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Parodia de los Comunes

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tripleC 11(2): 412-424, 2013 http://www.triple-c.at
The Parody of the Commons Vasilis Kostakis1 and Stelios Stavroulakis2 1
Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia, P2P Lab,
Greece, kostakis.b@gmail.com, www.p2plab.gr/en 2 P2P Lab, Greece,
sstavra@gmail.com, www.p2plab.gr/en
## Abstract
This essay builds on
the idea that Commons-based peer production is a social advancement
within capitalism but with various post-capitalistic aspects, in need
of protection, enforcement, stimulation and connection with progressive
social movements. We use theory and examples to claim that peer-to-peer
economic relations can be undermined in the long run, distorted by
the extraeconomic means of a political context designed to maintain
profit-driven relations of production into power. This subversion can
arguably become a state policy, and the subsequent outcome is the full
absorption of the Commons as well as of the underpinning peer-to-peer
relations into the dominant mode of production. To tackle this threat,
we argue in favour of a certain working agenda for Commons-based
communities. Such an agenda should aim the enforcement of the circulation
of the Commons. Therefore, any useful social transformation will be
meaningful if the people themselves decide and apply policies for their
own benefit, optimally with the support of a sovereign partner state.
If peer production is to become dominant, it has to control capital
accumulation with the aim to marginalise and eventually transcend
capitalism. Keywords: Peer Production, Free Software, Collaboration,
Commons, Emancipation, State Policy, Economic Theory, Partner State,
Peer Property Acknowledgement: This essay has immensely benefited from
two anonymous reviewers. We want also to thank Christos Giotitsas for
his critique. Moreover, Vasilis Kostakis would like to acknowledge
financial support received by the grants SF 014006 “Challenges to
State Modernization in 21st Century Europe” and ETF 8571 "Web 2.0 and
Governance: Institutional and Normative Changes and Challenges”.
It has been claimed that an increasing number of people are now able to
manage their political, social, and productive lives through a variety
of interdependent networks enabled by the Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) (Castells 2000, 2003; Benkler 2006; Bauwens 2005; Perez
2002). However, authors, such as Webster (2002a, 2002b), have argued
against the idea of an “information society”. They emphasise the
continuities of the current age with former capitalist-oriented social
and economic arrangements (Schiller 1981, 1984, 1996; Webster 2002a,
2002b). Kumar (1995, 154) maintains that the information explosion
“has not produced a radical shift in the way industrial societies
are organized” to conclude that “the imperatives of profit, power
and control seem as predominant now as they have ever been in the
history of capitalist industrialism”. In addition, Berry (2008, 369)
postulates that scholars such as Benkler (2006) fail to recognise the
extent to which network forms of production “will be co-opted into
mainstream 'industrial' ways of production”. Through several cases of
successful networked-based, collaborative projects such as free software
or Wikipedia, we see the emergence of new ‘‘technological-economic
feasibility spaces’’ for social practice (Benkler 2006, 31). These
feasibility spaces include different social and economic arrangements,
in contrast to what Kumar and Webster claim, where profit, power,
and control do not seem as predominant as they have been in the
history of modern capitalism. Benkler (2006) has argued that from this
new communicational environment a new social productive model, i.e.,
Commons-based peer production, is emerging different from the industrial
one. Peer production, exemplified by various free software (GNU, the Linux
kernel, KDE) and free content (Wikipedia) projects, makes information
sharing more important than the value of proprietary strategies and
allows for large-scale information production efforts (Benkler 2006). In this context, peer production could
be considered an early seed form stage of a new mode of production
enabled through Internet-based coordination where decisions arise from
the free engagement and cooperation of the people. They coalesce to
create common value without recourse to monetary compensation as key
motivating factor (Bauwens 2005; Orsi 2009; Kostakis 2013). Our take is
that peer production is a social advancement within capitalism but with
various post-capitalistic aspects, in need of protection, enforcement,
stimulation and connection with progressive social movements around
Commons-oriented policy platforms. As “Commons” we understand the
cultural and natural resources, which are held in common (not owned
privately) and remain accessible to all members of a society (see Ostrom
1990; Hardt and Negri 2011; Bollier 2009). In this essay, our point of
departure is the digital Commons (knowledge, software, design) since peer
production was first noticed in the information sphere of production. We
consider the “Commons” a third sector alongside the market and the
state, which conceptualises the deep affinities amongst several forms
of collaboration and helps validate their distinctive social dynamics
as significant forces in economic and cultural production (Bollier in
Laisne et al. 2010). The term “peer production” or “peer-to-peer
production” originates from the innovative nature of peer-to-peer (P2P)
networking architecture that enabled the advent of the Internet. The
introduction of P2P architecture in the social relations of production and
exchange of goods and services is based on the idea that every networked
community, just like every networked node, becomes a “server” to
satisfy the needs of other communities, as well as a “client” to
satisfy its own. Peer production operates on a non-competitive, synergetic
basis leading to an optimal distribution of resources (Benkler 2006;
Bauwens 2005, 2009). The traditional market approach with its pricing
mechanism has mostly been unable to achieve such optimal allocations due
to productive information asymmetry whereas peer production maximises
the access to information. Contrary to the traditional economic thought,
in peer production we become witnesses of consumer/producer dichotomy's
collapse towards a new understanding in the form of the “multitude”
(Hardt and Negri 2001), “prosumers” (Toffler and Toffler 2006),
“produsers” (Bruns 2008), or “user-innovation communities” (von
Hippel 2005). Further, it has been shown (Benkler 2002, 2006; Bauwens
2005) how peer production, given certain resources, optimally exploits the
skills and abilities of the producers involving participatory ownership
structures, participatory learning and decision-making (Fuchs 2013).
Whereas the firm binds by contract only a fraction of capabilities,
which considers appropriate for realising a certain goal. In a peer
production project the motive emerges when a full set of capabilities
is accessing a given amount of resources. Peer production achieves
the optimal allocation of resources being a more productive system
for information than the market-based or the bureaucratic-state ones
(Bauwens 2005; Kostakis 2012). This article begins with a brief outline
of how the initial architecture of the Internet is being distorted
into a client-server format as observed in proprietary social networks
managed by the cognitive capitalists of the web. We, then, address
and question the main arguments in relation to “the tragedy of the
Commons” and the phenomenon of Commons-based peer production. What is
the role of the peer produced Commons in the capitalist accumulation
while the emancipatory potential of peer communities is neutralised
without affecting their productive function? To answer this question,
we discuss how the emancipatory promise of the (digital) Commons and of
peer production can evolve into a parody bringing to the fore the case
of free software. To tackle the threat of the Commons' full absorption
as well as of the underpinning peer-to-peer relations into the dominant
mode of production, we conclude by arguing in favour of a certain working
agenda for Commons-based communities.
1. From the Tragedy to the Parody of the Commons Benkler (2006)
postulates his assumptions about the conditions for the development of
peer production, taking for granted a general stable economy. He does
not deal with the threats Commons-based peer production will face once
exposed to a hostile economic environment. An emerging question is why
the dominant socio-economic framework would resist to the building of a Commons sphere. After all, one may argue, it is within
this sphere that the Internet and many other digital technologies have
been developing. Our position is that the aforementioned statement is
partially true: The emergence of web technologies, and of the Internet
itself, has taken place in a contradictory framework. The previously
failed attempts for the adoption of ACTA/SOPA/PIPA proposals that seek to
restrict the freedom of the individuals through a global enforcement of
strict “intellectual property” standards; the efforts for a regulatory
regime with an architecture of transactions in the first place (rather
than policing the transactions afterwards) (Boyle 1997); the attempts for
surveillance and censorship by both authoritarian and liberal countries;
and “the growing tendency to link the Internet’s security problems
to the very properties that made it innovative and revolutionary in
the first place” (Mueller 2010, 160), are only some reasons that have
made scholars, like Zittrain (2008), worry that digital systems may be
pushed back to the model of locked-down devices centrally controlled
information appliances. The initial P2P architecture of the Internet,
based on the end-to-end principle, has been distorted into a client-server
format where the server has the absolute authority over the client,
who stands unprotected with limited intervention possibility (Kempf and
Austein 2004). The “addiction” of the client to assign tasks, which
concern him/her on the first place, to the supposed convenience that the
server offers is a phenomenon observed in proprietary, centralised social
networks and SaaS models (i.e., “Software as a Service” acronym;
for example, think of Facebook). This exemplifies the tendency of the
user population to neutralise and detach from issues important for their
online and offline future. Further, in this contradictory framework we
observe nuanced changes not only in the institutional design concerning
the Internet but also in the used terminology. For instance, see the
shift from “free” to just “open source” software. The term
“open source” has become related to ideas and arguments based only
on practical values, such as having powerful software (Stallman 2012). As
Stallman (2012) writes: “the two terms describe almost the same category
of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different
values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a
social movement.” The open source implies that non-free software is an
inferior solution to the practical problem at hand, whereas for the free
software advocates non-free software “is a social problem” (Stallman
2012). “If it's the same software (or nearly so), does it matter which
name you use?”, Stallman asks to answer, “yes, because different words
convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give
you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends
above all on teaching people to value freedom.” We attempt to move from
a strict techno-economic analysis towards a discussion of the Commons
within a turbulent, contradictory socio-economic framework. In other
words, what is the role of the Commons in the capitalist accumulation
while the emancipatory potential of peer communities is neutralised
without affecting their productive function? The capitalist system
arguably seeks to incorporate Commons-based, peer communities because
of their cost-effective advantage (low-cost labour with high quality
products). We argue that the development of P2P relations in itself,
if placed in the current socio-economic conditions, can take place
only temporarily because in the long run it will be undermined by
means designed to maintain profit-driven relations of production into
power. We call this transformation process “parody of the Commons” in
relation to what Benkler (2006) defines as “tragedy of the Commons”.
In 1968, Garret Hardin first introduced the concept of the tragedy of
the Commons referring to the degradation of a finite resource used by a
group of individuals who act independently and rationally on the basis of
their self-interest. If individuals agreed to assign private management
responsibility, which would implement a protection fence around the
resource against the “rational” behaviour of all, the resource would
be safe (Hardin 1968). Elinor Ostrom (1990) understates Hardin's approach
claiming that if those, who share a certain resource, belonged to a local
community, then they would adopt the optimal solutions to serve their
interests. In certain cases the aforementioned statement cannot apply,
because of a lack of confidence amongst community members due to the high
communication costs and/or because of the small benefit from the problem
solving. However, the criteria that Ostrom (1990) articulates are also immanent in Hardin's definition as a
matter of the rational behaviour of individuals. Ostrom (1990) correctly
denotes that the resource sustainability can be achieved by adopting best
practices without the need of privatisation. What eludes both Hardin and
Ostrom is that the best practices or the technical means are defined by
those in power. There is arguably almost no possibility of implementing
measures that would not enforce the established structure. The shared
resource may not become private, but the extraeconomic support of
other privatised means in the infrastructure of the common resource
(e.g. friendly policies toward activities regardless of business plan)
could gradually eradicate the resource. Once again, the ruling agenda
defines whether the technical means can be considered best practice.
Hardin's (1968) position about salvation through privatisation has been
claimed for forests. If forests get privatised, the manager's best
interest would be to protect the wood from fire and the uncontrolled
work of woodcutters. What we have here is a category error. What
the managers protect is their fenced area rather than the forest
itself. In front of the “sacred” ownership rights there is no legal
document to guarantee that the area will remain a forest. Nowadays,
the destruction of natural environment does not occur because the
environment is a common resource. It is arguably happening because the
applied policies are designed to support means of production of private
appropriation, which exploit the common resource unconditionally. To
that point, Hardin's and Ostrom's approaches are equally unhelpful,
since their difference is related solely to the composition of the
mixture. For Hardin, more privatisation is required, whereas according
to Ostrom it should be constrained. Benkler (2006, 378) explains that
traditionally the tragedy of the Commons is described by (i) the absence
of incentives, i.e., nobody invests resources in a project since no
privatisation follows; (ii) the absence of leadership, i.e., nobody has
the appropriate authority to guide and accomplish such a project. What
Benkler says is this: Let's assume that Hardin's proposition is true:
Privatisation secures the sustainability of a resource. But how do we
get there? To begin with, what is our incentive to assume ownership or
management of a common resource, if we do not charge for its use? And
suppose that the incentive has been found: Are we capable of achieving
the sustainability goal when this capability is part of collective
intelligence? The difficulty to meet both conditions means inadequacy
of assuming responsibility, hence, the common resource has no future,
according to Hardin. Benkler (2006) states that this does not apply in
peer production: Commons-based communities manage to find their own ways.
However, counter-examples can be found against the cases Benkler brings
to the fore to support his argument. For instance, see the software
development in traditional corporate environments on projects released
under permissive free software licenses (examples include the MIT license
and the BSD licenses), which allow privatising code modifications and,
thus, do not take action against patent “treachery” (see Peren
1999; GNU 2013; Fitzgerald 2006). In that way software misses its free
component and its quality becomes questionable, since the distribution
of code's changes depends on the personal stance of the entrepreneur
who can package them up under restrictive terms. That is to say, the
programmer or the entrepreneur can shift from a permissive license to
an “end-user license agreement”. In addition, production shifts to
the terms with which the non-free, proprietary software is produced.
Thereby the software community experiences higher pressure and the rights
of the end users are eventually reduced. In other words, permissive free
software licenses can lead to a “tragedy” or rather a “parody
of the Commons” because of free software's allegedly emancipatory
promise. In such a scenario maximising individual freedom away from
society needs would have worse total consequences than would have resulted
by applying regulation to maximise societal freedom instead. One might
claim that code is in abundance, as an informational good with almost
zero marginal costs; however it needs improvement and maintenance, i.e.,
labour hours. Hence, investing free labour hours in dead-end projects,
permissive free software licenses may trigger a parody of the Commons,
by slowing down the overall adoption pace of free software. By contrast
the copyleft licenses (for example the GPL, General Public License)
guarantee end users the freedoms to use, study, share (copy), and modify
the software. Copyleft is a method of social production as well as a
process of knowledge sharing, which makes a program or other work free, and requires all modified and
extended versions of the program to be free as well (GNU 2012). Hence,
copyleft licenses define the relations amongst the members of software
communities and in that sense they create ecologies outside or rather
in the interstices of the capitalist market. To ensure there is no
misunderstanding, we need to clarify the meaning of free software. The
“free” in free software, unlike “free” in free labour, does not
mean gratis. Free software is defined by the four freedoms the user
of that software has in order to use, study, share copies, and share
modified versions of the software.
2. Defining the Parody of the Commons We name “parody of the Commons”
the introduction of privatisation in the management of the common
resources realised either by the assignment of ownership to individuals or
by the interference of state regulation, when capital is the prevailing
force as well as the appropriation of the financial results. Both
routes rely on the assumption of owning better information pools,
which is challenged by the current developments of liberal-democratic
societies. If Commons-based peer production does not become the dominant
mode of production, the conditions for a tragedy will be arguably met
and then the emancipatory promise of the Commons will be torn apart. It
can be claimed that the state policies have to be considered as a
parameter. We argue that the state intervention – when it legislates
enforcing or facilitating measures – actually applies Hardin's schema
following other routes. The state perceives as “public” all goods and
resources of some value and then intervenes introducing regulations for
the “common good”. However, this intervention is an attack to the
public sphere and subverts communities. If a community starts to grow,
inspectors from above turn up to define specifications, procedures,
financial constraints, setting the direction for the future of the common
resource. Also they set aside the immediate interests of those who now
must obey rules set by bodies irrelevant to the local needs. The basic
idea originating to the bounded rationality principle is that regulation
cannot stop the abuse and eventually the depletion of the Commons
occurs. This approach does not adopt the position that the state is
incapable by nature or due to its size. The state policies are, most of
the times, what they are because of commitments and facilitations by the
political system to the financial sector. We define two main features
of the parody of the Commons. The first feature is the institutional
integration, which is the absorption of the proportional dividend of
every individual by a mandatory private appropriation enforced through
legislation. The applied policies cannot affect free software communities
in large scale, but they directly harm other forms of Commons as much
as any other type of industrial unit involved with the production of
any material. Individuals enter the Commons to enjoy the participatory
nature of a productive and/or creative endeavour carrying the belief
that the involvement of other members alongside with theirs builds a
sum that belongs to all and from which all benefit from. In that sum,
every contributor to a Commons-based community expects a contributory
return plus a reward for nonvoluntary work. The capital markets seriously
challenge this belief by pursuing their own agenda, based on onerous
and illegal, concerning the international law, debts that stifle the
real economy. The central or local administrations in an attempt to
fulfil financial obligations to creditors, apply policies that oblige
a whole society to transfer a large part of the national income toward
payments to creditors. Instead of re-investments for the local needs,
the society is deprived from valuable resources and assets. The state
treats Commons-based communities as any other business unit and applies
heavy non-contributory taxation. Any ambitious activity is finally
ceased and one of the first victims is the voluntary work done by the
members of peer communities. This is not an imaginary situation; it is
the reality in the Eurozone today, where the banking sector is allowed
to have an unprecedented concentration of power. The link, which makes
this situation unbearable for all, is arguably the iron fist of the
common currency. Even Germany, the most powerful economy in the Eurozone,
is turning slowly into recession (Indexmundi 2013; The Economist 2011)
while most of the cities and towns there now belong to the banks rather
than the federal state (Czuczka 2012). For the European south, there are many examples of structural reforms taking
place that damaged equally the industrial and agricultural sector in
the last 40 years. This is arguably a path to a dead-end. The second
feature is the external outsourcing, according to which, regardless of
the partners’ intentions and plans, the project is converted into a
mode of crowdsourcing/aggregation economy. In the aforementioned scenario
the peer produced use value serves certain for-profit interests no matter
if peer producers are aware of it. The owners/administrators of the web
platforms/network, i.e., the “netarchists” such as Facebook or Google
(for an overview of the concept see Bauwens 2007, 2013; Kostakis 2012)
can be considered as the web capitalists, who renounce their dependence on
information accumulation through intellectual property and become enablers
of social participation (Bauwens 2007, 2013; Kostakis 2012). They combine
open and closed elements in the architecture of their platforms to ensure
a measure of profit and control by expanding the reach of neoliberal
economy through cognitive capitalism (see Aytes 2013; Andrejevic 2013;
Bauwens 2007, 2013; Kostakis 2012). Fuchs (2013, 219-220) notes that
in proprietary-based platforms the productive labour is outsourced to
users “who work completely for free and help to maximize the rate of
exploitation [...] so that profits can be raised and new media capital
may be accumulated. This situation is one of infinitive exploitation
of the users”. In a similar vein, Terranova (2013, 53) addresses the
relevance of the concept of the Commons: “as the wealth generated by
free labour is social, so should be the mode of its return”. Hence, she
concludes, “social networking platforms should be deprivatized – that
is, that ownership of users’ data should be returned to their rightful
owners as the freedom to access and modify the protocols and diagrams
that structure their participation”. So, free labour is voluntary. In
peer production projects, the knowledge worker owns the final artefact
(which is always open to further development) of the productive process
and gains experience, knowledge, relations and/or even money (however,
monetary profit is not the key motivating factor) through it. In states
of privatisation (according to the aforementioned categorisation that
would be in the crowdsourcing/aggregation economies) free labour implies
exploitation. In addition to the social media monopolies, the development
of Apple's MacOS X is another example of external outsourcing. In short,
MacOS X is based on UNIX, software that begun as a free-shared product to
later become proprietary under different brand names and then free again
(for example, FreeBSD and NetBSD). Parts of the latter free software
components along with the mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon
University were included into NeXTSTEP operating system, which was
finally renamed into OS X. Hence, we argue that the Commons firstly
emerge as a tragedy due to long-term inertia and then evolve to a
farce or a parody. As soon as the gradual destruction is perceived
(tragedy) everybody agrees to privatise the management and in case
they do not agree, the state may force agreement in order to implement
the assignment. The common resource remains common by its name only
(parody). We argue that, unfortunately, this is a likely scenario. To
put it in software terminology, this constitutes a security hole in the
ecology of peer production, and, for the moment, no patch (i.e., solution)
has been proposed. The question, therefore, is whether the peer producers
will actually benefit from the development of P2P relations and the
production of commonly produced use value, or whether the Commonsbased
peer production phenomenon will just constitute a part of a neoliberal
Plan B, put in Caffentzis' terms (2010). Supposing peer production will
be progressively emerging as a dominant productive model upon which will
rely the prosperity of the people (see Hardt and Negri 2011; Rigi 2012;
Bauwens and Kostakis in press; Kostakis 2013), then the transcendence
of the parody is not just a theoretical issue to be dealt with. It is
rather a practical, political issue that will determine the success of the
Commons-based communities in general. Hence, it is necessary to approach
the Commons concept within the ongoing socio-economic context that is
blooming and discuss how it affects the function of the real economy.
While the triggering event of its burst was the failure of subprime
mortgages, many opinions have been voiced concerning the causes of the
2008 financial bubble. Some of technoeconomic nature (for example Perez
2009a, 2009b) and others (for instance Sowell 2010; Krugman 2009, 2012;
Stiglitz 2010), which focus more on the symptoms rather than on the inherent contradictory characteristics of the capitalist system. According
to Karl Marx (1992/1885, 1993/1983), the general pattern of the capitalist
system, which makes economic crises inevitable, is created by the combined
action of two laws of capitalist integration. The first law concerns the
tendency of profit's quota to decrease whereas the second law describes
the need for an increasing capital concentration and accumulation. These
two laws contradict each other leading the system to collapses and
crises: Capital cannot be invested when the declining rate of profit's
quota is faster than the increasing rate of capital accumulation. In
Marx's analysis, capitalism is inherently built on a Sisyphean logic
reaching always a dead-end in which the escapable policy often concerns
the partial destruction of the total capital. For a certain period of
time, capitalism –a process of “creative destruction”, to remember
Schumpeter (1975/1942, 1982/1939) who shares many views with Marx in the
analysis of the capitalist dynamics– may seem sustainable, introducing
innovative products and services. Williamson (1995, 1998), also, from
a different perspective reaches a similar conclusion: Every firm will
stop developing once its organisational costs surpass the organisational
costs of a smaller firm. The partial transformation of the stagnant
capital into loan capital is used as a pressure valve for overcoming
the dead-end (Marx 1992/1885; Harvey 2007, 2010; Lapavitsas 2012).
The overflow of loan capital with compound interest into international
markets along with the shift of policy decision-making from democratically
elected state governments to the banking sector firms and institutions
preserves a global debt crisis. Once the loanable capital secures its
dominant position in the market, the debt crisis becomes permanent
and is reinforced regardless of the progress in the annual economic
indices. Even a prosperous economy will start declining in the course of
time if the annual surplus is being used to serve external debts. Serving
the external debt does not necessarily mean that the debt is reduced,
it may as well increase if the interest is accumulated into capital,
thus neutralising not only the benefit of the local producers, but also
any advantage on innovation achieved by their talent and effort. This
situation occurs when the creditor and the debtor sign an unbalanced
agreement, the interest rates and spreads are unfairly high and there
is no flexibility in monetary policy. In that case, and especially in
bankrupting economies, the individuals who participate in Commons-oriented
communities may fall into the trap of a parody of the Commons. The peer
producer participates to satisfy his/her inner positive motives, interests
and needs (for instance, the need to create, learn, communicate and share)
on a voluntary basis (Benkler 2006; Hertel, Niedner and Herrmann 2003;
Lakhani and Wolf 2005). As Hertel, Niedner and Herrmann (2003, 1174)
point out, the Linux kernel community participants are driven “by
similar motives as voluntary action within social movements such as the
civil rights movement, the labour movement, or the peace movement”. On
the other hand, the peer producer has no idea that his/her voluntary
inputs contribute to the retention of the average profit quota's decrease,
offering the chance to capital to develop, appropriate, expand and grow.
Therefore, we argue that those who have a competitive advantage over the
P2P relations of production will benefit from the appropriation of the
commonly peer produced use value. The aforementioned is a typical case of
the transformation of the tragedy into parody, once the lack of authority,
observed in several Commons-based peer projects, gives the chance to
extra-economic means to take advantage of creative communities' inertia.
3. The Parody of Free Software? For the economic system the accumulation
of means of production is both a functional necessity and cause for
deadlock. In the area of information sciences, computers and other
digital devices, the technical capacity of using all those devices as
means of production is at the hands of the majority. The private property
in the means of production at this economic sector for the first time is
universal and the amount of means that people own decisively influences
their potential. Today, free software, due to its technical excellence,
is being widely used by organisations that compete against the philosophy
and practice of peer communities. One of the causes is the division of
the developers' community to those who use the term “free software”,
thus, contributing to an increasing power of software communities and
to those who prefer constructs like “open source” or “shared
source” arguing in favour of the ease of free software penetration into
the world of business. The latter removed from all users, individuals or
legal entities, the ability to understand that their political freedom
that depends on the use of digital media is far more important than the
technical superiority of the free software that enables those media.
The majority of the people cannot be aware of all these, when free
software is not a corner stone of the public education system. This
shortcoming severely damages society or part of it in the face of
urgent social issues. Even the application of wide consent policies
is doomed to fail if the technical infrastructure does not deal with
immediate social problems. One may observe two heavy consequences of
the community division. The approaches closer to “open source”
are anti-pedagogical due to their axiological neutrality, thereby
cannot get promoted as educational material, while friction with free
software does not offer teachers a clear direction. Then society,
due to absence of guidance, is moving conceptually to what people
intuitively understand. That software technology is more technology and
less software, hence, a business for specialised engineers. When the new
technology of typography was invented, its high cost kept the majority
at a distance from these new means of production. In our days, when
the excuse of keeping a distance from digital media is not an option,
the misinformation, even by official sources, regarding the dynamics
of software has become epidemic. In that way, it prevents people from
finding out how to use computers for their own benefit, instead forcing
them to assign even the simplest task to computer experts. The network,
i.e., a sum of networked nodes, is actually the “real computer” since
coherence and economies of scale are both possible in the network. The
traditional state policies that give way to monopoly power cannot easily
apply here. The advocates of P2P architecture are struggling against a
coordinated international effort to control the power of peer nodes before
the majority realises the width of opportunities it offers. The chosen
policy to subvert Commons-based communities is on one hand the pressure
for signing international agreements against the freedom of Internet,
which is a typical operation of institutional integration, and on the
other the binding of users to monopoly corporations. Those corporations
charge for pre-installed proprietary technologies that come with any
newly purchased device and deprive all from basic freedoms in exchange
of a presumed ease of use. Although the “golden cage” is a syndrome
that cannot last forever, companies that develop non-free software may
estimate that one way or another it will be a source of income driven by
the power of inertia. Proprietary technologies in operating systems and
software applications have two major consequences. They keep the users
divided and helpless (Stallman 2008), deconstruct local cultures (Greve
2006a, 2006b) and increase digital illiteracy. This is a good example of
external outsourcing, which holds a more or less important role, however
the institutional integration appears to be the most appropriate way of
undermining the Commons.
4. Overcoming the Tensions In times when the global economy is relatively
stable, the parody of the Commons can be easily avoided. There is
insignificant migration of labour power from the corporate model
towards the Commons, hence no serious pressure to apply institutional
integration and the mobility of community members practically cancels the
consequence of crowdsourcing. But in an era of economic collapse and while
mobility becomes a risk, gradually more people direct their attention to
communities, with many of them doing so for survival purposes. The state
seems to face Commons-based peer communities as ordinary economic units
subject to heavy taxation while supports “intellectual property”-based
activities. Those activities are injected into communities blocking
their growth. The hope that the multiplicity of communities will help
them rise into dominant relations of production is refuted since
the political system will allow communities to grow only if their
operations and functions become integrated to the established mode of
production. History shows that the capitalist mode of production allowed
no other form of production. The future of pre-capitalist or novel produc-
tion modes was predetermined: destruction or integration. While P2P
relations are not dominant, their dependence on a friendly economic
environment becomes imperative. A recent example where a Commons might be
commodified is the case of ERT's digital archive. ERT was the Greek state
television and radio network. It was a constituent of the public sector
and had been funded through a mandatory tax implemented into the bill of
the public electricity enterprise (DEI) for decades. In December 2007,
the launch of the effort to digitise the old ERT archives was announced,
which first delivered results a few months later. Although initially this
endeavour was considered an important step for the public availability
of a unique cultural wealth, the decision to be distributed in that
specific way was met with the opposition of several Commons-oriented
communities and civilians. According to the protesters, behind this
initiative lies an “innocent fraud”: The digital archive remained
in the exclusive ownership of ERT. Patented file types and video, text
and picture formats were selected to implement the digitisation while
download and further use of the material was forbidden. Further, in the
current event of ERT's dissolution as a consequence of the Greek crisis,
(at the time of this writing, August 2013, the fate of ERT's archive is
still unknown) this national cultural aggregation, created and funded by
the Greek citizens, may revert to private ownership. Already during the
summer absence of a public Greek network, private stations broadcasted
parts of the archive. The ERT case highlights the traditional concept for
state ownership of public goods: The state manages a resource on behalf
of the civilians over which they have no authority. And in turbulent
times the exploitation of the Commons, as part of “shock doctrine”
policies (see Klein 2008), more easily takes place contributing to
and catalysing the process of capital accumulation. An effective
treatment is arguably the use of means that guarantee the smooth growth
of communities. Structurally, a measure is the adoption by society of
the five maturity conditions to enter the Commons: open standards, free
software, P2P architecture, advanced learning system and communities. As
far as the political context is concerned, the parliamentary democracy,
for instance in Greece, is trying hard to secure the current status
quo by demolishing various citizens' rights and occasionally violating
constitution. One should not rest his/her hopes on the political party
system and the associated policies mainly due to three characteristics
inherent to political party policies: i) restrictions on democracy is
a policy to overcome economic crisis; ii) supranational centralism in
deciding and applying fiscal and monetary policies serves the vision
of a United Europe; iii) in a long period of depression, increased
capital borrowing is the best method to return to growth. This set
of characteristics makes this intentional absurdity evident in the
behaviour of political parties, for which the probability to adopt P2P
practices is practically zero, since this perspective requires immediate
implementation of P2P infrastructures, something which is in contrast
with the notion of “property” as it is embedded in the philosophy
of the political system. How is it possible for a political system that
defends the constitutional interpretation of “property”, to take the
lead in confiscating private properties? One possible answer is that while
the political system simply declares itself as an adherent of property,
it only defends a particular monopolising trend, a form of impersonal
appropriation against the real individuals. When Jean Monnet (1976)
declared “nous ne coalisons pas des Etats, nous unissons des hommes”
(“we are not building a coalition of states; we are creating a union of
peoples”), his wish came along with the deconstruction of the national
state, conceptually prepared in various publications. The philosophical
background of that approach was clearly Manichaeistic since the bipolar
schema national-supranational is interpreted on the basis of a theocracy
that proclaims a dualism of absolute extremes. Only a few scholars,
Victor Hugo one of them, attempted to transcend the anti-dialectic
heritage of the discourse around the “ideal of a unified Europe”
(Swedberg 1994). The answer to the problem should be a type of democracy
capable to emerge from the activity of Commons-based communities and
the interactions among them. A political project at both national and
international level is required to release the healthy forces that demand
the construction of communities for the benefit of their members. Given
the estimated lengthy time period of the economic crisis as well as its
structural peculiarity, which is a combination of monetary inflexibility
and debt accumulation regardless the possible reduction of deficit,
the parody of the Commons can be eliminated only if communities adhere to
their mission: To ensure a high maturity level and make their requests
for a Commons infrastructure a government policy towards a “partner
state”, i.e., democratically-run, civic institutions that protect
the common good (see Bauwens 2012; Kostakis 2012). This high maturity
level could be achieved through the establishment of a democratic legal
jurisdiction, which would impose restrictions on the exploitation of the
Commons (Kleiner 2010; Fuchs 2013; Bauwens and Kostakis in press). Peer
production might be collectively sustainable but it is not individually:
Most of the peer contributors cannot make a living and they are dependent
on wages from the capitalist market. We side with Bauwens and Kostakis
(in press) who suggest “the creation of Commons-friendly, ethical
enterprises, consisting of the commoners themselves, who also control
their own governance and have ownership. Such enterprises would be
legally structured so that theirs is an obligation to support the
circulation of the Commons”. The development of the Peer Production
Licenses, introduced by Kleiner (2010) as a copyfarleft type license,
could be part of the debate. These licenses could be oriented towards
a plural form of ownership, which would include “maker ownership
(i.e. a revisiting of worker ownership for the P2P age), combined with
user ownership, i.e., a recognition that users of networks co-create
value; and eventually a return for the ethical funders that support
the enterprise” (Bauwens and Kostakis in press). In that way profit
making is allowed, but profit-maximisation would not be the driving
force of economic development. Against the capital accumulation,
which leads to the parody of the Commons-based communities' political
struggle should include the creation of an infrastructure that protects,
enables and catalyses the circulation of the Commons. In that way peer
production i) could become sustainable on the personal level as well;
ii) expand more easily to the manufacturing of tangible products building
on its conjunction with the emerging desktop manufacturing technological
capabilities (see Kostakis 2013); iii) and, thus, protect itself against
capital accumulation with the aim to marginalise, control and eventually
transcend capitalism.
5. Conclusion We defined two main features of the parody of the Commons:
the institutional integration and the external outsourcing, according
to which the Commons-based peer production is converted into a mode of
crowdsourcing. In these conditions, we described how the Commons emerge
as a promise, then a tragedy and evolve into a parody. As soon as the
gradual destruction is perceived (tragedy) the management of the commons
resource is privatised: The common resource remains common by its name
only (parody). We argue that this is a likely scenario, particularly
damaging communities devoted to the production of tangible goods, in
the absence of free hardware and open specifications. Since information
sources as well as ICT are uniformly distributed, we claimed that the
best management is one applied by groups of conscious individuals
without orders from above. This should take place away from the
traditional perception of the market, which, despite its imperfections,
secured its place in a distant past, when the technology level could
not possibly support analogous claims. Subdivision of communities
into groups organised by a particular information-based competitive
advantage or preferential access and control delegation to the most
powerful parts cannot be possible if Commons-based communities follow
their principles. The opening of a path to such a perspective depends on
whether the majority decides to take creative control of their future.
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About the Authors Vasilis Kostakis is a political economist and
founder of the P2P Lab. Currently he is serving as a research fellow
at Tallinn University of Technology as well as at P2P Foundation.
Stelios Stavroulakis is a computer scientist and software engineer
interested in distributed information systems with a particular focus
on free software and open standards and a general awareness of social
and environmental issues. He is a collaborator of P2P Lab.
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