commons-based in Constant 2015
dified by the context you are
producing in. And if what you’re being paid for is essentially to make people
like SONY or make people like the state then it’s going to change the way
you present what you are doing.
Yochai Benkler used the term ‘commons-based peer production’ and of
course took great pains to avoid talking about communism and try to limit
this only to information production. He’s very clear, for him this is not for
real material production. Because he’s a liberal lawyer, working for a major
university, in the states ... so this is how he presents his work.
But what this means, commons-based production, means that the instruments of production are actually collectively owned but controlled by the
direct producers, which means that nobody can actually earn money simply by owning the instruments of production. You can only earn money
by employing the instruments of production in actually making something.
So, commons-based peer production. You have common things like instruments of production, land and capital, they’re are commonly controlled and
commonly owned, and individual labour of peers is applied to that shared
commons and the results of that labour is then owned by the actual producers. None of that product is owned by the people who are simply owning
instruments of production. That is what is meant by commons-based peer
production. But that’s exactly what the anarchist and the socialist call communism. There is no actual difference. Communism in a text book example
is the state less, property-less society. And that’s what it means, commonsbased peer product
another person sweats without earning and that’s fundamentally true.
If anybody is earning revenue simply by owning instruments of production,
that means that people actually producing are not capturing the value of
their labour. And that’s what commons-based peer production is. The idea
that we have a commons which is all of our property, nobody controls our
instruments of production, they’re all our property together. Each of us
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have our labour and we apply that to the commons and we produce som
d therefore has no reproduction costs,
it can be reproduced with no costs, it also has no exchange value. So in
order to convert it to exchange value you always have to apply other forms of
property: land, capital, hard fixed property ... And so, as commons-based
peer producers in the Yochai Benkler world, we have our little internal communism, but we can neither live in it nor feed ourselves with it. So in order
to actually sustain ourselves, to actually capture our material subsistence, we
then have to deal
then we have a beer factory.
And then you need people who drink the beer! Who’s going to make the
people that drink the beer?
Haha.
But wait, there must be a little bit of difference, a modified option to
this. For example ...
In the scenario of commons-based peer production it’s not that the designers have to own the beer factory, it’s just that there can’t be any capitalist
in the middle that owns the land, it’s enough if the designers and the beer
makers both own the land together and the capit
pital couldn’t
use it for free. They would have to either not use it at all or negotiate a
different set of terms under which they could use it. So the question is
how do we remove coercive property relationships. If you really have a situation of commons-based peer production, or communism, where there is
no state, no property, the instruments of production are collectively owned,
people just work together in a very kind of free way, than it could certainly
work. But that’s not the world we are living in
lus value. The surplus value
will always leak at the point of scarcity, so the system has to be complete,
what Marcel Mauss calls a ‘total system’. It has to be a total system, if it
is not, if the entire cycle of production doesn’t go through commons-based
peer production hands, then it’s going to leak at the first point of scarcity.
Then whoever privately controls the one scarce resource through which all
this cycle of production goes through, will capture all the surplus value.
Again, back to our v
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