In the Mackey thread I asked if capitalism, as an emergent socio-economic structure, could embody the values that Mackey represents, which seem to arise at a higher level of development. I used the analogy of trying to fit a more developed value peg into a less developed structural hole. If capitalism is the wrong hole for the job, then what is?
Michel Bauwens has been exploring the very real socio-econmic developments in peer-to-peer (P2P). This form of exchange has been happening for some time and Michel has attempted to theorize it in his popular essay “P2P and Human Evolution.” Below are some excerpts of summary points from Michel’s 7/13/07 blog entry “What P2P means for the world of tomorrow“:
Our current world system is marked by a profoundly counterproductive logic of social organization: it is based on a false concept of abundance in the limited material world; it has created a system based on infinite growth, within the confines of finite resources
…we need to base our physical economy on a recognition of the finitude of natural resources, and achieve a sustainable steady-state economy
Markets, as means to to manage scarce physical resources, are but one of the means to achieve such allocation, and need to be divorced from the idea of capitalism, which is a system of infinite growth.
Peer to peer as the relational dynamic of free agents in distributed networks will likely become the dominant mode for the production of immaterial value; however, in the realm of scarcity, the peer to peer logic will tend to reinforce peer-informed market modes, such as fair trade; and in the realm of the scarcity based politics of group negotiation, will lead to reinforce the peer-informed state forms such as multistakeholdership forms of governance.
The world of physical production needs to be characterized by:
a) sustainable forms of peer-informed market exchange (fair trade, etc..);
b) reinvigorated forms of reciprocity and the gift economy;
c) a world based on social innovation and open designs, available for physical production anywhere in the world.
The best guarantor of the spread of the peer to peer logic to the world of physical production, is the distribution of everything, i.e. of the means of production in the hands of individuals and communities, so that they can engage in social cooperation. While the immaterial world will be characterized by a peer to peer logic on non-reciprocal generalized exchange, the peer informed world of material exchange will be characterized by evolving forms of reciprocity and neutral exchange.
We need to move from empty and ineffective anti-capitalist rhetoric, to constructive post-capitalist construction. Peer to peer theory, as the attempt to create a theory to understand peer production, governance and property, and the attendant paradigms and value systems of the open/free, participatory, and commons oriented social movements, is in a unique position to marry the priority values of the right, individual freedom, and the priority values of the left, equality. In the peer to peer logic, one is the condition of the other, and cooperative individualism marries equipotentiality and freedom in a context of non-coercion.
This is the truth of the peer to peer logical of social relationships: 1) together we have everything; 2) together we know everything. Therefore, the conditions for dignified material and spiritual living are in our hands, bound with our capacity to relate and form community. The emancipatory peer to peer theory does not offer new solutions for global problems, but most of all new means to tackle them, by relying on the collective intelligence of humankind. We are witnessing the rapid emergence of peer to peer toolboxes for the virtual world, and facilitation techniques of the physical world of face to face encounters, both are needed to assist in the necessary change of consciousness that needs to be midwifed. It is up to us to use them.
Cooperative economics is one example of a market-based structure divorced from capitalism. It embodies many of the principles that Mackey champions. For example, per Jaroslav Vanek* (Professor of Economics at Cornell) he’d agree with Mackey that maximzing profit is not the only function of markets. He’d also agree in that a free-market economy is the way to go. But Vanek sees capitalism as tending toward monopolies due to the investment of capital by private and separate stockholders. Whereas cooperatives are competitive, market-driven businesses where ownership and management is distibuted to the worker, not capital-holders. The nature of this organizational structure implements all of Mackey’s innovations and then some. While Mackey’s corporate version is an improvement, it still doesn’t provide the democratic advantages of a cooperative business and in fact it cannot embody such advantages structurally.
*See an interview with Vanek at http://www.ru.org/51cooper.html
There is a great deal of merit in the P2P and co-operative model. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin called this ‘mutual aid’ as far back as 1914. His book ‘Mutual Aid’ was also a critique of the dominant Darwinian idea of competition and the survival of the fittest. Kropotkin was also a naturalist and ‘Mutual Aid’ cited examples of animals co-operating.
Whatever system is in place it still needs to feed, clothe and house people to an adequate standard. In my essay on an Integral political economy I argue that there is a hierarchy of needs and that the higher needs can only arise when the lower needs are secured. You cannot be ‘creative’ or ’spiritual’ if you have to concentrate on finding enough food (obviously).
I have never supported the P2P concept of ‘open designs’ and ‘free ware’ and elimination of copywrite, for the simple reason that individual labour should be rewarded. If someone produces food you expect to pay for it, it is not handed out free. A socialist solution is the social wage, a minimum wage guaranteed to everyone, no matter what. But this has obvious drawbacks.
I could go on with ‘problems’ because as an anarchist from way back I am very familiar with the arguments. The one I have never been able to answer is what I call the ‘Bikie’ problem. Most societies have Bikie gangs. Anarchist theory hopes that these gangs will co-operate with the Hippy commune down the road. The reality is that freed from constraint the Bikie gang will resort to violence and take over the Hippy commune. How do you deal with people who do not want to be a part of a P2P structure? Most communitarian proposals require voluntary committment and considerable dedication – I have seen many fail (whilst others have succeeded).
Regarding individual reward in terms of $ most co-ops I’m aware of use a pay scale that depends on job skill-level required with individual performance variables. There is also a limitation between top and bottom pay, often expressed as a ratio, like 4 to 1, e.g. in the Equal Exchange (http://www.equalexchange.com/worker-owned). Plus there is other $ reward when profits are returned to each member via discounts, etc.
I don’t know how P2P answers the question of remuneration for individual work, especially with freeward, etc. Hopefully Michel will join us to explain how that works.
As to the biker gang, that’s a function of government, not the economy. We (US) already have a democratic governmental system (sort of, representative republic), so the idea is to bring up the economy to the same standard, i.e., democracy. I don’t see why they shouldn’t be able to work side by side, and probably with more equality and justice than the current system. Which includes jailing bikers, but only when they commit a crime.
Hi Edward,
You’ve missed my point. All around the world Bikie gangs are involved in criminal activity. They make a virtue out of being ‘outlaws’.
In regard to the separation of government and economics – governments make laws to facilitate and control economic activity. The point of political-economy is that they cannot be separated.
I would again propose that modern capitalism is a method of integrating some otherwise destructive elements of human behavior and a code of ethics at the same time. What comes next must also grapple with these issues. A high level of interdependency at the market level still seems key to me- otherwise you can’t effectivley “punish” another peer group without actually killing them.
I would like to answer the different comments:
Comment 1:
- from Edouard Berge on cooperative economics. I certainly believe cooperative economics are part of the answer. However, I’m not sure that cooperative physical production is inherently superior to private for-profit production, which is why I think we need to keep the solution ‘open’ on the market side, and let different formats co-evolve and compete.
- However, public authorities need to create a level playing field, and one of the important rules will be that of no harm done to nature and communities. Within the context of such rules, i.e. without a corporate nanny state heavily subsizding monopoly capital, it is possible that cooperative economics would have a much more important role. Let us not forget that the number of workers in cooperatives (the cooperative alliance represented at the ILO, I forgot its name, is already greater than that of all multinationals combined
Comment 2:
- concerning Ray’s arguments against open design.
- An important point is to distinguish the logic of immaterial production, where non-reciprocal relationships are most productive, i.e. the pure peer production model, to the logic of material production, where costs for the material means of production need to be recouped. Here we still must have exchange or reciprocity. I believe that it is more clear, that there are laws of asymmetric competition favoring open design. It is already proven for the world of software, but I believe it will extend to other forms of design as well. Companies (or for benefit institutions such as the mozilla, wikipedia and apache foundations) that can count on large communities that are constantly working on making better designs, will tend to win out from those using exclusionary proprietary designs. I think it is not just a matter of wanting it, because it insures more continuous social innovation, but that it is also largely inevitable. See the exponential growth of open source software, creative commons content, the production of an open source car planned for 2011 already, as early signs confirming it.
- I urge Ray to read the Democratization of Innovation by von Hippel, which shows that model is already at work in many different economic sectors, not just extreme sports, but even capital intensive specialty chemical industries. To reassure Ray, there are many business models emerging that work with open designs and the sharing economy. For example, the Web 2.0 proprietary platforms enable free sharing, but live from aggregating attention and selling it; the open source world is marked by commons-oriented business strategies that are working well for many companies (IBM, Red Hat); many artists are using creative-commons to built derivative income strategies (only a fraction of a percent of artists lives from copyright anyway)
- Further arguments are simply that the old model seems broken, for example in pharmaceuticals, with high profile scientists and economists (such as Stiglizt), calling for open design type of solutions
- Finally, I do not advocate abolishing copyright completely, but rather creating non-coercive alternatives, so that open designs might be freely chosen.
- Concerning the Bikie problem. First of all , P2P Theory is not an anarchist theory, it calls for neither the abolition of the market, nor of the state. The Bikie problem is a problem for the state, a public order problem. I therefore agree with Edouard that this is just a pragmatic problem. Peer to peer is also first and foremost a potential. I have a slide which shows how the different SD meme constellations use distributed networks differently. Nevertheless, as a constitution, the technological and social logic of peer to peer also can play an important role in leveraging the whole of society to a higher level, in an analogous way that the EU and its requirements have helped in the transition of many eastern European societies, which could have evolved in Balkanized ways otherwise. So the crystallization of values on which P2P is based, and the low threshold needed to use them, can create an upgrade of consciousness as well.
Comment 3:
Very generally, P2P does not have ‘solutions’ to all the world’s problems, but it is first and foremost a better way to solve complex problems by involving more collective intelligence than hierarchical or even representative democratic systems can.
In general, the peer to peer logic seems to operate by reversing the logic of quality selection from a a priori filtering process done by institutionalized elites, to a a posteriori filtering system undertaken through various forms of communal validation and collective choice systems. It eliminates the bottlenecks and allows a much broader variety of options and solutions to emerge, from which the better ones need to be chosen.
So, concerning the remuneration levels. I think that what happens in terms of how to marry the peer to peer requirement, i.e. the ethical demand to treat everyone as peers with equipotential skills to bring on any given problem, to the demand for excellence, is a pragmatic one. In non-reciprocal peer production in the immaterial sphere, communities have found that it is best to reward individual producers, as it creates crowding out of the community logic; however, in the world of material production, I believe two things will happen: 1) markets will become peer-informed. This means abandoning the pure power play of monopolistic capitalism, as fair trade is actually doing. You consider producers and consumers as partners, and try to bend power market realities to the needs for dignified living of the producers, by eliminating monopoly rents for middle men, and asking an extra contribution for consumers. Another form of peer-informed market practice is social entrepreneurships, which overturns the capitalist priority on profit, and making it a means to an end, i.e. helping ‘peers’ in one way or another.
Personally, I do not worry about capitalism to much, because it is simply physically and logically impossible for an infinite growth system to survive within finite limits. So, we need to distinguish the idea of a market, as a possible way of allocating scarce resources, from the current dominant form, which is a historical form bound to transform itself. The last that capitalism collapsed, it led to fascism, communism and the welfare systems which embedded the market within the social priorities. We will face a similar choice in the coming decades, i.e. either replacing the collapsing growth machine by authoritarian allocation, or by democratic forms of distribution. Only this time, the latter will require more than a welfare state, most probably a social wage, as indicated by Ray Harris, as well as an integration of may peer to peer elements.
My answer to Matthews is that the integrative capacities of capitalism only work as long as the growth machine can continue to function, but when it increasingly hits environmental and other limits, then the system may falter. The problem of capitalism, as a growth engine based on interest-bearing finance, is that it cannot function as a steady-state economy (because if you need to pay back interest in a static economy, you can only do it by taking it from somebody else, instead of taking it from the growing pay.
An important issue is the following: could we imagine a form of capitalism that grows immaterially? The reason I’m skeptical about this way forward is that there is an increasing disconnect between value creation for use value (through the p2p and sharing economies), and the value capture of exchange value (which is only a minor part of it). This crisis of value will in my mind lead to a crisis of capital accumulation, which will compound the problems of physical limits.
Hi Michel,
I’ve just an email from Chris telling me you are in Melbourne. In which case we’ll meet at the event he’s organizing.
For now a general comment. The term ‘market’ is of course misleading. The ‘market’ is not a thing that acts. The word ‘market’ is just a term to describe the sum total of all economic transactions, no matter how those transactions are organized. The neo-liberal economists reify the market, in fact they almost deify it. I think Michel will agree that we can choose the type of economic system that best fulfills it’s main purpose – to serve human needs.
Hi Ray,
I think the market is an abstraction, but nevertheless can mean something. In this case, a system where goods can be sold for a price, and which tends to allow for neutral or impersonal exchanges (which can be an advantage), and a general way to allocate scarce resources through the pricing info. Capitalism is a particular implementation where a certain type of market becomes dominant and which is based on infinite growth. I think the latter cannot survive longterm, but since many people appreciate the freedom to produce and work for the market, I think we need to respect that freedom. But you are right that there may be not only different types of market (think of currently fair trade, social entrepreneurship, base of the pyramid approaches, etc..) but also other ways of allocating scarce resources, including personalized ones (gift economy), but also impersonal ones (relying on strangers) such as the adventure economy principles of couchsurfing.com. What we need is a pluralist economy, but which has a central value the respect of all human ‘peers’ (including nature and its beings as dignified for partnership approaches)
and I forget: look forward to see you at the venue with chris stewart then. Interested people can ask for my agenda at michelsub2003 at yahoo dot com
“I have a slide which shows how the different SD meme constellations use distributed networks differently.”
Where/when can we see this? It sounds really interesting.
Would using the internet analogy give any perspective on the integration of a collective code of ethics? How is a covert hacker spreading worms/etc.. punished in the p2p format? Is it the job of individuals/corporations to do so? I guess I don’t know much about that side of that industry.
Parecon: Life After Capitalism by Michael Albert
From an interview at http://www.zmag.org/parecon/pelac.htm:
Parecon: Life After Capitalism is about an economic system called Participatory Economics that seeks to accomplish production, consumption, and allocation to efficiently meet needs consistent with the guiding values: equity, diversity, solidarity, and self-management. When people ask what do you want for the economy, I answer: parecon.
Parecon features workplace and consumer councils, self-managing decision-making norms and methods, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and participatory planning. This is a set of institutions very different from those of capitalism as well as from what has been called market socialism.
The book, Parecon: Life After Capitalism, first briefly examines existing systems, revealing their incompatibility with guiding values we hold dear. Then the book presents defining institutions for the new economy. It describes new institutions for workplaces, consumption, and allocation. Next the book details the daily life implications of the proposed new institutions. Finally, the book deals with a host of broad concerns people have registered on first hearing about this new vision: Would it really further our aspirations and values? Would it be productive? Would it violate privacy or subvert individuality? Is it efficient, flexible, creative, meritorious? And so on.
And of course there’s Semco, a living, working example of some of these ideas. Here’s a few of them from an article at http://www.mondaymemo.net/030512feature.htm. Semco’s English-language web site is at http://semco.locaweb.com.br/ingles
Today’s Semco doesn’t have a traditional management hierarchy or typical organizational chart, or even a matrix or lattice management structure. The company is effectively made up of autonomous, democratically run units. The model of organization is that of concentric circles.
At the center are the Counselors, including Ricardo Semler. There are six of them and a different one takes the CEO job every six months. They deal with general policy and strategy, overall financial results, and work to inspire the Partners who make up the second circle.
Partners are six or seven leaders from each Semco division. Everyone else is an Associate. Some Associates also work as team leaders.
Semco has no receptionists, secretaries or any personal assistants. Associates set their own salaries which are publicly posted and worked into the budgets. All meetings are open to any Associate who wants to attend. Financial information is available to anyone who wants to see it and courses are available to help them understand what they see.
Semco’s units are limited to 150-200 people. That’s something of a magic number in sociological, management and anthropological studies. It’s the largest group that a human being can feel a part of and that can create a social context that affects behavior.
What follows is a debate between David Schweickart, author of After Capitalism and SolidarityEconomy.net editor, and Michael Albert, author of Parecon and founder of Z Magazine. The debate was sparked by Schweickart’s critique of Parecon, “Nonsense on Stilits.â€Â
http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2006/10/05/economic-democracy-vs-parecon-debating-life-after-capitalism/
And here’s a blurb on Schweickart’s After Capitalism from amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/After-Capitalism-New-Critical-Theory/dp/0742513009
David Schweickart moves beyond the familiar arguments against globalizing capitalism to contribute something absolutely necessary and long overdue–a coherent vision of a viable, desirable alternative to capitalism. He names this system Economic Democracy, a successor-system to capitalism which preserves the efficiency strengths of a market economy while extending democracy to the workplace and to the structures of investment finance. Drawing on both theoretical and empirical research, Schweickart shows how and why this model is efficient, dynamic, and superior to capitalism along a range of values.
Hi Edward,
The reference to how different vMemes may use p2p networks is the following: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/types-of-connectivity/2006/06/28
Originally from an essay by Chris Lucas which is referred to in the blog entry.
Parecon I found to be very problematic, because it is based on a hyper-administration of very detailed practical issues. Rather than let people work equipotentially, it wants to create balanced work complexes that preclude any inequality in job duties and satisfaction, and in order to do this, it has to include many detailed rules. I am personally not in favor of such a planning approach,
Michel
I wasn’t crazy about Parecon either for those very reasons. I’ read the debate between Albert and Schweickart and found the latter’s economic democracy much more feasible. I’m just trying to show the alternatives to capitalism out there because it seems so many of us accept it as the only economic system within which we must operate.
And if we accept Ken’s tetra-enaction of the quadrants, and that capitalism arose with the egoic-rational consciiousness, it only makes sense that another, more developed economic system will evolve to make the proper fit.
On the other hand a good case can be made that capitalism is still stuck as a feudal expression of economics and has yet to live up to the egoic-rational level to match the democratic expressions we find in politics.
I have a question Michel. You linked to your blog on how the vmemes use P2P. This can be compared to how the different vmemes use integral theory (like trying to fit it into a capitalist framework). But integral theory itself, like P2P, arose from (or tetra-enacted within) a vmeme worldview, no? If so, from within what worldview did P2P arise?
Hi Edward:
In one of the earlier versions of my essay P2P and Human Evolution, I actually did an exercise comparing the various vMeme characteristics, and I found it had elements from various levels. But I think it is most likely an expression of turquoise, in its most fully formed potentiality. However, I’m not an expert in the fine distinctions between different vMemes.
For integral theory, note how Chris Cowan has mentioned research showing that abhorrence of the mean green meme (which according to his research does not exist) is only expressed by the orange meme.
Your remarks about capitalism not having reached its own potential, is judicious. I think that new expressions like fair trade, social entrepreneurship, and base of the pyramid movements are themselves expressions of this maturation (as is the greening of capitalism and the sustainability movement). And as you know, I call them peer-informed expressions of the market, since they recognize that the economy is about partnership and the recognition of everyone’s needs.
From Ray’s “Left, right or just plain wrong†at Integral World:
Is it capable of asking the tough questions such as; will an integral political economy be capitalist in character or be a totally new configuration that transcends any previous political economy? Is the integral movement really challenging the cultural norms of society or is there a bias that accepts individualism and capitalism as a given?
Isn’t it still true that the capitalist class profits by exploiting labour? What is Wilber’s position on the minimum wage in the US? Does an integral politics think that this is ethically acceptable? Will integral politics admit, as research seems to suggest, that worker owned and controlled enterprises are more efficient and naturally more integral places to work?
Will Don Beck and other integral consultants advise their corporate clients to buy back shares and distribute them to workers and then set up a management system based on direct worker input? Will they advise their corporate clients to raise wages and to drop executive remuneration and share packages? Will they advise clients that the share market is simply an elaborate casino that extracts wealth from productive investment? Or will they simply hold a series of workshops that really don’t challenge a thing? Are the workshops designed to shift everyone in the organization up the spiral or do they merely tell managers how to better manage each vMeme to better maintain profits and therefore share price? To better exploit the working class?
I agree with the prime directive. It states that the health of each level is vital to the health of the whole spectrum or spiral. It’s worth really contemplating because it forms the absolute foundation for integral ethics. It says that anyone who espouses integral theory is bound by the logic of that theory to act in such a way that the greatest good is accomplished for the greatest number across the greatest depth and span possible – a kind of expanded integral utilitarianism. Note that the prime directive does not say – the greatest good for the greatest span except where it affects my own country, lifestyle or personal ambitions and desires. You see that is what first tier is supposed to do. It mitigates the prime directive by putting in selfish exceptions.
But what if the integral community is actually dodging the full political implications of the prime directive? What if it is excitedly looking into the integral future and ignoring some rather obvious and large ethical boulders in its path? For example, the class system inherent in capitalism where certain people benefit by exploiting the labour of others, like Indonesian clothing machinists or illegal Mexican farm labourers. Or do we just conveniently ignore this problem? Or do we create an integral rationalization or even argue that there is such a thing as integral capitalism? This is the argument that the best way to help poor people is to get rich and employ them. This is the trickle down effect. It’s a cornerstone of Republican tax theory. Remove tax to stimulate the economy to increase employment. Except it doesn’t answer the problem that the extra income is usually invested in the speculative stock market and that there has been a net flow from productive investment to speculative investment in the last five years. In other words it doesn’t go to jobs it goes to share portfolios. Or should we buy the neo-liberal economic propaganda lock, stock and barrel without critical examination and ignore the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer in relative terms?
Is it okay to be somewhat complacent with the clear evidence that the current political economy of the planet directly contradicts the prime directive?
Heh,
so, where does that speculative investment money go? The advancement of technology? Speculative means high risk for an investor. The internet as it exists in probably based on technology derived from such speculation. I see the internet as the most likely catalyst for upward integral movement, for the machinists and farmers on up.
The issue is that any new system has to deeply and meaningfully integrate the vital elements of the previous one.
MrTeacup Says in “The reinvention of I-I†at http://www.openintegral.net/blog/?p=235
September 18th, 2007 at 12:59 am
“Interesting stuff, Edward.
“I can see that capitalism is, and will continue to be a very contentious issue for I-I. Many people are totally committed to working toward an anti-capitalist future, and find it very difficult to accept that I-I is not.”
From a review of A Theory of Everything by Roar Bjonnes dated 8/27/00 at Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Everything-Integral-Business-Spirituality/dp/1570628556). It is similar to questions asked by Ray some time ago as well. And it would seem such questions have yet to be answered by I-I.
“This book tells us little about how an integral business person or politician might operate, even less about the deeper, philosophical map he or she needs in expressing spiritual values in today’s fierce political and economic reality. Nor does he paint a constructive, integral vision of how business might look like in a society based on spiritual values. When Wilber attempts to do this, he simply offers a short laundry list of people who are trying to “ïntegralize” corporate life, or he briefly explains how a liberal vs. a conservative worldview differ or complement each other. The deeper questions about an integral political platform or agenda are left unanswered, and so are questions about what kind of an economy we need to harmonize the human spirit, the workplace, or the environment. I know that Wilber is up to the task, but in this book, he has failed to answer some basic questions about the societal implications of a spiritual worldview, or, in effect, A Theory of Everything. Questions such as: Which aspects of capitalism are compatible with A Theory of Everything? Which aspects of socialism? Are new economic ideas–such as those of Sarkar, Korten, Schumacher, and others–more compatible with an integral worldview than classical capitalist and socialist ideas? Will the new, integral economy favor decentralization and cooperative enterprises? What is the integral visions answer to the growing inequity in the corporate world and in society in general? Since capitalism is based on the egoistic pursuit of self-interest, can it ever favor integral business practices? Which aspect of the socially responsible business movement would be part of an integral business agenda, and which would not?”
This from “An integral perspective on the political economy of ‘big change’†by Brian Hilton in World Futures, Volume 63, Issue 2, March 2007, pp. 127-36.
Does anyone have this Journal article and are willing to comment?
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a769890687~db=jour~order=page
Abstract:
The integral age demands a new economic vision. This has to emphasize exchange as processes, not the exchange of things. It must address humanity’s unique compulsion to learn using collaborative learning networks. These are what energize the self-organizing global change now accelerating the emergence of new global economic institutions and processes. This new vision requires political economy (i.e., economics integrated with its sociopolitical context).