Tesis sobre el trabajo digital

http://p2pfoundation.net/Theses_on_Digital_Labor_in_an_Emerging_P2P_Economy

2012-11-18-tesis_sobre_el_trabajo_digital.markdown

+**Thesis on Digital Labor, by Michel Bauwens:**
+
+"Peer to peer is the ideology of the new cognitive working class. The
+majority of workers in Western countries are no longer involved in
+factory work, but are either cognitive or service workers. There are
+strong connections between peer-to-peer values such as openness,
+participation, as well as commons-orientation and the structural
+conditions of this new working class.
+
+First, peer-to-peer responds to the ideal conditions for cognitive work.
+For cognitive work to progress, it needs participation of all those who
+can contribute, the knowledge needs to be freely shared, and available
+to all who will need the same material in the future. It is no accident
+that peer production was born amongst the developers of software code,
+who are uniquely dependent on access to shareable code in order to
+progress in their work.
+
+Under structural conditions of exploitative and Intellectual
+Property-constrained wage-based knowledge work, peer production is the
+modality of life and work that cognitive workers aspire too, and engage
+in whenever they can either escape voluntarily from waged labor, or are
+obliged to engage in because of a precarious exodus outside of wage
+labor in the context of conditions of temporary or permanent economic
+crisis.
+
+Peer-to-peer corresponds to the objective needs of the new craft
+structure of cognitive labor. Cognitive workers are no longer primarily
+engaged in long-term factory work, but have very flexible career paths,
+by choice or necessity, which require them to change from being wage
+laborers, to independent free lance consultants, to being entrepreneurs,
+and back again. Under conditions of chosen or forced flexibility,
+workers have an objective interested in being networked, in order to
+gain practical experience, and social and reputational capital, as well
+as access to networks of exchange and solidarity. Networked peer
+production is the best avenue to obtain these advantages.
+
+Peer to peer, and engagement with peer production, is the objective
+condition of participation into networks, and therefore affects and
+engages all network users, to the degree that they are engaged in online
+collaboration and knowledge exchange, and the eventual creation of
+common value through such free aggregation of effort. All work however,
+has cognitive aspects, and so today, all workers are exposed to networks
+and the peer-to-peer value system. The peer-to-peer value system and
+peer production as a social dynamic are therefore NOT constrained to
+full-time knowledge workers, but to the totality of the working class
+and working people.
+
+Because of the hyperproductive nature of peer production, which allows
+for broader participation and input, passionate engagement, and
+universal distribution of its benefits (conditioned by network access),
+it attracts the participation and engagement of capital, through the
+activities of netarchical capitalists.
+
+Netarchical capital is that sector of capital, which understands the
+hyper-productive nature of peer production and therefore enables and
+empowers social production to occur, but conditioned by the possibility
+of value extraction to the benefit of the holders of capital.
+
+Peer production is both immanent and transcendent vis a vis capitalism
+because it has features which strongly decommodifies both labor and
+immaterial value and institutes a field of action based on peer-to-peer
+dynamics and a peer-to-peer value system. Peer production functions
+within the cycle of accumulation of capital, but also within the new
+cycle of the creation and accumulation of the commons. Netarchical
+capital uses peer production for its own accumulation of capital; peer
+producers naturally strive for the continued existence and protection of
+their commons.
+
+The creation of commons under the rule of capital is NOT a zero sum
+game. This means that the fact or objective relation between the commons
+and capital does not automatically constitute a hard and fast
+distinction between capitalist and anti-capitalist commons. Workers
+associated with peer production have a natural interest to maintain and
+expand the commons of knowledge, code and design, and under conditions
+of capital, the role of wage labor and capitalist investment contributes
+to the sustainability of both the commons and the commoners.
+
+However, under conditions of capitalist crisis, commoners have an
+objective interest in maintaining commons and conditions of
+participation that create maximum independence from capital, and aim for
+its eventual replacement as dominant system. We propose that this can
+happen through the creation of non-capitalist, community-supportive,
+benefit-driven entities that participate in market exchange without
+participating in capital accumulation. Benefit-driven institutions are
+responsible for the financial sustainability and social reproduction of
+the commoners, as well as for the protection and strengthening of the
+commons.
+
+Through the use of a new type of peer production license, commoners can
+freely share the commons with commons-friendly entities, while charging
+for-profit entities who do not reciprocate to the commons, thereby
+creating a positive feedback loop which creates a commons-centered
+counter-economy. Crucial for phase transition under conditions of
+capitalist crisis is to combine the emergent counter-economy, and its
+working solutions to issues of social reproduction, to the broad social
+movements that emerge to protect the life conditions of working people.
+
+Traditional labor and their organizations has an objective interest,
+under conditions of declining capitalism, to adopt the idea of global
+and shared innovation commons, and thereby ally themselves with the
+emergence and deepening of peer production. In conditions of social
+strife, capitalist corporations can be transformed into workers-owned,
+self-managed entities that create their own commons of shared knowledge,
+code, and design.
+
+Farmers and agricultural workers have a similar interest in the creation
+of shared innovation commons in order to transform soil-depleting
+industrial agriculture into smart eco-agriculture based on shared
+innovation commons uniting farmers and agricultural knowledge workers.
+
+Commons-oriented peer production can both strengthen netarchical capital
+and hence the system of capital accumulation, and the reproduction of
+the commons. Peer producers can both benefit for corporate platforms,
+while struggling for their own rights as the real value creators, and in
+conditions of social strength, could potentially take over such
+platforms as common or publicly owned utilities.
+
+Participants in commoner-owned for-benefit entities can significantly
+transcend purely competitive market dynamics, while avoiding
+authoritarian central planning, through the adoption of open book
+management, adaptation to the publicly available signaling, as well as
+through negotiated coordination of production and distribution. This
+does not obviate possible need for democratic planning through citizen
+participation, whenever this is needed and wished for. However, it
+creates broad areas for mutual alignment of productive capacities.
+
+The traditional ideologies and movements of the industrial labor
+movement became largely associated with collective property. Peer
+production opens the avenue for more distributed property, whereby
+individuals can freely aggregate, not only their immaterial productive
+resources, but their material productive resources. Under those
+conditions, possible abuse of collective property is balanced by the
+individual freedom of forking productive resources.
+
+Peer production is vital for sustainability and biosphere-friendly
+production methods, as open design communities design naturally for
+sustainability, but also transform the production process itself, for
+example to insure participation and more distributed access to
+productive resources. Combined with the development of more distributed
+machinery, as well as more distributed capital allocation, peer
+production can lead to a new system that combines smart material
+re-localization, with global cooperative innovation, and the existence
+of global phyles uniting peer production entities on a global 'material'
+scale. Phyles are transnational, community-supportive entities, which
+create a new layer of post-capitalist material cooperation.
+
+Free labor is only problematic under conditions of precarity and
+non-reciprocal value capture by (netarchical) capital. Under conditions
+of social solidarity, the freely given participation to common value
+projects is a highly emancipatory activity.
+
+Because of its hyper-productive nature, and inherent ecological
+sustainability, peer production becomes the condition for transcending
+capitalism. Its own logic, i.e. free contributions to a commons, managed
+by for-benefit associations and made sustainable through for-benefit
+entrepreneurship of the commoners themselves, create a seed form for a
+new social and economic form, centered around the core value creation of
+the commons, managed and contributed to by both for-benefit associations
+and entrepreneurial coalitions, and sustained by participatory
+collective services, which form the basis of a new model of the Partner
+State, which enables and empowers social production as the core reason
+of its existence.
+
+The hyper-productivity of peer production, makes it conform to the dual
+conditions for phase transitions, i.e. the crisis of the old model of
+production, and the availability of a working alternative which can
+perform better while solving a number of systemic problems plaguing the
+current dominant form of production. The task of the movements of
+cognitive and other forms of labor, is to create a new hegemony and a
+new commons- based alliance for social change, which challenges the
+domination of capital, the commodity form, and the biospheric
+destruction that is inherent to it."