The only way to change society is to produce and share differently.
Capitalism has its means of self-reproduction: Venture Capitalism. By using exclusive access to the great accumulations of wealth resulting from the continuous capture of surplus value, Capitalists offer the participants of each new generation of innovators a chance to be a junior partner in their club by selling the future productive value of what they create in exchange for the present wealth they need to get started. The stolen, dead value of the past captures the unborn value of the future. For us to expand the scope of our commons we must create a chance for innovation to be born and allowed to develop in a free commons, and for this we need Venture Communism. We must develop ways to create and to reproduce commons-based productive relationships. The degree to which the products of labour are captured by commons-based producers or by appropriators will determine which kind of society we will have, one based on co-operation and sharing, or one based on force and exploitation. The motivation to engage in a venture communist struggle against class stratification could not be more vital, for not only does our society face the age-old afflictions of poverty and injustice, but it becomes increasingly clear that production levels to sustain the accumulation of an elite few drive us repeatedly into war and inevitably towards environmental catastrophe. Failure to achieve a more equitable society likely brings consequences far graver than society can afford to bear. To succeed the space, instruments and resources we need must be a common stock employed in production by a dispersed community of peers, producing and sharing as equals.
Politics is not a battle of ideas; it is a battle of capacities. Ideas are powerful, and there development and implementation can certainly have a political impact, however which ideas are developed and implemented is determined not by their intrinsic value, but by the relative power of those whom they benefit versus those whom they threaten. The capability to change a social order, for better of for worse, is rooted in the ability to impose change, which requires the wherewithal to overcome competing capacities for, among things, communication and lobbying. All capacities are, at their base, economic capacities, to cause change requires that enough wealth be applied to overcome the wealth of those who would resist such a change. Such wealth can only come from production. New ways of producing and sharing must always precede any change in the social order. New kinds of relationships, if they can create new productive relations, are needed to constitute a new economic structure which is able to give rise to a new kind of society. No social order, no matter how entrenched and ruthlessly imposed, can resist being transformed when new ways of producing and sharing emerge.
Society is composed of social relationships. The relations of production constitute the economic structure of society, on which arises the legal and political structures that define it. Relations between buyer and seller, between tenant and landlord, between employee and employer, between those born to wealth and privilege and those born to precarity and struggle are all outcomes of the relations of production. These relationships are a consequence of how things are produced and shared in society. Those who are able to control the circulation of the product of the labour of others can impose laws and social institutions according to their interests. Those who are not able to retain control of the product of their own labour are not able to resist.
Capitalism depends on the appropriation of value for its subsistence and growth. The disingenious rhetoric of "Free Markets" is a smoke screen to justify a system of privilege and exploitation. In a free market, competitin among producers woud reduce the price of everything to the lowest level that it can be produced for. If everything truly traded in a perfect market, then land and capital, like labour would never be able to earn any more than the cost of providing it. There could be no class that is exempt from working as their would be no income to sustain such a class. In reality, the "free market" is what property owners want to impose on workers, while retaining their own priviledges. Capital needs to make the price of labour low enough to prevent workers, as a class, from being able to retain enough of their own earnings to acquire their own property. If workers could acquire their own propoert, they could also stop selling their labour to the capitalists. Capitalism could not exists in a free market. The whole idea of the "free market" is part of the mythology of capitalism, is not possible within capitalism and just as unlikely to exists without it. "Free" from the coersion of profit-seeking Capitalists, producers would produce and share for social value, not for profits, as they do in their private and family lives, and as they have in non-capitalist communities. This is not to say that a free society would not have competition or that it's members would not seek to benefit from their own labour, the devision of labour required in a complex society implies exchange. The metaphor of "the market" as it is currently used would no longer dominate. The need to account value exchange in tiny and reductive lists of individualy priced transactions would be superceded by more fluid and generalized forms of exchange. The motive to maximize profit from ownership, so often the driving force behind irrational and distructive production, would give way to much stronger motive, doing work that has direct benefits for our lives and our society, production that fulfils our real world needs and desires.
The State's traditional role of mediating between the classes on behalf of the ruling class depends on its territorial sovereignty.
The State's ability to grant title and privilege is based on its ability to enforce privilege with its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Communications based on global peer networks have a chance to resist and evade such title and privilege. Social relations among transnational, trans-local communities operate within an extra-territorial space, one where title and privilege could give way to mutual interest and negotiation. Modes of production employing structures similar to peer to peer networks, have relations reminiscent of the historic pastoral commons, yet rather than being located in a specific place, create a commons that spans the planet, offering our society a hope for a way out from the class stratification of Capitalism by undermining its logic of control and extraction.
Specters of such a potential mode of production can be readily found. Peer networks, such as the Internet, and all the material and immaterial inputs that keep them running, serve as a common stock that is used independently by many users. Free Software, whose production and distribution frequently depends on peer networks, is a common stock, available to all. Free software is produced by diverse and distributed producers who contribute to it because the value they gain when they employ it in their own production is greater than the value of their individual contributions to it. Popular attacks on the rents captured by the recording and movie Industries by users of file sharing technologies show us the difficulties faced by those whose incomes depends on controlling reproduction. Mass transportation and international migration have created distributed communities who maintain on-going interpersonal and often informal economic relationships across national borders. All these are examples of new productive relationships that transcend the currently dominant property-based ones. They point to a potential way forward. Our success depends on our ability to prevent property owners from capturing the value of our production.
Developments in telecommunications, notably the emergence of peer networks such as the Internet, along with international transportation and migration, create broad revolutionary possibilities resulting from dispersed communities with the ability to instantly interact on a global scale. Our lives and relationships no longer need to be confined by territorially bounded nation states. Though coercive elements in the political and corporate hierarchy impose ever more draconian controls to resist our ability to evade such confinement, we can place our revolutionary hopes in the possibility that the scale of change is simply so large that they can never fully succeed.
As bold as the emergence of peer to peer technologies, free software and international communities have been, the obstacles to social change are daunting. We must overcome the great accumulation of wealth the Capitalist elite have at their disposal. This wealth gives them the ability to shape society according to their interests.
In order to change society we must actively expand the scope of our commons, so that our independent communities of peers can be materially sustained and can resist the encroachments of Capitalism.
Whatever portion of our productivity we allow to be taken from us, will return in the form of our own oppression.
There has been error in communication with booki server. Not sure right now where is the problem.
You should refresh this page.