The Political Economy of Peer Production

In this article, Michel Bauwens discusses an emerging human social dynamic called: peer to peer (P2P). According to the author, this is a major post-industrialisation shift in distribution networks that is affecting production, governance, and property through processes that aim to increase the most widespread participation by equipotential participants (participants who have equal, not proprietary, access to information). This essay aims to develop a conceptual framework ('P2P theory') capable of explaining these new social processes.

The definition of P2P processes, as stated here, is:

• "produce use-value through the free cooperation of producers who have access to distributed capital: this is the P2P production mode, a 'third mode of production' different from for-profit or public production by state-owned enterprises. Its product is not exchange value for a market, but use-value for a community of users.
• governance by the community of producers themselves, and not by market allocation or corporate hierarchy: this is the P2P governance mode, or 'third mode of governance.'
  
• make use-value freely accessible on a universal basis, through new common property regimes. This is its distribution or 'peer property mode': a 'third mode of ownership,' different from private property or public (state) property."

The document lists what is needed to facilitate the emergence of peer to peer processes as:

1. a technological infrastructure that operates on peer to peer processes - as in the internet, as long as it is controlled through distributed (not proprietary or hierarchical) governance, including viral communicators, or "meshworks", such as the 'Community Wi-Fi' movement, Open Spectrum advocacy, and file-serving television;
2. alternative information and communication systems which allow for autonomous communication between cooperating agents, such as the web, which enables autonomous content production that may be distributed without the intermediary of the classic publishing and broadcasting media;
3. the existence of a 'software' infrastructure for autonomous global cooperation, such as blogs and wiki's, embedded in social networking software to facilitate the creation of trust and social capital;
4. a legal infrastructure that enables the creation of use-value and protects it from private appropriation  (as described here: the General Public License (which prohibits the appropriation of software code); the related Open Source Initiative; and certain versions of the Creative Commons license fulfil this role); and
5. a culture of "diffusion of mass intellectuality, (i.e. the distribution of human intelligence) and associated changes in ways of feeling and being (ontology), ways of knowing (epistemology), and value constellations (axiology)".

The document describes in detail aspects of P2P, particularly those related to means of production and the market and conventional economic systems. The author describes the following:

• "peer production effectively enables the free cooperation of producers, who have access to their own means of production, and the resulting use-value of the projects supersedes for-profit alternatives;
• peer governance transcends both the authority of the market and the state;
  
• the new forms of universal common property, transcend the limitations of both private and public property models and are reconstituting a dynamic field of the Commons."
  

In conclusion, the author envisions the possibility of a social, economic, and political economy, centred around the P2P dynamic. It would be "Commons-based" and operating without an economic growth imperative. Instead, it would operate within a context of multistakeholdership and a re-invigorated sphere of reciprocity (characterised as gift-economy), centred around the introduction of "time-based complementary currencies" (or equivalent work time as a non-monetary currency of trade) as the basis for use-value production and exchange.