Golden Dawn), the new Syriza led government
was forced to swallow a humiliating austerity program by the Troika (European
Commission, ECB and IMF). Although bullying and forcing the left wing Greek government to surrender in
order to “encourage the others” is undoubtedly an important factor in the policy
of the EU and the Troika, we cannot ignore objective capitalist interests
behind the latest Greek austerity deal. A simple Grexit in itself wouldn’t solve
the problem, as Marxist economist Michael Robert explains:
“The Keynesians
say the way forward is through Grexit and so now do many Austerians. Both see Grexit as a solution to save
Greek capitalism. The Keynesians reckon it will ‘free’ Greek capitalism from
austerity. The Austerians reckon it will ‘free’ the Euro leaders from the wasted
funding of a failing capitalist economy. But neither side is right if the profitability of capital
does not recover in Greece and in Europe.” (13)
TINA (there is no alternative) as a perverted
version of Fukuyama’s “End of History” is pushing countries like Greece over
the cliff. This makes the scenario of a high road to P2P, based on
neo-Keynesian policies and wealth redistribution in the context of national states unlikely. The traditional
left is still exclusively based on the working class, which for more than 30
years has been on the defensive, due to both subjective (a leadership that
capitulated completely for neoliberal policies), and objective reasons (the
decline of large scale industry in the West, hence the numeric decline of the
working class). Traditional left wing politics of social reforms financed by
taxes and wealth redistribution don’t seem to work anymore. That brings us to
the classical labour theory of value.
Labour theory of
value
According to this
theory, first developed by David Ricardo and further elaborated by Karl Marx, human
labour is the only source of value creation. That does not mean that water, air
and other indispensable ‘goods’ provided by nature have no value, but as they
are abundant and not a product of human labour, they cannot be marketed, although
capitalism tries to do exactly that. According to Peter Brabeck-Letmathe,
former CEO of Nestlé, the largest food producer in the world, corporations
should own every drop of water on the planet and people should pay for it (14).
In the industrial
phase of capitalism, workers (wage earners) constituted a very large part of
the population. The welfare state, a by-product of their struggles, was based
on the redistribution of wealth mainly created in industry. In Belgium, one of
the few countries where the welfare state -although under attack- is still quite
strong, social security is nearly completely financed by labour-based
contributions (taxes). The corporate world consider labour costs much too high
and pushes the present right wing government to cut more and more in social benefits
and carry out a “tax shift” in order to make labour cheaper and business more
competitive. On July 23 the Belgian government decided a tax shift of 7,2 billion
euro to lower corporate taxes from 33 to 25%, mainly by cutting social benefits.
But if it’s true that human labour is the only
source of value creation, what about the contributions to commons of code,
knowledge and design? This sort of labour obviously creates value, but this
value cannot be marketed because the end product is free available for
everyone. Under the present system, this leads to two major problems: the
contributors cannot live from their contributions, and the commons they produce
are used as free raw materials by private business operating in the market. Take
the example of open source software. The software is free, but the added value
of customisation, adaptation, education etc. is indeed marketed.
Just as cheap oil, these free common resources
give capitalism a new breathing space, but create at the same time new
contradictions. Unpaid labour doesn’t fuel the consumer market, quite the
contrary. Companies can produce cheaper goods, but if at least a part of the
created value is not returned to the value creators, there will be nobody to
buy the stuff. The same is true for the business model of “platform capitalism”
or netartichal capitalism (the hierarchy of the network: peer-to-peer at the
bottom, centralised control and 100% monetisation at the top). Take the
business model of Google or Facebook. Income is generated through advertising
and the selling user information to corporations (and even governments). In the
long run, this business model is not sustainable because it provokes a value
crisis. That's probably the reason why Google is moving to more traditional
ways of making money, such as investing in self-driving cars and hardware
devices. In addition, cognitive capitalism faces more and more problems it fails
to resolve: depleted resources, shrinking markets, social and financial
instability…
The high road to P2P: what about ne-Keynesianism?
Let’s return to the different scenarios for
society to move beyond capitalism. The first scenario, the “high road” to P2P,
is quite similar to the ideas developed by Jeremy Rifkin in his latest books
“The Third Industrial Revolution” (15) and especially “The Zero Marginal Cost
Society” (16). Rifkin’s thesis is that within 30 years or so, commons based
peer production will be at the core of our economy. Capitalism will continue to
exist, but as an auxiliary system, pushed to the periphery. But to get there,
massive investments are needed to build the necessary infrastructures for this
new Internet of communication, energy and logistics, enabling and facilitating
common based peer production. The present Internet as a communication network
should indeed be expanded globally and completed by an energy Internet and a
logistic Internet.
This presupposes massive public investments that
would create millions of traditional jobs, while at the same time, as
information technology is eliminating tens of millions of jobs in
manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. New jobs must also be created
in the third sector, voluntary and community-based service organisations.
According to Rifkin these new jobs should be created with government support to
rebuild neighbourhoods and provide social services (17). To finance this last
enterprise, Rifkin advocates scaling down the military budget, enacting a value
added tax on nonessential goods and services and redirecting federal and state
funds to provide a “social wage” in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector
workers.
Rifkin made these last proposals 20 years ago in
his book “The End of Work”. But to finance the infrastructures needed for an
economy based on the collaborative commons, far bigger budgets are required. So
the question arises: where will the money come from? The private sector will
only invest if these investments lead to higher profits, but it is doubtful
that traditional multinationals will pay for infrastructures that in the end
would lead to their downfall. After all in the end, it would lead to a zero
marginal cost society in which profit making would be a thing from the past. On
the other hand, the new “netarchical” (or platform) capitalists like Facebook
(drones) and Google (balloons) do invest in P2P infrastructures on a global
scale because their business model is based on it (18).
If on the other hand the already
heavy indebted national states have to do the job, it is difficult to see where
they will get the money from: by “taxing the rich”, by massive deficit spending
or by both? Even under the Democratic presidency of Obama, US public investment
fell to the lowest level since the Second World War, as reported in the
Financial Times (19):
“Gross capital
investment by the public sector has dropped to just 3.6 per cent of US output compared
with a post-war average of 5 per cent, according to figures compiled by the
Financial Times, as austerity bites in the world’s largest economy.”
So under the present political circumstances, it
seems excluded that governments would engage in such neo-Keynesian policies.
History shows that the managerial and owner classes only make these kinds of
concessions when their own survival is at risk, as was the case after the
Second World War. Afraid for the “communist threat”, they introduced the
Marshall Plan and the welfare state. Today, in the absence of an alternative
economic system, there is no political motivation to introduce a large public
investment program to build the infrastructures for a new economy based on the
collaborative commons seems unlikely, even if such a scenario would be highly
preferable. But what about the economic motivation and feasibility?
The problem is that the financialisation of the
world economy has created incredibly huge amounts of fictitious capital, which are
easier destroyed than taxed. As David Graeber and others explain, money is
created out of thin air by private banks every time a loan is made, on
condition that the borrower is (or is not as the subprime crisis has shown)
creditworthy, that is, capable of paying the loan back with interests. The
result is a continuous cycle of financial bubbles and inevitable bursts, mostly
triggered by “external” events: a bank going bust, a rise in energy prices
above a certain level (Rifkin puts forward the figure of 147 $ for a barrel of
oil) and today after the Greek experience we can add any attempt by a left wing
government to radically change policy. This would undoubtedly also be “punished”
by the financial markets.
The low road to P2P
So under the current circumstances, the most
likely transition towards P2P is the “low road”. Therefore the best way for moving
forward at present is to build our own peer-to-peer alternatives here and now, including
local en digital currencies, and make our networks and solidarity mechanisms
stronger. Michel Bauwens already expressed this view in 2010, in the aftermath
of the financial crisis:
“What seems to be
happening is that mobilization is increasingly happening indeed, and also the
quite rapid spread of open and sharing infrastructures, BUT, there is no longer
anyone to talk to. The enlightened part of the nation states either do not
exist or are two weak, and the global market forces are intent to break what
remains of their independence, and hence, what they can do and signify for
their own peoples. They’re is simply nobody there anymore, the system has
exhausted its capabilities to rectify outside of the narrow interests of the
predatory financial class“ (20).
Also in 2010, John Robb, author, entrepreneur,
inventor and a former USAF pilot in special operations wrote: (21)
“For those that
think that this will bring about a surge of peaceful economic vigour, you will
be wrong. It will fragment society and lead to perpetual stagnation/depression,
endemic violence/corruption, and squalor. For absent any moral basis (a social
compact), stability, or (widely shared) prosperity: new sources of order will
emerge to fill the gap left by the hollowing out of the nation-state. These new
sources of order will be first seen in the rise of the criminal entrepreneur,
whether they be the be suited corporate gangster or the gang tattooed thug. For
in the world of hollow states (without a morality that limits behaviour) and
limitless connectivity to the global economic system, these criminal
entrepreneurs quickly become dominant, violently coercing or corrupting
everyone in the path to their enrichment.”
Building the alternatives in a low road scenario
shouldn’t however be all that dramatic, as John Rob already stated in 2009:
“In either case,
system recovery could be catalyzed and the damage largely mitigated, if our
global system was scale invariant. Basically, this means that if we had
communities that could produce at the local level many of the essential
products and services currently produced at the global level, handling
disconnection or buffering turbulence would be of little consequence (also, it
would be much easier for us to find ways of protecting or making redundant the
products/services that ONLY could be produced at the global level).
Fortunately, particularly given the substantial uptick in dynamic instability
at the global level, we are seeing movement towards scale invariant resilient
communities. These communities can and would be able to operate autonomously
regardless of availability, pricing, or quality of external goods/services for
extended periods of time. Unfortunately, this movement may not spread quickly
enough to provide any meaningful support to those communities that are utterly
dependent on the smooth functioning of the global system.” (22)
Commons transition
plan on a national level
John Rob was talking about local communities, about local resilience. But
what is local in a globalised world? Is it communal, regional, or even
national? We could argue that in the case of Greece, a plan B, based on the
introduction of a “local” (in this case national) currency protecting and
stimulating the local economy (and keeping the euro for international
payments), and a governmental commons transition plan to turn the Greek state
into a facilitator for commons based peer production, could well be a viable
alternative to the present situation in which the country has in effect been
turned into a European protectorate, stripped from every shred of sovereignty
and democracy.
Europe and the West would of course meet such a move with the greatest
hostility. It wouldn’t be the first time that a country wanting to reform is
pushed much further than originally planned because of the reaction of the
West. Remember Cuba. But all nations that introduced socialism in the 20th
century were characterised by bureaucratic deformations and a lack of
democratic involvement right from the early beginning. This democratic deficit
and the bureaucratic planning of the economy led ultimately to the failure of
the “communist” or “socialist” experiments in the 20th century. It was also the
reason that the new (mainly Latin American) progressive regimes of the 21st
century didn’t go “all the way”.
But even during some of the socialist experiences in the past, attempts
were made to improve the planned economy using cybernetics, as shown in the
semi-fictional book Red Plenty by Francis Spufford (23). In this book, Spufford
explains that under Nikita Khrushchev, plans were made to use a sort of
“internet avant la lettre” to make the planned economy work, not only for the
production of steel and concrete, but also for the production of sophisticated
production goods. As the Guardian reports: (24)
But during the
Soviet moment there was a serious attempt to apply the intellectual resources
of the educated country the Bolsheviks had kicked and bludgeoned into being.
All of the perversities in the Soviet economy that I've described above are the
classic consequences of running a system without the flow of information
provided by market exchange; and it was clear at the beginning of the 60s that
for the system to move on up to the plenty promised so insanely for 1980, there
would have to be informational fixes for each deficiency. Hence the emphasis on
cybernetics, which had gone in a handful of years from being condemned as a
"bourgeois pseudo-science" to being an official panacea.
The USSR's
pioneering computer scientists were heavily involved, and so was the authentic
genius Leonid Kantorovich, nearest Soviet counterpart to John Von Neumann and
later to be the only ever Soviet winner of the Nobel Prize for economics. Their
thinking drew on the uncorrupted traditions of Soviet mathematics. While parts
of it merely smuggled elements of rational pricing into the Soviet context,
other parts were truly directed at outdoing market processes. The effort
failed, of course, for reasons which are an irony-laminated comedy in
themselves. The sumps of the command economy were dark and deep and not
accessible to academics; Stalinist industrialisation had welded a set of
incentives into place which clever software could not touch; the system was
administered by rent-seeking gangsters; the mathematicians were relying (at two
removes) on conventional neoclassical economics to characterise the market
processes they were trying to simulate, and the neoclassicists may just be
wrong about how capitalism works.
In other words, using this technology would in effect have destroyed the
bureaucracy that controlled the planned economy.
In Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (25),
Eden Medina shows that in
Allende’s Chile a similar experience was undertaken, but this time it was not
the government that killed the attempt, quite the contrary, but the Pinochet
coup. Here’s a synopsis of the book by Amazon (26):
In Cybernetic
Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian
visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment
with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the
simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's
economy. Neither vision was fully realized. Allende's government ended with a violent
military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely
implemented-but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between
technology and politics.
Drawing on
extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic
system envisioned by the Chilean government--which was to feature holistic
system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national
telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and
modelling the behaviour of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents
with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured
swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data,
and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project
Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a
government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the
Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine
the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just
society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities.
Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are
reading history.
Under the present circumstances, with exponentially growing bottom-up
initiatives, open source alternatives and the Internet as a new means of
production, this failed experiences would have far more chances of succeeding.
Therefore, a progressive government armed with a commons transitional plan
might prove a much better alternative. It would undoubtedly face many
difficulties in the beginning, but it would at least open the horizon for a
better future. And it would certainly enjoy a wave of solidarity throughout the
world.
Sources
(1) The Global Economic System in the Midst of Profound Change: An
Examination of Michel Bauwens’ Foundation for P2P Alternatives. Peer Production
in a World that is Benkler’s “Wealth of Networks” Made Concrete. Cook Report on
Internet Protocol, Volume XIX, No. 5-6, August-September 2010
&
The high road towards p2p is dying; prepare you for the low road, P2P
Foundation blog June 2 2010
(2) “De wereld redden - met peer-to-peer naar een
postkapitalistische samenleving” by Michel Bauwens and Jean Lievens - Publisher:
Houtekiet; 1 edition (16 Oct. 2013)
(3) Sauver le monde / vers une économie
post-capitaliste avec le peer-to-peer Michel Bauwens & Jean Lievens - Éditions
Les Liens qui libèrent (18 mars 2015)
(4) De Morgen (April 19
2014) “Het afscheidsinterview van Dehaene”
(5) http://floksociety.org
(6) Michel Bauwens: Four Scenarios for the Collaborative Economy - Youtube
21 May 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMV4cqRgV6Q)
(7)
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, Strike Magazine August 17
2013.
(8) De Standaard June 18 2014: “België is 11.900 dollarmillionairs rijker”.
(9) Thomas Piketty, Capital in
the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press (18 Mar. 2014)
(11) The Guardian January 22 2015: “US Senate
refuses to accept humanity's role in global climate change, again”
(12) Wired May 7 2015: “Hole in the ozone layer
'solved' reports Nasa”
(13) Grexit, De Long and the wages of Sinn, July
26, 2015 – Michael Robert’s blog https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com
(14) The Privatization of Water: Nestlé Denies that Water is a Fundamental
Human Right – Global Research, Centre for Research on Globalization, June 27
2013
(15) The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral
Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World Paperback by Jeremy
Rifkin – Palgrave Macmillan
(5 Feb. 2013)
(16) The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the
Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin -
Palgrave Macmillan (1 April 2014)
(17) Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the
Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, April 16, 1996,
Tarcher; New edition edition (April 16, 1996) (Quoted from Publishers Weekly)
(18) Google and Facebook's
Race to Bring the Web to the Developing World, Bloomberg Business 3 March 2015
(19) Financial Times 3
November 2013: “US public investment falls to lowest level since war”
(20) Michel Bauwens: The high
road towards p2p is dying, prepare yourself for the low road, 2nd June 2010
(blog P2P Foundation)
(21) John Rob, The Decline of the West, 8 May 2010
(22) John Rob, Resilient Communities and Scale Invariance 16 April 2009
(23) Francis Spufford, Red Plenty, Faber & Faber; Main
edition (7 July 2011)
(24) Red plenty: lessons from the Soviet dream,
The Guardian 7 August 2010
(25) Eden Medina, Cybernetic
Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile, MIT Press; Reprint
edition (11 Feb. 2014)
(26) quoted from Amazon.uk
