in designing the future. Third, the transition to postcapitalism is not simply about economics; it is about human beings, and we cannot privilege economic progress at the expense of social welfare. Fourth, problems must be attacked from all angles, which takes advantage of networked hierarchies. In short, the benefit of networks is that meaningful action can occur at many different levels and it does not need to be centralized. Finally, we should maximize the power of information by learning from the data being generated about social life. However, the apparatus for data collection would be collaborative and de‐centralized rather than under corporate control.
Another influential work about postcapitalism comes from Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2016) who provide a series of demands that are necessary for the transition to postcapitalism. First, the authors argue for a fully automated economy, which would free up human beings from the required routines of waged labor. More specifically, they argue for a progressive reduction in work so that necessary labor is reduced as much as possible. Not only would this eliminate some of the social hierarchies between different types of employment, but it would also free up more time for addressing social and community needs. Second, the authors argue for a reduction in the length of the work week with no reduction in pay. Third, the authors argue for a universal basic income that is sufficient for living, given without qualification, and acts as a supplement to the welfare state rather than a replacement. Finally, the authors argue for a diminishment of the work ethic, or the development of a counter‐hegemonic approach to work. Such an approach “would overturn existing ideas about the necessity and desirability of work, and the imposition of suffering as a basis for remuneration” (Srnicek & Williams, 2016, p. 125).
At the heart of these proposals is the recognition that commons‐based movements and the active process of commoning carry something within them that points to another way of living. In a sense, the proposals offered by Mason (2015) and Srnicek and Williams (2016) take for granted the achievements of commons movements without probing into the specific dynamics of how value is created and circulates within communities of commoners. Massimo DeAngelis (2017), however, has offered such an analysis, particularly of the way that value circulates within the commons and commons‐based communities. Figure 3.1 below illustrates one attempt to chart how value circulates in the commons through the circuit of commons value. In this figure, an association of people (A) claim collective ownership of their commonwealth (CW), whether the sources of commonwealth are material, immaterial, commodity (C), or non‐commodity (NC). This dual relationship between the association of commoners, as subjects, and their commonwealth, as objects, constitutes the commons (Cs). Through the activity of commoning (cm), the commons are produced and reproduced over time, which ensures their survival.
While this circuit of value differs from capital accumulation circuits, this is not to say that commoners do not interact with capital or the state. Rather, for DeAngelis (2017), circuits of commons value can couple with capital circuits through the commodity form, which is also pictured in the figure. Rather than arguing that these two circuits can or ought to peacefully coexist, DeAngelis simply demonstrates that they do coexist. For example, when commoners must interact with the money form of capital, they do so only as a medium of exchange to gain access to the materials necessary to reproduce the commons and themselves over time. As this relates to the digital commons, free software contributors or users will need access to a computer in order to code the digital commons or access them. In addition, programmers will need to have access to food, water, shelter, and all those things necessary to reproduce their own capacity to code the digital commons over time. These goods may be provided by the welfare state or one’s family but, in the absence of such provision, one would need to intersect with capital circuits to obtain them. However, the extent to which commoners engage with capital circuits is left up to the community and will vary depending on the unique situation of each community.
The goal for any commons‐based movement, however, is how to ensure that the value created within the community is preserved rather than extracted by capital or the state. 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. In response to these concerns, open cooperatives and platform cooperatives (Scholz, 2014) have been developed as organizational forms that seek to directly enrich 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 may vary. In other words, rather than imposing a “one‐size‐fits‐all” approach to organizing, the commons framework remains flexible, allowing local communities to make choices about how to govern collective resources. The recognition here is that local communities will have a much more sophisticated understanding of their collective resources, including the institutional, political, cultural, and social contexts within which the resource is situated.
Figure 3.1 The Circuit of the Commons.
Source: DeAngelis, M. (2017). Omnia sunt communia: On the commons and the transformation to post‐capitalism. London: Zed Books.
Within commons‐based peer production, we also have numerous examples of the ways in which communities negotiate their relationship with capitalist firms. One notable example of how this is done is through the creation of “boundary organizations,” which are established to negotiate and establish boundaries between two parties who may have both disparate and shared interests (O’Mahony & Bechky, 2008). Within free and open source software development, communities working on free software projects want to ensure the survival of their software projects and attract other developers to work on the project, and securing corporate sponsorship of a project can be a direct way of attracting more developers to the project (Santos, Kuk, Kon, & Pearson, 2013). However, the community also has an interest in preserving its creative autonomy by not ceding too much influence or power to the corporation. One example of a boundary organization is the Fedora Project Board, which negotiates the boundaries between the Fedora Project as a free software project and Red Hat, Inc. as its corporate sponsor (see Birkinbine, 2017).
These examples illustrate the tension that lies at the heart of peer production and the commons. On the one hand, communities want to ensure creative autonomy for their members as well as the survival of their common resources over time. On the other hand, commons‐based peer production provides an intriguing opportunity for capitalist firms looking to extract value from the community’s productive activities. Indeed, commons‐based peer production has proven to be an efficient and effective model of production, even producing large‐scale projects like the Linux kernel, which contains millions of lines of software code (see The Linux Foundation, 2019). When firms want to harness the production power of commons‐based communities, they often need to find ways of negotiating access to those communities, particularly because their interests may differ from those of the community.
6 Concluding Remarks
This chapter has provided an overview of the political economy of peer production. I began with an examination of the structural changes within capitalism that enabled the rise of peer production, and I also focused on some of the emergent cultural practices of peer production that subvert prevailing tendencies of capitalism. As such, there is a tension between capital and the commons that is constantly at play in the political economy of peer production. In this sense, it is useful to understand peer production as dialectically situated between capital and the commons, as it can account for the contradictory power of peer production, highlighting the ways that peer production intersects with circuits of capital accumulation but also the ways in which value is created and circulates within peer production communities according to a
