Peer2Politics

Bitcoin’s innovation in terms of creating a networked form of commodity money is not useful in creating networked forms of public money, and as a result it does not create a way for networked public forms to replace the current State forms.

Governments have the ability to regulate the way Telecomms and Internet companies operate within their countries, indeed, the government is no stranger to creating regulation. Government regulation ensures buildings are built correctly, structurally sound, follow the fire code, etc. Governments create rules that make sure highways, roads, and sidewalks are used safely. Governments pass laws to prevent consumers from being defrauded, create statuary warranties, labour standards, regulate broadcast media, etc. Governments can pass regulations to protect the right to privacy. The idea that the Governments such as Brazil, Germany and the others participating in NETMundial need reforms to IANA and friends before they can work towards guaranteeing their own citizens’ right to privacy is absurd.

Can commons-oriented peer production be applied to material production? Will activists and contributors to the commons always be forced to work within capitalist structures to subsist while investing their available free time in volunteer activities? How can we created socially-oriented companies without the start-up capital to fund them? Is there a model that will allow us to make a living, produce goods and services and even compete with the dominant hegemony?

A must-listen trialogue between Michel Bauwens, Dmytri Kleiner and John Restakis sketching out proposals for radical new economic models that draw on the best from the Co-op, commons and P2P and Venture Communism movements. This conversation was originally recorded by KMO of the C-Realm Podcast.
 

The only way to change the structure of wealth in society, is to change the way we produce and share, by producing and distributing wealth differently, we change the structure of society itself. The preamble of constitution of the IWW states this quite well: “The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old”

My criticism of Facebook and other sites is not they are not useful, it is rather that they are private, centralized, proprietary platforms. Also, simply abstaining from Facebook in the name of my own media purity is not something that I’m interested in, I don’t see capitalism as a consumer choice, I’m more interested in the condition of the masses, than my own consumer correctness. In the end it’s clear that criticizing platforms like Facebook today means using those platforms. Thus, I became a user and set up the Telekommunisten page. Unsurprisingly, it’s been quite successful for us, and reaches a lot more people than our other channels, such as our websites, mailing lists, etc. Hopefully it will also help us promote new decentralized channels as well, as they become viable.

Thus, like capitalists, voluntary producers, come to market twice. Fist time as buyers, the second time for the lulz. However, unlike capitalists their circuit is not completed, because the lulz do not enable them to be buyers again, do not allow for them to acquire the inputs they need to repeat such production.

In this fascinating conversation hosted by KMO from the C-Realm Podcast, Michel Bauwens, Dmytri Kleiner, and John Restakis tackle these questions, and arrive at a series of proposals combining new models of social co-ops with commons-oriented peer production and systems for collective financing.

As the social justice movement began to fade, along with the dotcom boom itself going into bust, it became very clear to me that this was very problematic. These truly liberating and revolutionary communication platforms were not going to be funded by capital. And so, if venture capital wasn’t going to fund them, then we needed some other way to fund them. This is where the term originates from. It originates from the simple aversion to venture capital. If venture capital won’t fund what we need to do, then we have to create venture communism. And so, venture communism itself began as a research project. And over time, there has been some development of the concept, but I usually mean the term in the very broad sense. I have my own proposals that you’ll find in the manifesto and other texts for what approaches to venture communism might look like, or what a venture communism may be like, but I also use the term in a very broad sense that could include other ways of collectively forming the communication capital that we need.