Michel Bauwens, Helsinki
28/09/2012
Michel: “I’d like to start
with some examples, because otherwise some people will think well, it is
theory; maybe in thirty years something like that (will happen)… so I‘ll start
with two examples. This one I like, it’s almost a P2P-exemple by the book as it
were.
The Nutrient Dense
project
This is a community of
people who have this very strange idea that if you put good nutrients in the
soil, you will get better food. That might sounds logic for this audience, but
it is just the opposite of industrial agriculture witch depletes the soil to
make good food. So these people are not going to get a lot of money from the
government because organic food gets only about one tenth of the subsidies of
the agro-business, and I don’t think Monsanto is very interested in helping
them either. So what do you do in such circumstances? What they do is mutualising
their research infrastructure. This is a community of farmers and scientists
who decided to do collective research. So you have a particular biotope, let’s
say a particular type of soil, maybe Bhutan versus Peru, with a pretty similar
biotope, they do their experiments and they share their results. I like to show
this because this is a kind of knowledge that has an immediate impact on the
productive capacity and life of this people. So this is not theoretical, not
just ‘nice to know’, like Wikipedia This is something that has to do with the
way we grow food.
Wikispeed
The other example I’d like
to show is Wikispeed. There are not many cars like that driving already, just a
few, but I think this is important because the car is the emblematic product of
our industrial capitalist society, right? There is nothing more typical than
the car and actually you could argue that the car (symbolizes) the current or
perhaps already the previous phase of our system. There are a couple of
interesting things about this project. First of all it was done by about eighty
people in a dozen countries in three months time. It was done without any
financial capital whatsoever. They succeeded in designing a car that has a one
hundred mile per gallon fuel efficiency, which is about 4,5 times of what you
can find on the market from Detroit. Thy have a five star security crash rating,
so you can drive the car - it works. It has a modular design, which is very
interesting because industrial production under capitalism is mostly a linear
process; at each stage you need a command, you need permission, you need control,
and then it moves to another stage. But this is an open design project, where
every module of this car can be designed separately by different people in
different places in the world, so it is “massive parallel distributive
development.” This is why they can do this in three months time, whereas it
would take five years to do something approximately the same –if they wanted to
do it, because now the fight in the US against a new law which would double the
requirements from I think 23 to 56 miles per gallon, so they don’t want to do
it, but if they wanted to do it, with all their capital, it would take five
years. This project (Wikispeed) converged with another one, which is called
open source ecology, which is an American project, based in Missouri, and they
are building 54 (I think it is 54 – I’m not sure) basic machines that a modern
village would need to have a modern comfortable lifestyle. They are building
all these machines as an open hardware design and they have developed something
called extreme manufacturing methodology, so basically all the techniques that
were used are (similar?) to produce very fast software development and most of
them are paid by the open source software communities, they are blind into the
design. So why is this important?
Okay, let’s take a
historical analogy: industrial capitalism, mass consumer based capitalism, was
actually born when Henry Ford used Taylorist assemble lines, so you put
different things together. So when you have a method, that’s basically when mass
industrial production started. Now, this is an interesting project for
different reasons. If you live in a society that is characterized by energy and
resource abundance, which is what we think we have, then you compete with
something that is called economies of scale. Economies of scale means that we
become competitive by using more resources, by doing more of the same thing;
that is how you become competitive. So in other words you use more energy, you
use more materials to produce something. Now, when we are moving from an
economy of abundant energy resources and abundant physical resources to a
period where all these things seem to be in decline, then what we need are
economies of scope. Economies of scope mean doing more with the same things. So
Wikispeed by using open design, are mutualising their knowledge, so it is doing
more with the same knowledge. They are not just mutualising their design, but
they are also mutualising their machinery, the design of their machines. So
Wikispeed is based on a micro-factory model. So in other words they scale for
one, it’s manufacturing on demand, they start by making a car when somebody
asks for one, they assemble it locally, it takes two or three days; it’s like a
Lego system, and they use 3D printing machinery which is basically machines
that allow you to print an object from a design on the computer. And by
combining different 3D printing machines they make different parts of the car
and can then assemble the car. But people are also collectively designing the
machines, so this is very important.
So if you know anything about history,
this happened before, right? At the end of the Roman Empire… usually empires
grow until a certain point and then the cost of expansion becomes more than the
benefit of expansion, they start stagnating, then a tribe from the outside
invades and the whole thing starts again. But in the case of the Roman Empire
something different happened, which is they relocalized their economy, right?
Feudalism was no longer based on a globalised Roman trade system; it was based
on relocalizing the productive resources. But they used open design because
they had a global open design community called the Catholic Church. And the
monks worked most of the time, they travelled through Europe, they were
actually working, they were farmers as well, and they were sharing all the
technological advances throughout the European continent. So this is a
historical example of a shift from economies of scale to economies of scope
that already happened some time ago.
Bitcoin
I think this is a good example to show how
these different things fit together. I’ll show you one more thing… Which is
called Bitcoin. If you don’t know Bitcoin… Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer produced
currency; I’m being paid in Bitcoin partially by my P2P Foundation Cooperative.
So it’s basically a global reserve currency that has been created by a
community of hackers through a cryptographic process. So it’s the first social
sovereign currency–which means it is not created by the state-, it is not created
by the banks- and it is globally scaled. And what is interesting is that you
can now use peer-to-peer money to buy a peer-to-peer car.
Phase Transition
So let me tell you
why this is important. Imagine we are living in the sixteenth century, the time
of the print revolution. So first you have Gutenberg with the print revolution,
and before that, if you wanted to know “the truth”, you relied on one single
Church, which everybody believed had basically the Word of God and was Truth.
And most people couldn’t read the Bible. So once you had printing, people start
printing the Bible, people can read the Bible, people can interpreter the Bible
in different ways and they can share interpretations with other people using
mobile printing devices. So in other words, there was a change in the sense
what truth was and all of that, which came around this technology. And in the
same way, two or three centuries before, during the Crusades the Templers who
were in charge of moving the money for the Pilgrims who went to the Holey land,
they invented or reinvented double book accounting. The Catholic Church started
to talk about purgatory around the 11th century. So you could be a banker and
charge interests without going to hell immediately. You bought indulgences,
which allowed the Church to build cathedrals, and so you could be a banker,
right, before that was impossible. So if you had lived in the sixteenth century
you probably wouldn’t know what all these changes meant, you would have seen
that you were living in interesting times, things were changing, but it would
not have been clear to you what those changes meant.
So what you had were
different patterns emerging in different fields, cultural patterns, productive
patterns, financial patterns… But what about if you lived in the eighteenth
century? Well if you had lived in the eighteenth century, it would have been
clear to you that all these patterns meant one thing: capitalism. Because all
these different patterns had aggregated with each had other in a different way
of creating value and distributing value and out of this came a whole new set
of human institutions to organize society and economic life. So basically my
claim is this: my claim is that we are now living this period where basically
the generalization of the network and the horizontalisation of human
relationships and especially human productive relationships that is in chaos
(?) is creating distributed infrastructures, distributed practices, is creating
all kinds of new patterns of solving human problems and these patterns are
slowly congregating and aggregating in a new way of creating value and creating
new institutions, and this is basically what I want to talk to you about today.
So if we talk about peer-to-peer in peer-to-peer production and the Commons,
which is the title of the talk… so first of all, peer-to-peer is a relational
template. When you say peer to peer, basically what you are describing is a
particular type of relationship. Think about working on Wikipedia or working on
Linux, or working on Arduino motherboards, or working on Wikispeed. What you
doing there is… individuals are contributing to a common project, right? So
this is not a market exchange; this is not a hierarchical allocation and this
is not a gift economy either. Because that is a misconception, that the
Internet is a gift economy. In a traditional gift economy, I give you something
and this creates an inequality in our relationship, therefore you feel the need
to give something back; and most tribal societies are organized mainly around
the notion of gifts. Most feudal societies are organized around the notion of
hierarchical allocation and off course all market societies are based on market
pricing and market relationships.
But this is something different, and let me
describe you the value logic of this new system. So in systems like Wikipedia,
Linux and Arduino, Wikispeed… what is happening is that people are contributing
to a common project. Some of these people may be volunteers; other people may
be paid. In Linux for example, the open operating system, 75% of the people
working on Linux are paid by private corporations. 25% are not. But it depends
on the different projects; they have different balances between projects (?).
But the important thing is people are contributing to a common project using
new property formats, and I want to remind you that capitalism rose when we had
a new property form, right? Feudalism doesn’t have private property like in
capitalism. In feudalism you don’t really own the land yourself, it’s a family
thing, right, it is your family lineage who owns the land, and it is a set of
rights and obligations. As we move to the enclosures of the sixteenth century,
the feudal lords become capitalist owners, the land is theirs and they can do
with it want they want. So they chase away the farmers to bring in sheep, those
farmers have no longer access to the land, they become labour and they join
with capital to form a new system, right? In here, you have new-shared property
formats. So if you work on an open knowledge project like Wikipedia, an open
software project like Linux, you are creating a common property, right?
So –and
that is very important- the value is accumulated in a commons, a common pool
that everybody can access. This is very different from the way we are doing things
today. Today we think that value is created privately. Corporations pay
researchers, pay labour, put copyrights or patents on innovation and sell that
as a commodity on the market. In the new system I’m describing people are
contributing to a common project which is universally available. And this is
where the value is deposited. So in other words, we have now what I call
productive publics. Civil society has become productive itself. It can create
value through contributions.
For-benefit associations
Now, the second aspect of this new modality is
what I call for-benefit associations. For example Bitcoin has a Bitcoin
Foundation. Linux has a Linux Foundation. The Wikipedia has a Wikimedia
Foundation. What do they do? Do they command and control the productive
activity of their systems? No they don’t. But what they do is, they enable the
cooperation to occur by protecting the commons and protecting the cooperative
infrastructure. So these for-benefit associations protect the commons, that is
basically their essential role. Peer production itself is not democratic. It is
based on free personal allocation of your skills and energy and time. So
basically people choose whether they want to or not contribute to a commons. So
this is called in scientific terms a stigmergic approach. Stigmergy is the
language of the ants, and ants leave chemical trails that determine the
behaviour of the other ants. So basically if you want to contribute to such a
project, let’s say a Wikipedia article, you want to write something about
Mahayana Buddhism, you check it out, there is no article on it, you can write
one. There is an article but it misses something that you know, you can add
your peace of knowledge to the project. So this is called stigmergy. So
basically, the technical term that us used is holoptism, the ability to see the
whole, as opposed to panoptism, which is only the top can see the whole, which
is the case in our traditional institutions. The higher you go in the
hierarchy, the more you can see of the system. It’s very important to name things
in the right way, so when I say they are for-benefit associations, what do we
think about non-profits? Non-profits is the old system. In the old system we
think profit comes first and non-profit is a secondary activity. If we say
non-governmental that means that government comes first and non-governmental is
a secondary thing. If we are saying this is a for-benefit association, it means
it is for something. It is not a secondary activity at all.
Entrepreneurial coalition
There is a third
player though, and the third player is something I call the entrepreneurial
coalition. The entrepreneurial coalition is all those companies that work with
a commons to add value on top of the commons to operate in the market place. So
typically you have to think of a variety between abundance and scarcity, right?
We learned in school that economics is about the allocation of scarce
resources. So in order to do a market activity, it has to be scarce. So what
can that be? By the way, the open source economy is already one sixth of GDP in
the United States. 17% of the economy is driven by this type of activity. So
the entrepreneurial coalition lives from the commons. A typical example would
be IBM. IBM used to be a hardware company, 15 years ago they went into
trouble, and essentially they transformed to a Linux consultancy company.
That’s what they do. So they use Linux as their collective infrastructure they
pool with other companies, and they use Linux as their raw infrastructure and
they make all kinds of derivative products on top of this open source software.
So they are a kind of in a contradictory position, right? Because they have to
make market activities while relying on something abundant that cannot be
marketed.
This is the difficulty of what I call open business models. So open
business models are always activities that try to create a sustainable living
from a commons, without relying on rent, Intellectual property. So these three
players… how does it work? Commoners contribute to a commons, free or paid, the
for-benefit association enables and empowers the collaborative infrastructure
that makes that cooperation possible and entrepreneurial coalitions create
market activity which sustain the commoners. So this is the kind of function at
the moment. So how does it relate to what we know as capitalism? I like to show
two different value systems operating within the same sphere, right? So we have
use value, we produce something because it is directly useful to somebody, or
we create exchange value through commodities and money because we make money
with them and hopeful it is also useful for someone. So let’s take the Linux
economy as an example.
So in the Linux economy we have a use value sphere. The
use value sphere people contribute to the commons, open and free input, there
is a participative process of value creation and there is a commons oriented
output, which in turn creates a new layer of open and free code, knowledge and
design which can be used to augment the commons. So you have an itinerary cycle
within the use value sphere. I hope that you understand what I am trying to
say. At the same time though, what happens is –and of course the rule is the
following- some people can volunteer all the time, most of the people can
volunteer some of the time, but not everyone can volunteer all the time. So
there is an issue within peer production in the current society, how to make a
living, how to socially reproduce yourself? So this happens today through
entrepreneurial coalitions, they are classical for-profit enterprises.
So you
get your wage, labour, and you get your wage from the big company that hires
you or the small company that hires you. So basically, again, if you look at
the two things, you have the commons, the commoners are sustained by the
entrepreneurial coalition, and the for-benefit association sustains the
collective. So that is basically how it works today. Now the question is
whether the system can become autonomous from this type of society that we have
today or not. So why is that important? One of my arguments why we need peer
production is… First there is a general argument. The general argument is: what
is wrong with our society today? And in very simplistic terms, but I think they
are true, two things: we believe nature is infinite. And therefore we have a
system based on infinite growth within a finite natural system. That’s why we
are destroying the biosphere.
Pseudo abundance and artificial scarcity
Now, all these problems that we are creating need
solutions. So you would think that humanity would freely try to find the best
solutions to those problems that are created. No, because we combine pseudo
abundance with artificial scarcity. We don’t want sharing to occur. So we have
copyright and patents and all kind of means that make sharing and cooperation
difficult. So basically we have pseudo abundance and artificial scarcity
combined. This is the DNA of the current system. In the system I just described
we have at least one of the two turned around. In the commons we have no
artificial scarcity. Every innovation is for the whole of humanity. There is no
privatisation of useful knowledge. Why is this important? I used to work for
the petroleum industry a long time ago. And as you perhaps know, in the
seventies we had thriving renewable energy, for example in California. We had
even electric cars and they were riding already.
I don’t know if you saw the
movie ‘Who Killed the Electric Car”? where you can see the physical destruction
of electric cars in the seventies. Why? Because the oil companies bought up the
renewable energy companies and closed them down, and then the privatised
patents were shelved for thirty years. So this is the general argument. More
specifically, if you want to design as a for-profit company, how do they have
to design? Not because you are evil, it is just how the system works. You have
to design for scarcity, right?
There is a lamp burning in Los Alamos, which has
been burning for 103 years. Can you buy it? No, because it would be suicide for
any market based company to actually sell something that is indestructible. So
how do you do it? Well you do it like with the iPhone, right? You make it, so
that after so many charges it breaks down, and you make the battery in such a
way that you cannot change it yourself, you need soldering expertise, and even
then it is very, very difficult. Then you go ton the store and they tell you it
cost 100 euro to change the batteries. But for 150 you can have a new one. So
this is called planned obsolescence, and it is not a bug, it is a feature,
right? It is a feature of our system. Every design in a for-profit company,
even if it is done for renewable energy, or whatever social good, will always
happen within the scarcity paradigm, right? The market is a scarcity allocation
mechanism; capitalism is a scarcity engineering mechanism. This is why Monsanto
makes terminator seeds, to destroy the regenerative capacity of the earth, to
make it scarce. Scarce means commodity. Then you can sell it, and maintain it.
Now imagine if an open source community would design something. What is the
incentive to have a non-optimal design in terms of sustainability? The answer
is none. There are 24 open car projects and none of these 24 open source car
projects says I am going to make a car that break down after five years, no.
They make a car, for example the Dutch vehicle called the common car has a
biodegradable skin, which you can change every three years. So this is very
important, that in the new system, we have market players, yes we have market
players, but they work with sustainable designs, and they are being designed within
the community dynamic. IBM itself is a good example. So when IBM joined Linux
–of course their first attempt was, we have 2000 workers, we’ll tell them what
to do. But they found out after a few months that their internal systems
couldn’t cope with the speed of development of open source software. So IBM had
to adapt to the norms and regulations of the open source community of Linux.
And then what happened was that they started to use a lot of these techniques
internally. They have ideas jams, they have all kinds of techniques now at IBM
that are actually coming from the open source community. And this is of course
a typical for-profit company. I think we should go further, and I think we
should autonomies peer production and the commons. How can we do that?
Well my
proposal is the following. Now open source users use something called the
general public license, which basically says everybody can use the code,
improve it, change it, but every change is part of the same pool. So this is a
bit of a contradiction. And I am formulating it the following way: the more
communistic the license, the more capitalistic the practice. Why? Because this license allow IBM and all this big companies to use the commons, and it makes a
very big growth of these particular companies (possible), so it works, and most
open source software developers are happy with the way it works. But I think we
should change it a bit and the change I propose is the following: this is
called a peer production licence, which is the following: everyone who
contributes to the commons can use the commons, but if you are a for-profit
company and you are using our commons and you are not contributing, then you
need to pay. So why is this interesting? Because then you have exchange value
coming into the commons itself. And so they advocate basically an alliance of
open source communities with a new type of ethical companies; market entities,
which are not for-profit.
They can make a profit, but they are social
enterprises, they are fair trade enterprises, they are B-corporations, they are
trusts, they can be many different things, but the essential thing is that
their mission, goal and purpose is not profit. Profit is a means and not an
end. So in other words then you get a system were the commoners themselves
create can their own market entities, which are structurally and inherently
commons friendly. Because you know this, if you are now a company, you are
legally obliged to maximise the shareholders value. So you cannot do social
good, because you can be sued. So take Ben & Jerry, a very interesting
progressive ice cream. What did they do when they sold it? When they sold it,
they sold it to the highest bidder on the market because they had shareholders
who would not accept anything else. So they could not follow their own value
system because of their structure. So therefore we need to change these legal
structures.
My point of view is the following: peer-to-peer infrastructures are
inevitable, they are emerging everywhere, in every field of social activity,
and they are outcompeting their proprietary rivals. In any field of open source
software where you have an open source software company emerging, in time, it
displaces the proprietary software company. Usually what happens is that the
proprietary software company starts to use open source strategies as well. So
even those peer-to-peer structures are inevitable, that we have this great
horizontalisation taking place of our productive capacity, so what you have is
the following: you have vertical institutions, you have horizontalisation
taking place, what do you get? You get diagonalization, right? You get some
mutual adaptation, a mutual tension between both, and let’s say that the
hierarchy factor and the commons factor can be combined in different ways. So
this is basically saying the following: given the fact that the peer-to-peer
structures are given, they can be controlled separately or you can get
distributed control. They can have a for-profit orientation or a for-benefit
orientation, in short, capitalism or the commons as a way to say the same
thing.
Four scenarios
So we have four scenarios. First is centralised control with a
for-profit orientation. This is what I call netarchical capitalism –the
hierarchy of the network: net-archy right? A typical example would be Facebook.
I think we can underline that in Facebook you do have a lot of horizontal
dynamics, people share information, meet together, create stuff together, make
revolutions, all kinds of stuff… using a capitalist platform, right? So you can
do many things with Facebook. But you don’t control the design, the servers are
centralized by a company and the monetization of your activity is almost
exclusively in the hands of the platform. This is a problem. This is actually
an unsustainable alternative. The way I explain it is the following. We have
now the capability to exponentially increase the creation of use value, but it
is only being monetized growing linear. So the gap between our capacity to
produce value and the capacity to monetize it is growing apart further and
further. Furthermore, the little bit that is monetized is being monopolized. So
this is the wet dream of capital, right? Free labour. All the time, and you
make all the profit. But it is unsustainable. Because who is going to buy your products
if you don’t pay anybody? So this is what we call a value crisis, we are
creating a value crisis in our society and precarity, because more and more
activities are pushed to this area, where there is no feedback-loop; the value
system is blocked as it were. These are systems where 100% of the value is
created by the users. What is an empty platform? Nothing. So the value is
created by the users, but is not realized by the users. So we have democratized
the means of production but not the means of our livelihoods. This is the basic
issue with this model.
The next model is distributed control with a for-profit
orientation. Bitcoin is a typical example of what I call distributed
capitalism. Bitcoin is a monetary system that is designed as a commodity. It is
scarce, you have to compete for it, you have to buy it on the market place. I
like Bitcoin, but it is a commodity currency. And the reason it was done is
because the people who made it and who like it are usually libertarians, they
are anarcho-capitalists, their ideal society is a society where everybody is
free to trade and exchange without centralized control. They don’t like the
banks, they don’t like the state. So Bitcoin is designed with a market point of
view. So this is why it’s important, you’re intent is very important. If you
design something, your values are very important. Technology is not neutral.
Technology is designed. And the design of your technology says something about
the world you want to enable. If you want to protect your privacy on Facebook,
it is very difficult. You can do it but it is very difficult, why? Because they
make it difficult. They do it in such a way that you give up. And so therefore
they can sell your data, right? Facebook, with CIA-funds –they have venture
capital from the CIA- and they have 800 pages on each of us, they are making a
living through selling our data, this is their business model. So Bitcoin is
different. But it is very important to know if you have a distributed
infrastructure to know what it is for. Let’s say I want to do social lending,
lend through Prosper’s Zopa, not from a bank, but from each other. I can do
that with a point of view, which is: I can go to Prosper because I get more
money on Prosper than I can get from a bank. So you have a unifier structure
but a mindset that is pretty much a normal mindset of a utility maximizer,
right? So these two are emerging, so they are few scenarios but they are also
become realities, right? They are emerging right now. What about the two next
ones?
This one is also emerging big time, localised with resilience. Many of
the people who think we are entering an age of resource and engine scarcity are
thinking oh my god we need to protect ourselves against the decomposition of
the global system. How do you do that? By relocalizing our productive
capacities. And they do that with a community orientation. I don’t know if you
know John Robb from Global Guerrillas, this is typical of this, and he would
say very flatly: I don’t believe in politics. So it is all about lifeboat
strategies. Relocalization as a survival strategy, transition tasks. And
definitively for-benefit oriented, community oriented, but what is lacking for
me –and this is why we have a fourth- is an orientation towards the global
commons, in other words, an orientation towards deep economic and social
change.
So here we have a for-benefit attitude with a global orientation. So
this is where we start thinking about the commons and peer production as a
social alternative that aims to solve the deep crisis that we are facing as a
planet, where we actually want to overturn this pseudo abundance / artificial
scarcity thing, right? And we want to use the commons and peer production as
our leverage. So basically, if I was in the sixteenth century, and I would be
visionary, I would tell you: capitalism is coming. Today I would say:
peer-to-peer is coming, but I am not sure exactly how it is going to turn out.
Because that depends on us, right? It depends on social structure, social
struggle, political mobilisation, all kinds of things that nobody controls. So
our intent for the future is very important.
And if you look at social change
in the past, what I call phase transition, take the end of the Roman Empire and
the end of the feudal system. So what you have is the main system is in crisis.
Rome no longer expands. Can not get more slaves, slaves are becoming very
expensive, cannot get more gold, so the old system no longer works, is
decomposing slowly over two, three centuries, right? So you have an exodus out
of the old system. The emperor start signing decrees to free the slaves, the
slaves start fleeing, the Germanic tribes who are in front of the cities they
want to conquer tell the slaves if you join us you’re free. So all these
pressures create an exodus from slave hood to serfdom. At the same time as the
clever managerial class which shifts to a local strategy, to localised feudal
domains, that eventually would become feudalism. And they did this because when
the Germanic tribes came in, and the state collapsed, what did they do? They
turned to the Christian community. Because the Christian community had created
an alternative system within the old system, right?
So you have crisis,
decomposition, exodus, and a reorientation of both the productive classes and
the managerial classes into a new system of value creation and social
structures. Feudalism is pretty much the same. You have the enclosures of the
sixteenth century, the farmers are expelled from their land, they have no way
to survive, they go to the cities as “free” labour. That’s where they find
people who had converted to merchant activities and factory activities who are
hiring them, creating the basis for a new system. Is it any different from what
is happening today? 35% of young people between 18 and 35 are jobless on
average in Europe, 50% in some countries in Europe. This is an exodus. There is
a massive exodus out of the wage/labour condition. Where are these people
going? They are creating peer-to-peer activities to ensure their survival. They
are creating new types of companies, and I want to give one more example. It is
not a big company, but I think it is a kind of typical.
I went to Rio two or
three months ago, and Rio is really an interesting city. About ten years ago
the minister of culture under Lula, Gilberto Gil, a famous singer, had created
6 or 7.000 points of culture, basically xxx (?) but geared towards production,
so teaching rural youth and favella youth to create film, music, photography,
and eventually create enterprises out f this. So this created a very strong
basis of culture in Brazil. This is just one of the companies I met and this is
how they work, as an example of how people are moving to this new way of
thinking, because it is first of all a change in the value system. This is an
important thing, right? The Christians did not think the same as the Romans.
The Romans hated work, that was for the slaves. The Christian monks loved to
work because this was prefiguring the divine society, they were building the
divine society on earth, right? This was their ideology. So curtocaffee (?), a
small company but really interesting. First of all they use open logistics and
open supply chains. So you can know where they buy the coffee, from whom and at
what price. So no need for certification for fair trade, you just look and you
can see that they are actually doing …? They are teaching the producers to do
their own roasting, which triples their income. Secondly, they do research.
They have four blends of coffee; their research is open. Any body can look at
their research and improve and change their blends of coffee. When they want to
expand their retail operations, they do crowd funding, they do actually as a
community on Facebook ask do you want us to be there and the people are believe
it or not crowd funding the rent for their expansion. So I am just trying to
show you that these people are creating companies with a whole different
mindset than we think a traditional entrepreneur would do, right?
Some politics
Okay, maybe
some politics. Because I believe that politics are still important, and that
this new culture that is emerging is creating its own politics. In Germany we
have the pirate party, in Greece we have (xxx cough), in Brazil there is a
musical network that is feeding candidates for the local elections. So let me
say a few words about all this. First of all: the Pirate Party. The Pirate
Party is a direct expression of the free culture, sharing and producing
communities on the Internet. So usually what happens when you have a new culture,
first it is a subculture. As a subculture it creates its own institutions,
creative commons, general public license, stuff like that, for-benefit
foundations. But as it gets attacked by the established powers, it needs
politics to defend itself. So even though they are not political in the
beginning, the fact that they have to continue to defend themselves against
jail time, create a political movement. Now the Pirate Party in Germany is the
number one party amongst young people between 18 and 25 year old. If it gets 10
to 12% -this is predicted- it would mean that they are basically indispensable
for any future coalition in Germany. Without Germany, any copyright extension
is dead, right? So even this small factor, this small party in Germany, if it would
win, it would have a major impact on how we think and legalize the sharing of
innovations. I have this following idea. I call it the global coalition of the
commons, and the idea is the following: the Pirate Party is the direct
expression of the young, precarious free culture generation. 18 to 25 year old.
They represent the digital commons.
The Greens –the 25 up knowledge class-
which has wages and pensions, represents the natural commons, that’s why they
exist, to defend ecology and nature. Then we have the resurgence of new left
parties pretty much everywhere in Europe. I don’t now about Finland, but in
many European countries there is the re-emergence of more radical left parties,
and they represent what is left of labour essentially.
And then we have social
liberals who represent social entrepreneurs. I like social entrepreneurs; I’ll
tell you why: because social entrepreneurs for me represent a young generation
who wants to get away from wage labour. They want to create their own value,
they want to follow their own passions, and because they want to be independent
they create an enterprise. That’s why they are doing it. But most of them are
doing it by turning capitalism upside down. If you are a classic for-profit
company, what you do is, you look at what people need, because you want to make
money, then you make it. If people don’t want it, well you make them wanting
it, right? You have an overproduction of cars; you make sure that people want
to buy cars. But these people are different. What they want to do is solve
social problems, follow their passions, so they create an enterprise because
they don’t want to be an NGO that is depending on fund rising all the time,
they don’t want to depend on the government, so they create enterprises for a
social goal. So in other words profits become a means and not an end. The
reason I like social entrepreneurs is because they actually change the
productive system. They don’t do just politics, they are actually changing the
logic of production.
For example I met a young man in Paris –I’m not sure he
will succeed- but I think it’s great what he is doing, he wants to create fair
trade electronics. Completely redesigning the supply chain for electronics, XXX
from the minerals in Congo. So he wants a total open supply chain, open
logistics, ethical minds, the whole thing. This is very different from any
former entrepreneurship, this is different; this is a new generation that wants
to change the world through a direct intervention in the productive system, and
I think this is why it is so important and that’s why I think they should be in
this global coalition of the commons. So I think we have actually a potential
for a majority around the notion of the commons, with the pirates, the greens,
the new labour and the social entrepreneurial forces will join around a program
of enabling and empowering social production to occur. So I end up, maybe with
two examples.
One more is in Greece, the potato movement. So basically at some
point the farmers were unhappy and threw away 50.000 kilos of potatoes in some
square in a provincial city and some people said this is really stupid; we can
do something else. So what they did was create a national network of community
supported agriculture where the Greek potato farmers directly deliver to the
consumers, the consumers pre-buy a percentage of the production, this was the
response: 17% of the potato production in Greece were consumption, it has a
proven deflationary effect on the potato price, and these people can mobilize
5.000 people on public squares in provincial cities. So they are becoming a
political force.
In Brazil there is a musical network, Foro do Eixo, they are
musicians from the northeast of Brazil which is a poor state, so they decided
to mutualise their productive capacity, you know the studio time and that
stuff, they use their own internal currency, called the credito, and they
organise huge festivals which brings in external income. They are doing very
well without any copyrights whatsoever. So this is a new business model, it is
a social movement and they are now asked to feed candidates in the local
elections. So we see the first stirrings of a political expression of this new
emerging world. ` How could this world look? And I’ll conclude with that. Well,
basically what I do is the following. Look at what is happening already on a
micro scale within the emerging peer production in our world and imagine how it
would look as a social model. So basically civil society would consist of a
series of commonses as it were: digital commons, natural commons and productive
commons. Digital commons what we make ourselves (in the) immaterial commons,
natural commons, the sky, the oceans, we don’t create a value ourselves, we get
it from the universe, and the productive commons in the sense of the commoners
creating their own market entities, and own their own productive resources. So
we have a productive civil society.
The Partner State
What about the state? Well, I talk about
the partner state. The partner state is not a corporate welfare state as we
have today, it is not a welfare state as we used too have, it’s a state, which
enables and empowers social production to take place, it creates the right
infrastructure. This is very important. If you look at England, in England we
have peer-to-peer conservatives in power. Remember they had a book called The
Big Society, from the Red Tories, and it is basically a peer-to-peer
conservative social movement. But what they believe is that you have to cut the
state and then people would take care of themselves; this is the idea. Well,
let me tell you, it does not work. What happened in England is a devastation of
civil society? A total devastation; a drop of numbers of people active in civil
society. So you do need good public infrastructures if you want this kind of
social cooperation to occur.
Now, it will occur anyway, but I’d like to make
two scenarios, a low road to peer-to-peer and a high road to peer-to-peer. The
low road to peer-to-peer is this: we have a total decomposition of society, the
breakdown of public services, and people to survive, they’ll do peer-to-peer.
But they’ll do peer-to-peer like at the end of the Roman Empire, right? Five
centuries without roads, without cities, without ceramics. If we’ll have to,
we’ll have to, right? But I think we should do our best to avoid this. And the
high road is that you actually have a global coalition of the commons creating
the right infrastructure so social production can occur in this way. And
finally –partner state, commonses, we have the ethical market place where a new
type of players that don’t have in their DNA to ignore externalities, because
this is what went wrong with for-profit companies, it’s not about bad people.
I
talk about myself; I’ve been in business for 30 years, right? So I am not talking
bad of anybody, I was in it, so basically you have no choice. It’s in your DNA.
You have to get raw material, at as low price as you can, sell at the highest
possible price and make as much profit as you can. It is in your DNA. So you
have to ignore social and environmental externalities. It’s in your DNA, you
have no choice. The only way to avoid it is because of pressure of the outside.
So you have regulation to avoid the excesses. What I want is ethical companies
which are structurally sustainable. For example the P2P Foundation coop, we
have in our constitution that we have to support the commons. I don’t have a
choice. If I do something wrong, I make myself illegal in terms of my own
statutes, right? So we need to change civil society, we need to change the
state and we need to change our market type activities. And we van change all
three and actual have a sustainable society for the future of mankind. Thank
you.
(Thunderous applause)
