A deeper seam

Any challenge to neoliberalism must go much further than making demands on the state, argues Hilary Wainwright. And we must avoid the false dichotomy between organising locally and on a broader stage

‘The power of global connections,’ declares the first image of a revolving ad for Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. It shows a florescent, pulsating line. The following image is a silhouette of solitary man on a bicycle, set against a shadowy mountainous background. His mobility is clearly limited, confined by territory. The caption here is ‘human capital’.
By implication, the mobility of finance comes to the rescue to realise the potential of humanity, landlocked in its local confines. We are meant to imagine that global finance and humanity are all part of the same flow moving forward as smoothly as one slide flows into the next. Imagine the slides replaced by images of the struggle over the Belo Monte dam on the Xingu River in Amazonia, where workers and indigenous people confront the Brazilian government and its private corporate partners; or of the water wars in Cochabamaba, Bolivia, where water predator Suez SA was kicked out and the company taken over by an alliance of citizens’ organisations; or of local protests by Boycott Workfare, a UK-wide campaign to end forced unpaid work for people who receive welfare that has forced dozens of companies and charities to withdraw from workfare schemes.
A constellation of power relations
These alternative images would convey well the argument of the social geographer Doreen Massey that localities can best be understood as ‘a distinctive constellation of social relations and therefore relations of power, which themselves spread around the world’. She argues for a concept of power-geometries in which localities are not simply the victims (at the receiving end) of globalisation but also the loci of its production and reproduction.
A corollary of this, she argues, is ‘that places are differentially located within those geometries. Chad is in a very different position from the UK; Oldham in a very different position from London.’ This points to the importance of investigating the significance for capital of different localities, different ‘constellations’ of social and economic relations – rather than thinking of ‘the local’ as a blanket concept. But this is to leap ahead.
Massey’s focus on the power relations of place gives us a conceptual tool to move from the conventional, bounded notion of the local to one that views the local as a site of power and counter-power in the context of global capitalism. Her understanding of the way relationships of place produce and reproduce capital enables us to avoid both the false binary of local versus global and the flawed optimism about the local as a means of escape from corporate and systemic power.
From Massey’s work, I will draw an understanding of the local as no more inherently ‘good’ than the global is inherently ‘bad’ but as a context of changing, conflictual, unstable relations of power. I will use this framework to clarify some of the issues that Greg Sharzer usefully raises but does not consistently follow through. He tends to abstract the importance of ‘demands on the state’ from the often unpredictable dynamics of power struggles in and beyond the local.
Local sites of counter-power
Let’s consider and illustrate different aspects of locality as a site of potential counter-power. Capital, for all the mobility that is its distinctive feature, also depends in important ways on the social relations of place. It has to invest in some place at some point; it has to sell somewhere. Though new technology has qualitatively enhanced capital’s flexibility, it still has to physically locate at least some of its operations.
Take banks, for example, the very hubs of capital’s mobility. Many locate in the City of London. Here they depend on cleaners who live nearby. These workers have been using this reliance on their labour to win decent wages against bosses who can earn in a few days what the cleaners earn in a year. In 2007, these cleaners got organised through the Unite, Unison and GMB unions, supported by London Citizens and the campaign for a living wage. Through a mixture of guerrilla industrial action and public naming and shaming, they won a rise. Vital to their counter-power vis a vis the City were the alliances they had built, with roots in local sources of power: religious and cultural associations, sympathetic academics, local union branches. These alliances were important in building the confidence, capacity and cohesion of the cleaners and the strength of solidarity with their action.
The dependence of corporate retailers on local markets and on the local reputation of their brands provides another example of where the locality as a site of reproduction of capital has created an effective source of counter-power. Concerted campaigns to block Tesco, and corporate coffee chains such as Starbucks and Costa indicate how this leverage is being used. Often they are associated with networks of independent or social or co-operative retailers. And although the origins of these campaigns were often modest, starting from seemingly narrow ‘localist’ sentiments, they are increasingly linking up into a national networks.
The very mobility of capital, and its ability to get away with closing factories and taking over public assets in search of ever higher profits, depends significantly on the lack of information, organisation and confidence of local workers and citizens. Thus, struggles that have successfully blocked the closure and asset stripping of a factory have usually involved both militancy in the workplace, collaboration with sympathetic researchers and alliances with surrounding communities.
‘When management came to take back the factory, it was the presence of the local community that stopped them,’ says Leano Morais, an activist lawyer describing the ability of the worker-managed takeover of the Flasco chemical container plant near Sao Paolo to see off the corporate asset strippers. Similarly, the concerted attempt by predatory corporations to privatise water across Latin America was blocked by trade unions linking up with citizens and municipalities. In the process, they created a global network, spreading the lessons of each local struggle.
A similar exercise of locally-organised counter-power is evident when capital tries to privatise public space. In 2009, Durban city council tried to sell off the vast and well-used Warwick Early Morning Market by Durban’s main station for a shopping mall. This move was faced with a sustained and eventually successful resistance of stallholders, organised through Streetnet, the organisation of informal workers and street vendors, and backed by the municipal workers’ union. Streetnet is an interesting hybrid organisation, whose activities include the development of an alternative, solidarity economy.
The state in a broader context
A condition for the nature and impact of the counter-power asserted in these struggles is not only, or even primarily, the fact that they are making demands on state institutions. Greg Sharzer is right to insist on the importance of demands on the state. But what was also of critical importance, in all these cases, was the ability to create organised bases to sustain in daily life alternative values and social goals.
Here it is important to recognise the repercussions of the scorched-earth strategies of neoliberal governments. The traditional, mainly trade-union bases of the left and its strategies for state power have been radically weakened. People are everywhere having to remake or newly create bases of solidarity. They are building on and connecting all the various and often new ways in which people come together to struggle for justice – hence collective food buying and community gardens, as well as trade union branches, social centres and informal economic networks. In combination, they have created resilient sources of power able to shift the balance in the constellation of power relations that constitute a locality and its relation to global capitalism. These in turn provided autonomous bases for an engagement with the state, whether local or national or in some form global.
The issue of demands on the state, then, needs to be understood in a very much more complex context of plural sources of power than is currently common currency on the left. Greg Sharzer’s approach, though containing many insights, tends to fixate on this important issue of the state at the expense of paying detailed attention to the particular ways people are seeking to overcome their subordination. It leads him to false counterpositions of building capacity and self‑organisation with ‘demands on the state’.
For instance, the website of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network depicts not an ‘organisation which assumes, fundamentally, that resistance is useless’ pitching self-reliance as in itself sufficient, but one that is engaged in the wider struggle for social change. It was playing a central part in the US Social Forum in Detroit, for example, with the network’s chair, Malik Yakini, insisting how ‘important it is for all those who share a belief in mass social change to create alliances and work for that change together’.
That’s not just rhetoric. The DBCFSN was on the logistics and cultural committees of the forum and involved in organising tours of Detroit for its participants. Its policies involve an extensive engagement with the state to protect the space for urban gardens from corporate developments; to get schools and hospitals to buy food from local sources; and so on.
I recognise from my experiences in the women’s movement this combination of organising autonomously for change, around needs unmet or indeed exacerbated by the dominant insititutions, and at the same time struggling to control public resources. This kind of hybrid is becoming increasingly important as state institutions become hollowed out and people through collaboration find that they can create transitional solutions that also feed into the wider political struggle.
To appreciate the importance of combining efforts at direct, collaborative solutions to urgent problems with a wider political movement, we need a further set of tools. These can be drawn from the practice of social movements from the 1960s onwards and from a critical realist epistemology that goes beyond both the positivism associated with the closed system of the nation state and the post-modernism that flourished in the first phases of globalisation and the decomposition of these certainties.
Distinct meanings of power
One such tool is to make a distinction between two radically distinct meanings of power. These are, on the one hand, power as transformative capacity and, on the other, power as domination. Historically, mass social democratic parties have been built around a benevolent version of the second understanding. Their strategies have been based around winning the power to govern and using it paternalistically.
The understanding of power as transformative capacity is related to a different understanding of social change, implicit in much of the practice of recent movements. Crucial here is the insistence first on refusing to reproduce relations of oppression and exploitation. This is associated with struggling to create spaces for change to illustrate and develop in practice alternative values – not as an end in itself, but as a basis for society-wide transformation, shifting the balance of power and cultural hegemony to this end.
The struggle with the state thus becomes not the overriding goal but a distinct and very necessary strategy for control over the means of domination in order to use these against capital and as a resource for transformative capacity. This then means it is possible both to build sources of power autonomous from the state and to make demands on/engage with the state.
The Syriza experience illustrates this combination, as well as the unresolved tensions within it. Because so many of its activists at all levels were shaped by the social movements of the 21st century, they recognise the driving importance of transformative capacity.
At the same time as organising for governmental power – the power of domination – they recognise that, as Andreas Karitzis, one of Syriza’s key political coordinators emphasises: ‘It is clear that what is also decisive is what you are doing in movements and society before seizing power. Eighty per cent of social change cannot come through government.’
This points to the importance of developing power as transformative capacity, which more often than not is local in its roots, as a key and complex goal of any left activist or organisation. This in turn indicates a shift in priorities from those implied by an exclusive struggle for state power, whether electoral or revolutionary. There is a need for a certain ‘bending of the stick’ away from the traditional model of political parties, towards forms of political organisation able to learn from struggles occurring in and across local power relations; building alliances and forms of democratic organisation that have such learning and feedback at their core; developing forms of popular education in Paolo Freirian mode to realise latent capacities; creating contexts for debate and new levels of politicisation between local actors – conflict and debate being an important part of the development of transformative capacity.
This strategic concept of organising for change now as part of a long-term struggle for future systemic change has a special relevance today, as capitalism goes through what David Harvey analyses as a continuing cycle of decentralisation and centralisation. As the Merrill Lynch advert implies, capital in its predatory manner is very interested in what often begin as local initiatives – from organic food production through young people creating new musical or artistic forms, to hubs of open software producers. It’s all human capital, there to be appropriated to create financial value to feed the drive to accumulate. If we are to resist and reverse this, so that all this diffuse entrepreneurialism becomes part of a process of social value creation, we need to recognise it as part of the constellation of power relations to which Doreen Massey calls our attention.
After 30 years of the right depoliticising the local – of which ‘localism’ is the latest variant – the key issue is to understand and open up political debate and choices about the future of this diffuse and productive creativity. And we must work at a much deeper seam than that of ‘demands on the state’.

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New words expressing new concepts usually indicate stirrings at other levels of reality. So when we read of widespread ‘peer-to-peer’ activity (sharing without central authorities) and the spread of ‘open source’ (the mutuality of creativity), or come across seemingly paradoxical concepts such as ‘produsers’ (users producing value as they use), or entirely new concepts such as ‘phyles’ (transnational networks of small companies in which the values of the commons are predominant), we should find out about the innovations that old language does not capture.
We are witnessing the emergence of a new ‘proto’ mode of production based on distributed, collaborative forms of organisation. It is developing within capitalism, rather as Marx argued the early forms of merchant and factory capitalism developed within the feudal order. In other words system change is back on the agenda but in an unexpected form, not as a socialist alternative, but as a commons-based alternative.
Capitalism in its present form is facing limits, especially resource limits, and in spite of the rapid growth of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) economies, is undergoing a process of decomposition. The question is whether the new proto-mode can generate the institutional capacity and the alliances able to break the political power of the old order.
One way to describe the changes now taking place is as a shift away from a context in which the technological and economic advantage lies with economies of scale and mass production that depend on cheap global transportation and, thus, the continuous availability of fossil fuels. The move is to ‘economies of scope’, where bringing down the cost of common infrastructure for networked enterprises brings competitive advantages.
It is in achieving these economies of scope that the distributed, peer-to-peer forms of production made possible by new information and communication technologies can be deployed.
Distributed production: who has control?
The ecological and resource scarcity crisis makes the shift to economies of scope seem all but inevitable. Such a shift takes two major forms: the mutualising of knowledge, which is the ‘open source’ model; and the mutualisation of physical resources, which takes the form of ‘collaborative consumption’ in order to mobilise idle resources. Both occur in the greater context of the horizontalisation of human communication and the common value creation that have been enabled with the internet. These involve forms of mutual accommodation between centralised institutions (such as corporations and states) and decentralised, interconnected productive publics (such as open source software producers and social network users). In such accommodations there is a clear divide between those contexts where control is firmly vested in the companies, and is disadvantageous to the workers/producers, and forms in which the community dynamics remain dominant, and institutions have to adapt to the rules and norms of a community.
In the sphere of immaterial production, Facebook and Google are representative of forms in which individuals share their expressive output but do not collaborate with each other on common objects. Typically, such platforms will use business models that do not return the value to the users who have actually created it.
Commons-based peer production, by contrast, is emerging as a proto-mode of production in which the value is created by productive publics or ‘produsers’ in shared innovation commons, whether they are of knowledge, code or design. It occurs wherever people can link up horizontally and without permission to create common value together. It has the most potential as a leverage to transform what is now a proto-mode of production into a real mode of production beneficial to workers and ‘commoners’. To achieve this, strategic and tactical breaks with capitalism are necessary, though not necessarily with market forms.
How does commons-based peer production work?
Generalising from practice in the sphere of immaterial production, the new system functions as follows.
The contributors are either volunteers, or paid employees of collaborating companies. The infrastructure of cooperation is often maintained by a new type of ‘for-benefit’ association, such as the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, or the so-called FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) Foundations such as the Apache Foundation, which provides organisational, legal, and financial support for software that powers much of the web.
These foundations do not command and control the labour of production but enable and empower its emergence and the social allocation of resources by the associated producers. Around these commons, we see the emergence of entrepreneurial coalitions. These consist of enterprises that create market value ‘on top of the commons’.
An example here would be the open source provider Red Hat, which distributes and supports a commercial version of the free Linux operating system. Their role in the feedback loop of value creation consists in making possible the individual social reproduction of the commoners/contributors, and often sustaining the for-benefit associations that also act as buffer between the community of peer producers and the entrepreneurs.
This new emerging modality tends to out-cooperate and out-compete classic modes of capitalist production. This is because of its higher innovation potential (there is no privatisation of innovation); the ability for distributed parallel development on a global scale without the use of costly bureaucracies of control (as with Wikipedia, every module can be worked on separately, by any contributor with the necessary skills); and the much cheaper production costs due to price structures free of the rent of ‘intellectual property’ (IP). Where these new forms occur – in knowledge production, free software production and now emerging in physical production – they tend to displace proprietary and IP-based modes. A study by the Computer and Communications Industry Association estimates that the US ‘fair use’ economy, based on shared, ‘balanced copyright’ knowledge, already employs 17.5 million people and accounted for one sixth of GDP in 2007.
Replacing capitalism?
As with the proto-capitalist modes under feudalism, today’s new forms co-exist with the dominant modality and may at first even strengthen it. In peer production today, the individual workers are still employed by capital – but at the same time the role of the commons and the community, and its explicitly co-operative, non‑capitalist logic, is a core aspect of the new organisation of production. Peer producers are knowledge workers and an integral part of the working class, while the entrepreneurial coalition is often dominated by a ‘netarchical’ capitalist class – a new category of capitalist that is no longer dependent on the ownership of IP rights but rather on the development and control of participatory platforms such as Facebook. This netarchical class knows how to capture value out of social production for the benefit of capital.
The new mode of peer production has features that prefigure a new productive system in the sense that the sharing of knowledge, code or design essentially follows a logic similar to communism as described by Marx: anyone can contribute, and anyone with access to the network can access the resource. Resources are allocated socially, through the decisions of the contributors to allocate their skills and energy to a particular part of the project. The solutions are added back to the same commons, and can be used by all, even where they have been created by developers who are also employees of capitalist companies.
The paradox, of course, is that this really-existing communism is interdependent with the really-existing capitalism of the entrepreneurial coalition that works with that particular commons. This makes the transitional mode of peer production a new terrain of social tension, struggle and, eventually, adaptation between various social forces.
Ultimately, the potential of the new mode is the same as those of previous proto-modes of production – to emancipate itself from its dependency on the old decaying mode, so as to become self-sustaining and thus replace the ‘circulation of capital’ with an independent ‘circulation of the common’. In a circulation of the common, the value that is created by the commoners for the commons would directly contribute to the further strengthening of the commons, without dependence on capital. How could this be achieved?
Critically, it would require an amendment of the existing sharing licenses, to prevent the value capture (without retribution) of capital – for example, the use of the ‘peer production’ or ‘copy-far-left’ licence, as proposed by Dmytry Kleiner and chosen by the P2P Foundation.
Our proposal is that the users of the commons should be commons-friendly enterprise structures and not profit-maximising companies. These ethical companies, whose members are the commoners/contributors themselves, would be organised as global open design companies. These would be linked to networks of small factories that produce on the basis of shared values and could more easily adopt open-book management, open recruiting and open supply lines, ensuring transparency to the whole network, in order to create maximum mutual alignment between participants. This is simply an extension of the existing organisational practices of ‘immaterial commons production’, which combines full transparency of all actions with negotiated coordination.
In order to turn peer production from a transitional mode within capitalism to a potential new dominant mode of production, we have to bring together the commonist aspects of immaterial cooperation with manufacturing companies that do not reward shareholders and owners of capital but rather the value creators themselves. By interconnecting these emerging players we will create a powerful seed form for the future.
One possible way of doing so is through a conversion of the existing social/solidarity economy towards shared innovation commons. If social economy actors adopted shared innovation commons, they would become hyper-cooperative, and hence effectively competitive with multinational corporations, which they would outperform in terms of speed and depth of innovation, as well as price, since they would operate without intellectual property mark-ups. From what Marx called ‘dwarfish forms’, they would transform into powerful global players.
How does this apply to manufacturing?
A corporate-driven move to distributed forms of production has been underway for some time. When this ‘classic’ distributed manufacturing is coupled with the principle of shared innovation commons – that is, as the distributed production of ‘open hardware’ – much more dramatic changes could be afoot. Marcin Jakubowski of the Open Source Ecology project, which develops about 50 types of open hardware-based production machinery (open source tractors, bricklaying machines and so on), and Wikispeed, the open source car project, have announced the development of an ‘extreme manufacturing’ platform.
We regard this as the peer production equivalent of the invention of the assembly line by Henry Ford. It inserts the rapid production methodologies that have proven themselves in open source software production (such as ‘extreme programming’) into the world of machine design, and links it directly to microfactories and distributed enterprise.
As Jakubowski explains this model, it directly addresses the issue of economies of scope by offering a globally mutualised production infrastructure: ‘Extreme Manufacturing (XM) is an open source hardware development methodology, which focuses open source design and collaboration, and the revenue model is distributive enterprise . . . The magic of this method lies in synergistic, lively, distributed, parallel development.’ He explains how it is lean in its organisation but ‘maintains sufficient structure for scalability’.
This sort of distributed system can operate within a capitalist framework but can also, when linked with shared innovation commons, provide a new form of open and distributed manufacturing centred on social, rather than profit-driven, value creation. The bases for an integrated distributed manufacturing system are currently under rapid development. They include distributed access to machinery: 3D printing and other forms of personal fabrication, such as currently developed in FabLabs and hackerspaces, as well as in emerging microfactory models such as Wikispeed and Local Motors.
It requires distributed access to physical places for collaboration – co-working centres – as well as the widespread possibility for peer learning. Distributed access to financial capital is a further condition, notably crowd-funding, social lending and distributed, decentralised currencies such as cryptography-based digital money Bitcoin. The spread of these peer to peer forms of funding has already attracted the attention of the Bank of England executive director, Andrew Haldane, who has suggested that peer to peer finance models could sweep away the inefficient retail banks before too long.
Access to distributed forms of energy and raw materials will also be fundamental. Here too there are established trends in this direction. For instance, half of Germany’s solar energy is produced by community‑owned local cooperatives. The availability of appropriate legal forms to allow for entrepreneurship in this new modality will be necessary.
If it is true that the capitalist mode of production is reaching its limits, and that this emerging new mode of value creation creates significant opportunities for commons-centred production, then we need to seize this opportunity – not just at the micro-level as a new social practice, but as a societal project for emancipation.
How would peer production be extended to the whole of society?
The current capitalist system is based on two entirely erroneous premises: first, that nature is abundant and can be infinitely exploited to obtain endless growth; and second, that sharing of innovation, culture and science should be hampered through privatisation of intellectual property – an imposition of artificial scarcity. These macro-economic principles are then written into the ‘constitutions’ of profit-maximising corporations, which are legally obliged to enrich their shareholders by maximising social and environmental externalities.
Peer production models show us a new possible reality in which the democratic civic sphere, productive commons and a vibrant market can co-exist for mutual benefit. This model has three dimensions. At the core of value creation are various commons, where innovations are deposited for all humanity to share and build on.
These commons are facilitated and protected through non-profit civic associations, with the ‘partner state’ as their territorial equivalent, empowering and enabling that social production. Around the commons emerges a vibrant economy undertaken by different kinds of ethical companies, whose legal structures tie them to the values and goals of the commons communities, not absentee and private shareholders’ intent of maximising profit at any cost.
Where the three circles intersect, there are the citizens deciding on the optimal shape of their provisioning systems. This is what happened when the counter-power structure of Occupy Wall Street in New York decided to complement its free provisioning of food with the Street Vendor Project, enabling supporters to buy food from local street vendors. This was a conscious, citizen-driven choice for an ethical economy subsumed under the citizenry and its political commons. Occupy and the indignados signify the birth of digital-native social movements, and a necessary politicisation around the new productive and social possibilities.
While the shift to distributed production may be inevitable, the form it takes is open to evolution. This will be determined not just by the social construction of alternatives, in which communities, corporations and the state intersect, but also by outright social struggle, including in the field of political representation.
A political expression of the commons
New social movements always start first as a new subculture, consisting of people who invent new social practices. The file sharing communities at the root of the Swedish Pirate Party initially consisted simply of music lovers who wanted to share their music and discoveries. These communities discovered that such sharing was actually illegal, because the laws still attached to intellectual property do not give the user sovereignty over their acquired material but subject it to a prohibition on sharing, in order to ensure a guaranteed rent income to entertainment corporations.
At first, such communities did not directly attack the system that repressed their freedom to share. Instead they started building their own infrastructure. This included the new type of creative commons and other ‘copyleft’ licenses that formalise the right to share.
However, there is a stage in the evolution of a new social movement and culture when political power is crucial to ensure its survival and development. It is not enough to create new institutions on the margins of society; effective defence mechanisms against the constant attacks of the dominant powers become a necessity. This means building a political coalition.
The Pirate parties, one of which is expected to carry 10 per cent of German voters in the next election, are the first political expression of free culture. The Pirates are the natural defenders of the digital commons at the heart of the new mode of production. Sociologically, they attract the votes of the precarious youth generations that are most involved in the new productive modalities.
The Greens and ecological parties also claim to be the natural defenders of the commons. They are often the parties of choice of older, highly educated, knowledge workers.
The left and social justice parties, some of which have made significant gains in recent elections in in Europe, are of course parties of the productive commons. They could be a force that understands the advantages of distributed production that can be accessed and owned by the workers-producers themselves. They often receive the votes of government employees and industrial workers who are still loyal to the older labour traditions.
A final element in a new political coalition would consist of progressive liberal forces. For example, in Denmark, culture minister Uffe Elbaek is known for his commons-friendly approach. Such parties can represent a link with socially progressive entrepreneurs who create enterprises around the commons.
From these diverse roots, a new progressive majority can be created around free culture, respect for nature and its limits, the necessity of social justice and ethical entrepreneurship. This ‘grand coalition of the commons’ can create a new political majority for social change.
While none of the parties involved is as yet quite ready for it, a convergence of commons-friendly forces could create the conditions for a new social hegemony that could challenge the current dominant players and potentially re-arrange both peer production and a commons-centred society, so that it is driven by the commoners and operates in their interest.

The creativity of labour

Hilary Wainwright poses some questions about how to achieve a commons-based alternative to capitalist production
he work of Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation on a peer to peer/commons approach to production is important for several reasons. First, it draws attention to the fact that the new information, design and communication technologies make possible economies of co-ordination and transaction that provide potentially historic opportunities for scaling up, spreading and expanding the many dispersed economic initiatives driven by social values rather than profit maximisation.
Bauwens identifies this potential in the full knowledge that these same technologies enable the canniest corporations to become increasingly powerful while at the same time minimising their costs. Distributed, decentralised production is for Bauwens a contested terrain, full of ambivalences and risks as well as opportunities for transformative politics.
The second reason for the importance of his work is his focus on the growth of a commons of knowledge and design, in both immaterial and increasingly material production, as a development of immense strategic significance and with an already transformative character. In itself this commons is no island of unalienated work, however. Take open software development, for example: the success of Apple, Google and IBM is based on a business model, as Bauwens implies, that gives these companies access to creative labour while leaving responsibility for productivity with the developers themselves. In doing so, they avoid incurring the costs of recruitment, training, pensions, childcare leave or other means of sustaining labour.
Bauwens claims to provide a complete design for a new model of production: ownership, management structure, distribution system and all. His strength is his specific focus on the knowledge and design commons but at the same time an openness to the wider connections that will help realise its transformative potential .
Some questions, then, from a sympathetic point of view, to help to take the argument further. First, if the most intelligent predator companies are already exploiting commons production, what is to stop the corporations from fencing this commons in? What wider connections to what countervailing forces, initiatives and sources of support could enable this commons to contribute to a wider challenge to the capitalist firms?
I’m thinking here of connections within the economy, as distinct from – but not opposed to – the kind of political alliance that Bauwens interestingly but a little optimistically sketches. For example, what possibilities are there of linking up with and strategically enhancing the co-operative and solidarity economy discussed by Robin Murray and others in the previous issue of Red Pepper?
Is there a role for the unions in developing such an alternative? Levels of unionisation are low among IT workers. Open software developers, though, have a variety of strong networks of their own that act as sources of recognition and employment, and provide a degree of protection, bargaining power and sometimes a basis for campaigning on issues of common concern – for example, in opposition to attempts to impose proprietary enclosures. Could unions learn from experiences of supporting organisations of the self-employed, such as Streetnet in South Africa and Sewa in India, or from other unions such as the National Union of Journalists that have supported freelance workers for a long time? How would unions have to change to make the issues of control over the use and purpose of human creativity as important as the struggle over employment conditions and payment? Would it help to see labour as human creativity as itself a commons?
It would lead to asking: what are the institutional, including financial, conditions for nurturing and realising the creativity of each for the benefit of all? This would apply at micro levels – how enterprises should be organised – and at the macro. What means of livelihood, with what public support, would be required to have some autonomy from the labour market? What legislative frameworks would be needed; what support for education, training, sabbaticals? And how can we envisage non-capitalist market forms that can be experimented with here and now as part of the contestation and competition with capitalist forms?
Above all, though, as the left shows tentative signs of electoral recovery, we must learn the lesson of how social democracy has been bulldozed or captured by corporate power. This is in no small part due to the fact that its programmes of redistribution were not rooted in a distinct strategy for production, with the creativity and solidarity of labour at its centre. Bauwens offers an opportunity for thinking and acting over production beyond capitalism. We should grasp it in all its complexity.

Response: Out of the loop

The immediate prospects for financial reform are indeed dismal, but change is coming from below, argues Jonathan StevensonIt’s easy to forget how far the ‘principled critics’ of finance have come since 2008. In the aftermath of the crash, the economic logic of the bank bailouts was barely questioned from the left. Attempts at collective organisation failed to bloom into ongoing resistance. Only the symbolic issue of bankers’ bonuses achieved any resonance with the public. It took the clarity of George Osborne’s emergency budget to break the spell, sparking the anti-cuts and student movements and galvanising the trade unions.
While these movements have been building the organisation to defend public services, some imaginative media activism has gone on the offensive. By tying corporate tax avoidance to the cuts, UK Uncut has helped expose the values that underpin neoliberal economics. Focusing on deals that have already been done – from Vodafone’s takeover liabilities to Arcadia’s past dividends – it has rejected quick wins in favour of sharpening a narrative that demonstrates the logic of the system. Even if the government wanted to reopen some of the disputed tax cases, it may not be able to. As one targeted corporate executive told the Guardian, ‘This is the most difficult communications issue I have ever faced.’
The Occupy movement has taken this focus on economics and added a second dimension: democracy. ‘The 99 per cent’ is not the result of an opinion poll, but an assertion of a political constituency. No matter that a lesser percentage pledge their support, this movement stakes the claim that these interests have no representation in the political system. And while many on the left have criticised Occupy’s reluctance to issue a detailed set of demands, the need to go deeper and change the terms of the conversation has been key to its effectiveness. Witness Republican strategist Frank Luntz saying: ‘I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death. They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.’
Westminster has responded, as it always does, with a change in the mood music. Before Christmas news of a parliamentary investigation into billion-pound corporate tax avoidance made the front pages. In January, coalition MPs vied on Newsnight to take the credit for doing the most to tackle it. Now Clegg, Cameron and Miliband all claim to be working for a more responsible capitalism. Far from being ‘nowhere near the legislature’, as Adam Leaver suggests in his essay, critics of global finance now arguably face the opposite problem: co-optation.
Tensions within the Occupy London process have brought this into focus. On the one hand the outreach working group, the Tent City University outside St Paul’s and the Bank of Ideas (in an occupied UBS office building) have begun the slow business of economic and political education, both inviting the general public to drop by and taking the idea of Occupy as a participative political space out into schools and communities. On the other, an economics working group has run a media‑focused campaign on the legal status of the City of London Corporation, engaged with the Financial Services Authority and, aping the political mainstream, started work on policy papers to submit to government.
The challenge now is to develop the radical ideas and widespread organisations capable of altering the balance of power, not just of getting in the media. This means organising collectively to defend public services, but also to tackle the big challenges in the wider economy.
One is debt: the systemic problem of excessive debt – not just in Britain but in Western economies for the last 30 years, as a substitute for rising wages – is unaddressed. Calls for a debt default from below – the only solution to an endless spiral of bailouts and austerity – are most developed in Greece, but other Euro-periphery countries like Ireland and Portugal are catching up. This can only increase as austerity rolls out and people understand whose bills they are paying.
A second challenge is rebalancing the economy, away from financial services and towards (the arguably oxymoronic) green growth. This is essential to break the loop that tied New Labour to the City and equip society for an era of climate breakdown. It could occur narrowly, or it could be part of a widespread democratisation of the economy, socialising the banking system through credit unions, remutualisation and community finance.
Uprooting three decades of neoliberalism was always going to take longer than four years. We should not be surprised that well-positioned elites have consolidated their position, despite its injustice. The challenge is to stay ambitious and not settle for scraps off the table. After all, in Groundhog Day, the loop proves not to be a trap but an opportunity.
Jonathan Stevenson works at the Jubilee Debt Campaign and has been active in Hackney Uncut and Occupy LSX