Library Socialism

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything that you need”

- Cicero [1]

Description

Cory Doctorow:

"* First, libraries have some nexus with socialist principles; they are public institutions, devoted to efficient allocation of resources, through which you can get the benefits of owning vast quantities of books and other materials without the downsides of having to organize, store, or maintain them. They are available to all comers at no cost, and they are provided as public services.

• Second, librarianship is imbued with several ethos that are adjacent to socialist principles, such as "to each book its reader and to each reader their book" — that is, there's a book that suited to each reader, and a reader that's suited to each book, and librarianship is in part the art of consummating the encounters between books and readers.

• Third, libraries are already on a path to providing fractional access to many things (wifi hotspots, business suits and ties, tools, toys, etc) and we can imagine a future in which most of life's material needs are provided in this way, from suitcases to lawnmowers to speed boats. Such a future would give you access to untold material comfort and abundance, without running up against the limits of a finite planet that lacks the material wealth to produce one of each for everyone, which would then moulder in attics and garages most of the time. Moreover, something designed for library circulation could be designed to a better specification than something only ever used for long periods in storage punctuated by occasional individual use.

Library Socialism is connected to several strains in radical thought, like usufruct — the idea that property could be held in common, but that individuals could assume control over them as needed and enjoy both their use and the use of the fruits of the property, but on condition that they not destroy the property and that they return it when they're done with it.

Also connected is "the irreducible minimum": the commitment by a society to ensure that every person who lives in it must have the basics for happy, fulfilled life, regardless of their status.

Finally, there is "complementarity," the idea that the world can be improved by combining the things we find in it — just as different metals can make alloys that are stronger than the sum of their parts, the right combinations of our selves and our work can be more than any one of us can accomplish on our own.

These ideas are expanded in a series of science fictional sketches from a Librarian Socialist future, as part of a utopian project to get people to imagine a destination that is profoundly more egalitarian, sustainable, generous and humane than the moment we're in now."

(https://boingboing.net/2019/11/24/usufruct-complementarity-irred.html)

Usufruct

"Usufruct is the key to library socialism - and how it can radically change the nature of a capitalist society into one that works for the people of that society instead of just a few.

Unlike the myth of capitalism, which claims to compensate workers for their labor fully, the actual nature of capitalism is that ownership by the capitalist class of tools, the means of production, and sufficient resources to keep workers alive while they create goods and services allows them to steal part of the worker's labor and claim it as their property (see surplus value).

Library socialism instead offers another means of distributing goods, both capital and consumer. It provides a way to make us all much more affluent on average, distributing goods and services to where they solve the most needs, not just to where they generate the most profits for a few. And by sharing items, it means that fewer items can satisfy the wants of a society completely.

In the simplest terms, the right of usufruct means you can use things, but you cannot deny them to others when you're not using them."

(https://librarysocialism.org/)

Characteristics

Irreducible Minimum:

Noon:

"There are three foundational principles of Library Socialism: usufruct, the irreducible minimum, and complementarity. These terms are all adopted by the Wrong Boys from Murray Bookchin, who advocated a sort of socialism he called Municipalism. The irreducible minimum is probably familiar to most listeners under the name of a Universal Basic Income. However, Moritz and Vulliez suggest a different conceptual framework: rather than having a basic income, they advocate for basic outcomes. The UBI, they argue, is a fundamentally capitalist approach to social welfare. It retains the fundamental bourgeois social relations of profit, personal wealth, purchasing power, commodity production and consumption, and so on, essentially just supplementing wage-labour with a certain amount of wage-non-labour.

The irreducible minimum by contrast is a concept the Wrong Boys develop from Paul Radin, an anthropologist who argued that tribal societies allow all individuals access to communal resources based on their needs, rather than limiting access based on ownership. The irreducible minimum, then, as a component of Library Socialism, is the idea that everyone should have access to the goods and services they need to maintain a high quality of life. On some level, existing libraries are already providing this in certain areas, the most obvious being education (ie, access to reputable information in the form of books), but also increasingly in other areas such as internet access, language learning, childcare, and other goods – my local library has a free cold-weather clothing rack.

If we take the irreducible minimum to a logical conclusion in the context of Library Socialism, we reach conclusions such as: libraries should include kitchens, counselling services, doctors, and have close connections with housing services or homeless shelters. These are ways of providing the irreducible minimum to those without food, shelter, medical care, and so on. It's worth noting that none of these concepts are difficult to imagine: again, one of the most valuable things about Library Socialism is that it involves expanding and centering an existing social relation, which makes it both more accessible conceptually but also pragmatically; and it is well-documented that libraries and librarians are extremely valuable in providing people with this irreducible minimum. For example, Jane Garner (p iv) argues that libraries in prisons:

improve quality of life during incarceration, and reduce the chances of reoffending after leaving prison” and are “means of escape, a means of passing time constructively, a means of staying connected with community, both inside and outside prison, an opportunity to experience autonomy and self-responsibility and, finally, as an inadequate support for their formal and informal education and literacy development”

(https://www.neweconomy.org.au/journal/issues/vol2/iss4/library-socialism/)

Usufruct

Noon:

"The second major pillar of Library Socialism is usufruct. This is a legal term that derives from two Latin words, usus ('use') and fructus ('fruit'). Usufruct, then, is the right to both use an item and to benefit from its products. It is distinct from standard ownership of property because it does NOT involve the right to damage or destroy an object, which is called abusus ('abuse'). For instance, if you buy a book, you could read it (usus), benefit from the information (fructus), and you would be perfectly within your rights to tear out each page and burn them (abusus). By contrast, existing book and tool libraries work on a usufructian system: you can use the book or tool, you can keep the information you learned or the table you built, but you can't tear up the book.

Usufruct is conceptually important for Library Socialism because it illustrates exactly WHY our default capitalist concepts of ownership are inefficient and unnecessary. To return to the example of an Executive Assistant needing round-the-clock access to a car, even the most ardent capitalist would be hard-pressed to find a reason why they need the right to smash the car with a sledgehammer. It makes vastly more sense to let people have essentially unlimited access to the use and fruits of a car without including the abusus right.

Bookchin describes usufruct as “the freedom of individuals in a community to appropriate resources merely by the fact that they are using them. Such resources belong to the user as long as they are being used. Function, in effect, replaces our hallowed concept of possession”).[4] This is subtly distinct from the Library Socialism version – Bookchin is talking about pre-capitalist societies where usufruct is a default social relation, while Library Socialism is looking forwards to a post-capitalist society, where usufruct is an organising principle. So we might imagine that in a Library Socialist society, people would not necessarily be welcome to use other people's property (whether that is something permanently owned, like furniture you've made, or something on long-term loan from a library, like a car) but they would necessarily be welcome to use items held in common at a library."

(https://www.neweconomy.org.au/journal/issues/vol2/iss4/library-socialism/)

Complementarity

Noon:

"Finally, complementarity is “a way of seeing non-hierarchical difference as something generative” (Srsly Wrong ep 200). This is perhaps the most important conceptual shift from capitalist social relations to Library Socialist social relations, because unlike usufruct and the irreducible minimum, it is antithetical to the compulsory individualism and competitive drive of capitalist economies. There is a common claim that capitalism is extremely efficient – which it is in certain ways – but modern consumer capitalism involves immense duplication of effort: Nike and Adidas are in a constant arms race to develop better shoe technology. They are constantly replicating each others' developments because they are in competition with one another. Imagine how advanced our footwear would be if these two instead complemented each other's research – Nike looking at soles, while Adidas focuses on laces, or what have you.

In the context of Library Socialism, complementarity leads us to a constantly expanding realm of goods and services available at libraries. In fact, this is already happening – as mentioned above, libraries around the world have been early adopters of public computers. This is because information in books and information on the internet complement each other, and librarians, being curators of their space, understand this complementarity. This is also why so many libraries have story time, or children's entertainers: librarians know that a lot of children and parents come to libraries for books, and by providing complementary services like edutainment they can massively increase the benefits they provide to their patrons. This is also the reason for medical clinics, or physios who work at gyms; they have understood the way specialists are complementary to one another.

It is the contention of Library Socialism that libraries are the perfect locus for complementarity. They are definitionally accessible to everyone, and the non-financial relationship between the staff and the library users means that the librarians aren't incentivised to deny people access (unlike shops, where the staff are incentivised to deny access to goods until customers pay). Instead, they are incentivised to make the library as useful and beneficial as possible, which they do by curating complementarity."

(https://www.neweconomy.org.au/journal/issues/vol2/iss4/library-socialism/)

Tools

• meansofproduction

"A free as in beer application to manage a distributed library, especially a library of things. Why? Because there's no need for every person to buy every tool."

All code currently can be found at https://github.com/Means-Of-Production