Toward a Critical Political Economy of the Digital Commons
* Article: Commons Praxis: Toward a Critical Political Economy of the Digital Commons. By Benjamin J. Birkinbine. tripleC, March 2018
URL = https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d702/fe9f40d70186b8468457e3bcd736bd3ad6e0.pdf
"I argue that communities involved in the creation and sustenance of the digital commons still need a progressive political project that goes beyond protecting commons-based resources from enclosure – what I call the “politics of subsistence” – into actively seeking to integrate resources from the state and capital into commons circuits."
Context
"What is needed, then, is an account of the commons that incorporates a structural critique of capitalism."
Benjamin J. Birkinbine:
1.
"The goal of a critical political economy of the digital commons would be twofold.
First, the project would illuminate the structural dynamics and power differentials that exist within commons-based communities, as well as the ways in which commons-based movements intersect with capital circuits.
Second, the project would move beyond merely developing an analytical framework for understanding these power dynamics by developing a progressive political framework that could serve as a direction forward for a critical praxis of the digital commons."
2. A processual or dialectical understanding of the digital commons:
"The analytical project of a critical political economy of the digital commons would build on the processual or dialectical understanding of the digital commons. According to Broumas (2017a), this approach frames the commons as ‘fluid systems of social relationships and sets of practice for governing the (re) production of, access to, and use of resources’ (1509). This definition draws attention to the social relations that are produced and reproduced alongside the relationship to the commons. Linebaugh (2008) frames this active creation by using the verb ‘commoning’.
In describing the practice of commoning, Linebaugh outlines four characteristics of commoning:
1) commoning is ‘embedded in a particular ecology with its local husbandry’;
2) it is ‘embedded in a labour process’ that exists in a particular field of praxis;
3) it is collective; and
4) it is ‘independent of the temporality of the law and state’ (44–45).
Commoning is therefore not just about understanding commons as resources but about the active pooling of common resources with a deep connection to the history, culture, and ecology of the place where they exist. As such, commoning is imbued with a complex relationship between subjectivity and the objects (i.e. common resources) to which those subjects relate.
Description
"The concept of the commons has provided a useful framework for understanding a wide range of resources and cultural activities associated with the creation of value outside of the traditional market mechanisms under capitalism (i.e. private property, rational self-interest, and profit maximization). However, these communities often continue to intersect with capital and the state attempts to appropriate their resources. Recent scholarship has sought to unpack some of the contradictions inherent in the claims made about the revolutionary potential of the commons by offering conceptual frameworks for assessing commons-based projects. This paper builds upon this research by developing a two-pronged argument. First, by drawing examples from the free software movement, I argue that critical political economy provides the most useful analytical framework for understanding the contradictions inherent in the relationship between capital and the commons. Second, I argue for a commons praxis that attempts to overcome some of these contradictions. Within this discussion, I build on the notion of ‘boundary commoning’ to understand organisational form, and I develop the concept of ‘subversive commoning’ for understanding various forms of commoning that seek to undermine the capitalist logics of the digital commons."
Excerpts
See: Commons Circuits of Value
Boundary Commoning
Benjamin J. Birkinbine:
"The coupling of commons circuits of value with capital accumulation circuits, whether willingly or out of necessity, still does not overcome many of the contradictions of the commons. De Angelis’s formulation, then, seems to leave us with a picture of a “long social revolution”, which would proceed primarily through the autonomous development of an emergent alternative value system from within capitalism. Such a value system would privilege commons value rather than capital accumulation. But there is another element in De Angelis’s work that he draws from systems theory and cellular biology, which seems to contain the possibility of linking diverse commons movements. That is the concept of “boundary commoning”, which is defined as the commoning that exists at the boundaries of the commons systems and that creates social forms of any scale, opens up the boundaries, establishes connections, and sustains commons ecologies, or that could reshape existing institutions from the ground up through commonalisation and create new ones. (De Angelis 2017, 24) Boundary commoning has the potential to provide an organisational model for how diverse and distributed commons-based movements can work together toward a common goal. Through the multiplication of commoning activity and the interweaving of commons-based communities through boundary commoning, a commons movement could potentially lead to a tipping point at which social transformation is possible. In addition, De Angelis claims that commons movements could link with social movements to form a hybrid movement with the combined power to bring about social revolution. As he explains, these “are not movements of fragmented subjectivities sharing a particular passion, but movements of connected subjectivities whose connection is further increased by their social movement” (Ibid., 387)."
(https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d702/fe9f40d70186b8468457e3bcd736bd3ad6e0.pdf)
Subversive Commoning as Commmons Praxis
Benjamin J. Birkinbine:
"As discussed earlier in this article, the unique characteristics of the digital commons – low rivalry and low excludability – make it possible for the products of peer production to be appropriated by the state and capital. Similar arguments have been made within critical scholarship on the commons, more generally. Specifically, scholars have drawn on the concept of “enclosure” to refer to the ways that common resources are transferred to private owners (Marx 1976; Harvey 2009; Linebaugh 2014). The term “enclosure” is useful for conceptualising the capture of common resources for capital accumulation, but it does not describe the use of digital commons fully, as such resources do not become entirely closed off from the community that produced the resource. Rather, digital commons become dialectically situated between both capital and the commonwealth. As such, commons-based movements will actively need to work to subvert capital logics by positioning their activities in an antagonistic relationship to capital.
By seeking reformist agendas from within existing institutions, such movements risk remaining small-scale, fragmented, and only capable of temporary subsistence rather than formulating a coordinated alternative to prevailing logics. Therefore, commons-based movements need to move beyond a politics of provision (based on the granting of individual rights, open access, etc.). Such a politics would not only provide rights of access to community members, but the sources of their commonwealth would also continue to be susceptible to capital and state appropriation. To be sure, the inroads made by movements informed by liberal-democratic political economy have led to the widespread adoption of particular commons-based resources (see especially Linux and the technologies of free and open sources software). But insofar as these resources are available to capital, they only exacerbate or accelerate the inequities involved in circuits of capital accumulation.
One of the most well-developed proposals for reforming existing institutions to bring about a commons-based society comes from the P2P Foundation (2017) and its Commons Transition Plan. The plan outlines policy prescriptions for moving away from the state/market duopoly toward a “commons-centric society in which a postcapitalist market and state are at the service of citizens as commoners” (P2P Foundation, 2017, 13).
As I have outlined throughout this paper, however, the dilemma of how to ensure that the value created by commons-based movements remains within the commons persists. Bauwens and Niaros (2017) explore this dilemma through an analysis of value within the commons economy. The authors argue that economic theory is experiencing a “value crisis” in light of the emergent practices of commons-based communities. They argue that whereas value within capitalism is extractive, a shift to a generative value model would enrich the communities and resources directly involved in production. The open cooperative and platform cooperative (Scholz 2014) are organisational forms that have been developed as a means for directly enriching those involved in production. However, the specific tactics used by open cooperatives to ensure that the value created by their contributors stays within the commons varies.
Bauwens and Niaros (2017) provide case studies that illustrate these differences. Most important for the purpose of my argument, however, is the question of how value can be actively re-appropriated from capital and placed into the commons value circuit. My argument is that we need a form of ‘subversive commoning’, which would actively seek to incorporate resources into commons value circuits. Just as capital operates according to a logic of capital accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2009), so too can commons-based movements reverse this logic to establish a site of social struggle. This could be framed as commons pooling by capital dispossession, although there are a couple of caveats to such an expression. First, I use the term ‘pooling’ here to signal an opposition to the private accumulation of capital. However, commons-based movements need to find ways of actively growing their commoning capacity over time. Doing so could accelerate the pace of the social revolution described by Marx, as well as more recently by De Angelis. Second, ‘dispossession’ is not necessarily an entirely accurate term when applied to the digital commons. Rather, digital resources could be appropriated by commons-based movements to serve their own needs.
Bauwens and Niaros use the term “reverse co-optation” to describe the ways in which commons-based movements can “use capital from the capitalist or state system, and subsume capital to the new logic” of the commons (2017, 3).
The example given by the authors is the open cooperative, Enspiral, which uses a policy of ‘capped returns’ to protect its operations from the perpetual returns that investors often seek when investing in a company.
In essence, shares in a new company are offered to investors along with an option for the company to repurchase those shares at an agreed upon price in the future. The idea is that the interests of the investor and the cooperative become aligned; both have an interest in seeing the cooperative succeed. The investor will be guaranteed some return on the initial investment, and the cooperative will have full control of its finances. In the case of Enspiral, once the capped return contract has been fulfilled, all resources are then given to the commons. In this sense, Enspiral provides an example of how an open cooperative can actively grow common-pool resources.
While Enspiral provides one example of how the commons can grow, my idea for ‘subversive commoning’ would include many other examples. At a general level, we can think of movements to reclaim farming, housing, forests, and other natural resources by either occupying abandoned space or actively resisting the enclosure of ancestral lands. These activities are directly subversive to capital because they actively re-appropriate sites of capitalist production into cooperative or commons-based movements. But we also have examples from within the digital commons. For example, organisations like RiseUp or Saravá provide “online communication tools for people and groups working on liberatory social change” (RiseUp 2017). In addition, FemHack provides a space for feminist and queer hackers to “hack patriarchy, capitalism, and other systems of oppression”, and the group actively works to encode non-hierarchical values into their technologies and networked infrastructures (foufem 2016). These organisations, which have been effectively built from nothing, have the subversion of the logic of capital at the core of their foundational principles. Apart from within organisations that provide digital infrastructures, tools, and services to assist in the project of bringing about social change, subversive commoning can also be seen in attempts to release knowledge and information that has been closed off from public access. Aaron Schwartz’s downloading and release of academic articles held in the JSTOR database provides an example of commoning knowledge that was enclosed by the capitalist logic of publishing companies. What all these examples have in common is the subversive nature of their activities in attempting to undermine prevailing capitalist logics that either enclose knowledge and information behind paywalls or institute hierarchical systems of management, surveillance, and control over information resources. Any attempt to subvert these logics could provide an example of subversive commoning. Subversive commoning responds by appropriating these resources and re-encoding them within the logics of commons value circuits as well as within subjectivities that emphasise care, trust, mutual aid, and conviviality, while recognising the social value in social production."
(https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d702/fe9f40d70186b8468457e3bcd736bd3ad6e0.pdf)
More information
* From the Commons to Capital: Red Hat, Inc. and the Incorporation of Free Software. By . In: Incorporating the Digital Commons: Corporate Involvement in Free and Open Source Software. 2020
"Red Hat transformed the commons of free software production into a capitalist enterprise by transforming FLOSS products into commodities that could be customised, sold, and serviced for its customers."
See: The Incorporation of the Linux Free Software Commons Into Red Hat's Capital Accumulation