Felix Stalder on Sat, 7 Nov 2009 12:51:44 +0100 (CET) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Re: <nettime> The Precariat and Climate Justice |
Hi Alex, what a great text. I took me a while to absorb it, since there is so much in there. On a theoretical level, I think there are some points deserve to be spelled out in a bit more detail. Most importantly, it makes sense to come back to an old Marxist distinction between the "mode of production" and the "mode of development". Despite a number of problems with these concepts [1], I think it's vital, as you do, to distinguish between the "technical relationships of production", basically the techno-scientific state-of-the- art of doing things, and the social relationships of production, that is, the social goals towards which this state-of-the-art is employed. The relationship between the two is fairly open. Industrialism and informationalism refer to the mode of development. Fordism, Soviet-style socialism and more cooperative-oriented approaches (like Yugoslavia) where industrialism embodied in different political projects. To me, the most convincing explanation for the demise of the Soviet-block was its inability to move from industrialism -- which has reached an internal impasse (threshold of complexity) at the end of the 1960s -- to a more advanced mode of development, informationalism. But also informationalism can be embodied in competing political projects. So far, we know two. One is informational capitalism, the other is "commons-based peer production." Now, the type of competition between these modes of production is very different from the competition between statism and capitalism, but still, these are systems of social relationships oriented towards different goals. Informational capitalism, like all forms of capitalism, is oriented towards private appropriation of surplus in the hands of the owners of capital, based on private property and competition between market participants. Commons-based peer production is oriented towards use-value and cooperation between participants (competition is on the level of attention and reputation). If you take software production, it makes no sense to say anymore that software production is capitalist. Sure, there are very significant capitalist actors in it, but they no longer control the field and the further development of the field is no longer fully-dependent on them. In other words, there are co-existing modes of production which together -- in mutual interdependence -- make up the "software industry". The competition between the two modes of production is regarding their relative weight within the field as a whole. I think we have a comparable situation in terms of the greening of the economy. On the level of the mode of development, there can be only one direction: forward. We must do things much more intelligently, and this will require more advanced technologies and more science. Everything else is a cynical fantasy. Telling the poor to be more frugal is not an option. Thus, in terms of the mode of development, I don't think we are anyway near a next paradigm, and even informational capitalism is not particularly in crisis. The deep crisis is with the industrial paradigm and its focus on what now appears as primitive forms of property (copyright) and primitive ways of energy production (linear extraction of carbon-rich, finite resources). The greening of the economy, in my view, is an expansion of informationalism, since, as Brian pointed out, even genetic engineering basically views DNA as information system susceptible to the same forms of manipulation like digital information systems. Meaningless bits -- 4 rather than 2, though -- to be rearranged into complex networks capable of producing any meaning. Every cell is now a Turing machine. The deep question is whether we can establish other modes of production which can mobilize the state-of-the-art towards other goals. I guess commons-based peer production, or more generally, the commons, is the best conceptual and practical basis for such a project we have right now. So, the underlying question becomes how much "green capitalism" do we need to advance an ecological commons. I'm convinced that part of that ecological commons is also a social and a informational commons, and the demands of the developing countries that green technologies should me made freely available -- rather than expensively licensed to them -- shows that. Green capitalism cannot produce an ecological commons, since capitalism, geared towards private appropriation, cannot think in these terms. However, if the commons becomes the dominant framework on which the existence also capitalist actors depends in an immediate way, it will seek ways to appropriate surplus that do not destroy the commons. Put crudely, the GPL forced IBM to advance the free software commons in the pursuit of private profit. But software is also a misleading example because of the particular force of the GPL. For the ecological commons, regulation and supply-side subsidies will make all the difference. However, as Alex points out more clearly than I can, as pointed out, the necessary pressure cannot come from capitalist actors and also not from the state which is largely captured by these actors. The pressure must come from these sectors where practice of the commons are already (or still) established. A crucial arena in this struggle, as Brian Holmes pointed out, are current fights of the university and knowledge as a commons. If only because this seems to be one of the fights that's actually winnable. Not the least because there is the potential to build large coalitions around it. On the one hand, universal eduction is a project that is at the very core of enlightenment, thus it's a deeply felt, positive value of the enlightened bourgeoisie. On the other hand, it the contemporary university is a site of precarization. Plus, it's a genuinely inter-generational concern (students worry about themselves, parents worry about their kids and remembering the very different conditions of their own education, at least in EU-land). The breath of the possible coalition around free universities can currently be witnessed in Austria, of all places [2]. A wild-cat occupation of the lecture halls at universities in Vienna has spread across the country and waves of solidarity are simply amazing, including unions and pensioner's associations (which are very powerful in this gerontocratic country). The disappointment with the current political system is very deep producing a lot of energy. This is usually harnessed by the extreme right here. Not this time, and not around this issue. Others will follow. Felix [1] The main problem is the general economism of Marxism so that this differentiation is made only in terms of the economy, and assumes that the state-of-the-art exist primarily there whereas the social live is assumed to be more or less free of technology and is not seen as a source of techno-scientific innovation. [2] http://unsereuni.at --- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now: *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org