Peer2Politics

"Peer production is based on commons and possession (not on property). Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production” to emphasize the important role of the commons (goods and resources without owners who can control how they can be used). Generally, commons such as free software and open knowledge play an important role as input or output (or both) of peer projects.

The Commons is under fire in Madrid, and we need help. To give you some context to understand what’s happening right now, we’re reposting this article written by Bernardo Gutiérrez, which originally appeared at Guerrilla Translation.

Reposted from the C-Realm podcast, KMO starts off with a discussion of David Graeber’s 2012 essay, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”, part of which we’ve recently featured of the blog.  The bulk of the Podcast comprises a fascinating conversation with G- Paul Blundell on the workings of his Commune.

business-empowered communities: they are not companies linked to a community, but transnational communities that have acquired enterprises in order to gain continuity in time and robustness [1]

So, to try to explain what “venture communism” is, which is my own project, predating the term “peer production”, but very relevant to it. I think we’re talking about the same thing, even if I was using different terms. As a technologist, I was also inspired by the functioning of peer networks and the organization of free software projects. These were also the inspiration for venture communism. I wanted to create something like a protocol for the formation and allocation of physical goods, the same way we have TCP/IP and so forth, as a way to allocate immaterial goods. The Internet gives us a very efficient platform on which we can share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.

"In the last few years community ownership of land and buildings has become, alongside social enterprise, a hot topic across the political spectrum, evidenced by manifesto promises, government reports and White Papers, enabling legislation, regulation and guidance, new investment funds, community right to buy legislation in Scotland, a review by the Welsh Assembly and an Asset Transfer Unit for England.

By converting land into commonwealth – capturing escalating land values for everyone’s benefit – it is possible to make housing more affordable and to finance all sorts of infrastructure and services that make communities more stable, attractive and thriving.

A very special interview between sustainable community expert and “business provocateur” John Thackaray and our very own Michel Bauwens.

On the one hand we have a re-emergence of the cooperative movement and worked-owned enterprises, but they suffer from structural weaknesses. Cooperative entities work for their own members, are reluctant to accept new cooperators that would share existing profits and benefits, and are practitioners of the same proprietary knowledge and artificial scarcities as their capitalist counterparts. Even though they are internally democratic, they often participate in the same dynamics of capitalist competition which undermines their own cooperative values.

On the one hand we have a re-emergence of the cooperative movement and worked-owned enterprises, but they suffer from structural weaknesses. Cooperative entities work for their own members, are reluctant to accept new cooperators that would share existing profits and benefits, and are practicioners of the same proprietary knowledge and artificial scarcities as their capitalist counterparts. Even though they are internally democratic, they often participate in the same dynamics of capitalist competition which undermines their own cooperative values.

Building the infrastructure for a global community of a commons-based peer society

“Property-owning democracy is unfamiliar and not well-understood, but it is a promising ideal for progressive political economy. In this very instructive, wide-ranging, and most welcome volume, Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson have assembled fourteen thoughtful essays and a substantial introduction which together explore its meaning and history, and the prospects of its implementation. The book has a great deal to interest political philosophers and theorists, political scientists, political economists, and reflective political activists on the left. The essays are accessibly written, and the economics that is included is not mathematically demanding. As with any collection on an unfamiliar topic, a review of this one requires the provision of considerable background. The book is not primarily about Rawls. But its sub-title is “Rawls and Beyond” and it takes Rawls’s treatment of property-owning democracy as its touchstone and starting point. And so to appreciate this book, we need to see what Rawls meant by “property-owning democracy” and why he concluded in Restatement that either it or what he called “liberal socialism” “seem[s] necessary” to realize his conception of justice.[3] I shall therefore explain what Rawls had in mind while engaging and commenting on a number of the essays in O’Neill and Williamson’s collection.

“Land is part of the global commons like water, air, language, knowledge and culture. The loss of commons land continues to increase with the demise of county farms and the growing sales of public sector land to raise money to close the fiscal deficit. Today two thirds of the UK’s 60 million acres is owned by just 158,000 families or 0.36% of the population according to Kevin Cahill (2001) in Who Owns Britain.

Distributism, the ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the populace, rather than being centralized

Social media services can ultimately be run as public utilities, ad-free, at cost, in a democratic spirit and for social ends, in their enormous variety—or else digital society can become ever more subservient to the single end of the accumulation of private capital. The choice is between social life as an advertising platform and socialized social media.