Peer2Politics

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. 

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation recently published a short essay noting that the economic fruits of peer production in today’s world tend to be captured by capitalists – whereas what we really need is a system to enable capital accumulation for and by commoners themselves.  To that end, Bauwens embraces the idea of a Peer Production License, as designed and proposed by Dmitri Kleiner.  

On 20th of March, Michel Bauwens replied in the P2P weblog. His  key argument is the following: “the present fully-sharing open licenses which allow unrestricted commercial exploitation create a ‘communism of capital’, i.e. a sphere of open knowledge, code and design, which is subsumed to the present dominant political economy. But what we need is an autonomous sphere of peer production, in which commoners and peer producers can create their own livelyhood, while staying in the sphere of the commons. In other words, we need a ‘capital for the commons’. The best way to achieve that is to converge the sphere of immaterial commons contributions, with a sphere of cooperative accumulation through which the surplus value can stay within the sphere of commons/cooperative production.”

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation recently published a short essay noting that the economic fruits of peer production in today’s world tend to be captured by capitalists – whereas what we really need is a system to enable capital accumulation for and by commoners themselves.  To that end, Bauwens embraces the idea of a Peer Production License, as designed and proposed by Dmitri Kleiner.  

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation recently published a short essay noting that the economic fruits of peer production in today’s world tend to be captured by capitalists – whereas what we really need is a system to enable capital accumulation for and by commoners themselves.  To that end, Bauwens embraces the idea of a Peer Production License, as designed and proposed by Dmitri Kleiner.  

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation recently published a short essay noting that the economic fruits of peer production in today’s world tend to be captured by capitalists – whereas what we really need is a system to enable capital accumulation for and by commoners themselves.  To that end, Bauwens embraces the idea of a Peer Production License, as designed and proposed by Dmitri Kleiner.  

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation recently published a short essay noting that the economic fruits of peer production in today’s world tend to be captured by capitalists – whereas what we really need is a system to enable capital accumulation for and by commoners themselves.  To that end, Bauwens embraces the idea of a Peer Production License, as designed and proposed by Dmitri Kleiner.  

"Michel Bauwens ... dreams to link “the commons to a enterpreneurial coalition of ethical market entitities (Coops and other models)” keeping “the surplus value entirely within the sphere of commoners/cooperators instead of leaking out to the multinationals”. Smartly commons and cooperatives are intermingled via the involved persons. Hereby a “sphere of the good” is defined. It is good what contributes to this sphere, and this is the goal of the PPL which “allows commoners to create their own market entities, keeping the surplus value into the commons sphere”. Shortly said: Not the big, but the small ones should get the profit — as shown it is just about a different distribution. However, this sphere isn’t a commons sphere, instead it is simply a coalition of companies of self-defined “good” and “ethical” people. To behave good and ethical is a nice thing. However, it misses the efficacy of the rigid operational mode of commodity production. If you don’t succumb this logic you are out — having an ethic or not. Ethic isn’t a functional core of the market logic, an ethic has to stay externally and therefore finally always gets the short end of the stick. What I find severe is that the efficicacy of exclusive logic is not recognized or underestimated, so that in the end structural problems are veiled as personal deficits or conflicts between people."