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Class and capital in peer production.
Introduction
The emergence of commons-based peer production was originally described by Yochai Benkler, and many authors have pointed to the increased participatory nature of current production (see bibliography). However, most of these authors see it as an adjunct to the market. This contrasts with the view of those observers we might call 'digital utopians', because they ignore the constraints of the current political economy; and it also contrasts with the views of radical left analysts, who stress that peer production is already adapted and co-opted into the capitalist system. In this contribution, I take an integrative position, arguing that peer production is both immanent, i.e. part and parcel of a new type of capitalism, and also transcendent: i.e. it has sufficient postcapitalist aspects that can strengthen autonomous production communities in building an alternative logic of life and production that may, under certain conditions, overtake the current system. Definition I define (1) 'peer to peer' as a relational dynamic that emerges through distributed networks. Distributed (2) networks are networks in which the structure is such that agents and nodes can take independent action and maintain relationships 'on their own', i.e. through voluntary self-aggregation and 'without prior permission'. It is important to look at such a network from the point of view of the human: what matters is not the purity of the structure of the distributed network, (3) but whether or not, 'in the last analysis', such self-aggregation is made possible. Self-aggregation then naturally gives rise to the emergence of peer 'production'--the ability to create common value. In such a process, 'peer producers' can 1) voluntary assemble capital assets, which may be material or immaterial; 2) design, through mutual adaptation, participatory governance processes ('peer governance'); and 3) simultaneously make sure that the commonly created value indeed stays 'common'. This is done using new forms of 'common' property (i.e. neither private exclusionary nor public-collective), for which I use the term 'peer property'. Peer production is therefore defined by the following three interlocking characteristics: 1) the 'open and free' availability of the raw material; 2) participatory 'processing'; and 3) commons-oriented output. Because the latter re-creates open and free raw material for the next cycle of peer production, it can be considered as a process of social reproduction, which has been called the 'circulation of the common' by Nick Dyer-Witheford (2006). Immanent and transcendent aspects of peer prod...See the full content of this document
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