Category:P2P Theory
Collection of Core Works in P2P Theory
Introduction
Three inter-related processes, Peer Production, Peer Governance, and Peer Property, together constituting the Circulation of the Common:
Each aspect has its own category on wiki:
Each aspect also has its own value paradigm:
- Peer Production depends on Openness, i.e. open access and input such as Category:Open
- Peer Governance depends on Participation, Category:Participation
- Peer Property is related to the Category:Commons and Category:Sharing
* I (Michel Bauwens) fully endorse this as the spiritual theory behind an integrative p2p theory for social and personal change: A P2P Interpretation of Soul as Intersubjective Reality and Spirit as Interobjective Reality. By Joe Corbett.
Related Aspects
See our collation of key P2P Companion Concepts for the most important concepts in P2P Theory.
P2P Concepts that will change the world
P2P Transition Proposals
- Las Indias summarizes recent p2p thinking from the period 2012-2013: http://english.lasindias.com/michel-bauwens-and-the-new-socioeconomic-alternatives/
- a good summary of the triarchical proposal to simultaneously transform civil society, the market and the state: http://www.shareable.net/blog/blueprint-for-p2p-society-the-partner-state-ethical-economy
- key institutional concepts of the Partner State and Public-Commons Partnerships
- local and large-scale political strategies: 1) local change through civic Alliances of the Commons and Chamber of the Commons producing social charters to recreate local political majorities: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/proposed-next-steps-for-the-emerging-p2p-and-commons-networks/2013/04/02 ; 2) the global alliance of the commons at nation-state level and beyond http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/2012416102253184145.html
Key Theses on P2P Politics
Michel Bauwens:
Written in 2007:
"1. Our current world system is marked by a profoundly counterproductive logic of social organization:
a) 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
b) it is based on a false concept of scarcity in the infinite immaterial world; instead of allowing continuous experimental social innovation, it purposely erects legal and technical barriers to disallow free cooperation through copyright, patents, etc…
2. Therefore, the number one priority for a sustainable civilization is overturning these principles into their opposite:
a) we need to base our physical economy on a recognition of the finitude of natural resources, and achieve a sustainable steady-state economy
b) we need to facilitate free and creative cooperation and lower the barriers to such exchange by reforming the copyright and other restrictive regimes
3. Hierarchy, markets, and even democracy are means to allocate scarce resources through authority, pricing, and negotiation; they are not necessary in the realm of the creation and free exchange of immaterial value, which will be marked by bottom-up forms of peer governance
4. 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.
5. The creation of immaterial value, which again needs to become dominant in a post-material world which recognized the finiteness of the material world, will be characterized by the further emergence of non-reciprocal peer production.
6. Peer production is a more productive system for producing immaterial value than the for-profit mode, and in cases of the asymmetric competition between for-profit companies and for-benefit institutions and communities, the latter will tend to emerge
7. Peer production produces more social happiness, because 1) it is based on the highest from of individual motivation, nl. intrinsic positive motivation; 2) it is based on the highest form of collective cooperation, nl. synergistic cooperation characterized by four wins (the participants x2, the community, the universal system)
8. Peer governance, the bottom-up mode of participative decision-making (only those who participate get to decide) which emerges in peer projects is politically more productive than representative democracy, and will tend to emerge in immaterial production. However, it can only replace representative modes in the realm of non-scarcity, and will be a complementary mode in the political realm. What we need are political structures that create a convergence between individual and collective interests.
9. Peer property, the legal and institutional means for the social reproduction of peer projects, are inherently more distributive than both public property and private exclusionary property; it will tend to become the dominant form in the world of immaterial production (which includes all design of physical products).
10. 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.
11. The role of the state must evolve from the protector of dominant interests and arbiter between public regulation and privatized corporate modes (an eternal and improductive binary choice), towards being the arbiter between a triarchy of public regulation, private markets, and the direct social production of value. In the latter capacity, it must evolve from the welfare state model, to the partner state model, as involved in enabling and empowering the direct social creation of value.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. We need to become politically sensitive to invisible architectures of power. In distributed systems, where there is no overt hierarchy, power is a function of design. One such system, perhaps the most important of all, is the monetary system, whose interest-bearing design requires the market to be linked to a system of infinite growth, and this link needs to be broken. A global reform of the monetary system, or the spread of new means of direct social production of money, are necessary conditions for such a break.
16. 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.
17. At present, the world of corporate production is benefiting from the positive externalities of widespread social innovation (innovation as an emerging property of the network itself, not as an internal characteristic of any entity), but there is no return mecachism, leading to the problem of precarity. Now that the productivity of the social is beyond doubt, we need solutions that allow the state and for-profit corporation to create return mechanisms, such as forms of income that are no longer directly related to the private production of wealth, but reward the social production of wealth."
Key Citations
"It is a basic principle of a broadly pragmatist approach to theoretically analyzing politics of all kinds that the important innovations emerge in worldly practice before they show up in academic writings. Theory – and theorists – follow along behind overt political action, extracting and systematizing insights in such a way that they become more widely available than they would if they simply remained in their original context. In so doing, theory and theorists provide conceptual instruments—including explicit visions of alternate futures that may have been only implicit in worldly practice—that can inform future political practice, albeit in ways that belie or even contradict the abstract, idealized purity of the kinds of theoretically-informed explanations produced by academics. Theory and theorists must therefore be open to learning from events, because we have to listen before we can speak."
- Patrick Thaddeus Jackson [1]
Key Resources
Key Articles
- Michel Bauwens: From the Theory of Peer Production to the Production of Peer Production Theory. This article reviews the positioning of various p2p-related movements, thinkers and projects, and looks at how the P2P Foudation relates to them.
- Ten Peer_Production_Patterns. Stefan Meretz. Comment by Michel Bauwens: A word of caution. The text by Stefan Meretz is useful to understand the post-capitalist patterns that are inherent in peer production, however, it also abstracts from its embeddedness in present society and the way these aspects are instrumentalized by the present society and economic system, and create hybrid mechanisms of mutual adaptation. It also skirts around the central question of the self-reproduction of the means of production (however, see pattern 10 on the Germ Theory of change.
- A strategy for the commons in the context of social transformation: Massimo de Angelis, Crises, Movements and Commons. Borderlands e-journal, VOLUME 11 NUMBER 2, 2012. [2]
- Understanding the Two Levels of Change. By Larry Victor.
- Dmytri Kleiner: Flawed Circuits of Value in the Lulz Economy
By Vasilis Kostakis
Some co-written by Michel Bauwens:
1) http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/561
2) http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/606
3) http://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/463
4) http://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/484; in Spanish: endefensadelsl.org/pdf/parodia_de_los_comunes.pdf
5) http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2613/2479
Pages in category "P2P Theory"
The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 1,444 total.
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A
- Absencing vs Presencing
- Abundance Engineering vs Scarcity Engineering
- Accelerationism
- Achieving Personal and Relational Coherence Through Enabling Constraints
- Action-Shapers
- Activation Network Organizational Frame
- Adaptive Cycle
- Adjacent Possible
- Affective Strategies of Contemporary Capitalism, and the Resistance to and Transformation of Anxiety
- Afriforum Solidarity Movement
- Against Atomism and Decompositionism-Recompositionism
- Against Posthumanism
- Aleksandr Bogdanov
- Alexander Bard and Andrew Sweeny on the Exodus from the Old Empire
- Alexander Bard on Eventology vs Nomadalogy
- Alexander Bard on Exodology
- Alexander Bard on Syntheism and the Paths Ahead for Spirituality in the 21st Century
- Alexander Bard on the Digital Class Struggle in the 21st Century
- Algorithms of Capital
- Alternate G8 Interview on Open Government with Michel Bauwens
- Alternative Lineage of Evolutionary Thinking
- Altitude Lens Sickness
- Amadeo Bordiga and the Importance of the Agrarian Question for Capitalism
- Amir Taaki on the Dark Wallet Project and the Decentralization Revolution
- Amitological Paradigm
- Analectic
- Anatomy of Revolution
- Andre Gorz on the Immaterial
- Andrei Platonov
- André Gorz‘s Concrete Utopia of the Knowledge-Based Society
- Anoptism
- Anthromodernism
- Anthropological Introduction to P2P
- Anti-Capitalism
- Anti-Credentialism
- Anti-Developmentalism
- Anti-Hobbesian Trilogy
- Anti-Humanism
- Anti-Oedipal Collective Psychology
- Anti-Oppression Politics
- Anti-Politics
- Anti-Statist Traditions Within Marxism
- Antifragile Things That Gain From Disorder
- Antisystemic Movements and the Future of Capitalism
- Approval Economy
- Archmodernism
- Archtheory
- Arnold Schroder on the Difference Between Equality and Equity
- Arnold Toynbee on the Process of Civilizational Transition
- Arthur Brock Against the Consensus on Data Consensus in the Blockchain
- Articles on Value by the School of Cognitive Capitalism
- Articulating an Empirically Grounded Model of the Relation Between Markets and Commons
- Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity
- Asset-Based Egalitarianism
- At the Turning Point of the Current Techno-Economic Paradigm
- Atlas of Transformation
- Austro-American Group Struggle Tradition
- Auto-Nomistic
- Autonomous Politics and its Problems
- Autonomy
- Autonomy and Horizontalism in Argentina
- Autonomy, Labour, and the Political Economy of Social Media
- Awareness-Based Collective Action
B
- Balaji Srivanasan on the Three Competing Ideologies of the Networked World
- Beautiful Economics
- Becoming-Rent of Profit
- Beekeeper Model
- Before Writing
- Being and Technology
- Benefit-Driven Production
- Benefits of the Second Industrial Revolution vs the Benefits of the Third Industrial Revolution
- Bernard Stiegler
- Bernard Stiegler and the Question of Technics
- Bernard Stiegler on Social Networking As the New Political Question
- Better Without AI
- Beyond Adversary Democracy
- Beyond Civilization
- Beyond Classes
- Beyond Commodity
- Beyond Exchange
- Beyond Exclusion
- Beyond Labor
- Beyond Money
- Beyond Politics
- Beyond Scarcity
- Beyond Socialism
- Beyond State Capitalism
- Bibliography of the Triple C Debate between P2P Theory and Marxist Critics
- Big History
- Biophilia Revolution
- Biophilic Nature of Humanity
- Biopolitics
- Blogging as Distributed Activity
- Blueprint for a Global Village
- Books We Need To Read
- Boundary Commoning
- Boundaryless Organization
- Breakdown of Nations
- Breakdown of the Bio-Cultural Interfaces in the European Renaissance
- Breath of Life Theory
- Brian Hare on the Evolutionary Roots of Human Friendliness
- Bridge Builders for Transition
- Bruno Bosteels on Structuralism and Post-Structuralism
C
- Cadell Last on a Emergentist Mental Theory of Consciousness
- Can Capitalism Reform Itself and Move Towards a P2P Society
- Can Digital Commons Escape from Capital
- Can We Liberate the Market through Commons Governance
- Capital and the Enclosure of the Ethereum Software Commons
- Capital as Power
- Capital System
- Capitalism and the Commons
- Capitalism as a Mode of Exchange
- Capitalism as an Anti-Market
- Capitalist Markets
- Capitalist Realism
- Capitalist Road to Communism
- Captation
- Case for Economic Democracy
- Castoriadis and the Radical Freedom of the Imaginary
- Castoriadis on Value
- Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization
- Causal Power of Social Structures
- Center for the Study of Digital Life
- Center for World Philosophy and Religion
- Central Planning
- Chamber of the Commons
- Change Dynamics
- Changemaker Profile of Michel Bauwens
- Changing Society Without Taking Power
- Changing the System of Production
- Characteristics of Openness
- Characteristics of P2P
- Chrematistics
- Christianity and the History of Technology
- Circulation of Struggles
- Circulation of the Common
- Circulation of the Commons
- Citations on Open and Shared Design and Open and Distributed Manufacturing
- City, Anonymity, and P2P Relationality
- Civil Happiness
- Civilizing the State
- Class and Capital in Peer Production
- Classical Social Movements
- Clay Shirky
- Cliodynamics
- Co-Constructing a Commons Paradigm
- Co-Designing Economies in Transition
- Co-Evolution
- Co-individuation of Minds, Bodies, Social Organizations and Technè
- Co-Revolutionary Theory
- Cognitional Theory of Bernard Lonergan
- Collaboration Theory
- Collaborative Networks and the Productive Precariat
- Collaborative Rationality
- Collapse
- Collective Action After Networks
- Collectivism
- Comenius and Pansophic Education
- Coming of Neo Feudalism
- Coming of the Transnational Revolutions and the Networked Prince
- Coming Revolution of Peer Production and Revolutionary Cooperatives
- Commercial vs. Civic Commonwealth
- Commodification of Information Commons
- Common
- Common and the Forms of the Commune
- Common as a Mode of Production
- Common Core Thesis of Mystical Experience
- Common Good from an Integral Perspective
- Common Good, the Climate and the Market
- Common Humanity
- Common Turn
- Common-Humanity Identity Politics and Common-Enemy Identity Politics
- Commonism
- Commonism and Capabilities
- Commonism as a New Aesthetics of the Real
- Commons and Class Struggle
- Commons and Peer-to-Peer Alternatives for Planetary Survival and Justice
- Commons as a Rhizomatic Movement
- Commons as Political Subject
- Commons Association
- Commons Based Peer Production in the Information Economy
- Commons Boundaries and Postcapitalism
- Commons Circuits of Value
- Commons Enabling Infrastructures
- Commons in Marx’s Thinking
- Commons Movements and Progressive Governments as Dual Power