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Title: The Two Economies Author: Kevin Carson Date: December 5, 2005 Language: en Topics: economics Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/two-economies.html
Joel Schlosberg sent me a transcript of Graham Seaman’s excellent talk
on “The Two Economies.”
Seaman treats his model of the two economies as analogous to the early
modern period, when the new economy emerged from the guild system:
So I say that’s the first prerequisite — that you have people, that you
have the old system actually producing the situation where there are
people who need to get out of it, people who do not “fit” with the old
system. Secondly, once these new people exist, they start infecting the
old system....
Now I claim that there are bits of elements similar to that in the
present as well. You have the old system becoming, the old system first
generating the new one. It’s becoming increasingly hard for the old
system to produce software products. There are many products —
especially ones that require cooperation of some kind, that require some
kind of sharing, even commercially, that simply can’t be produced under
commercial constraints. And you see attempts at organization of
standards bodies purely by software companies with one another, and the
things break down. [some words are hard to hear] They are just
inherently very, very bad at doing anything that requires real
cooperation with one another. So you have some kinds of products, and I
think this is software products and I think it’s going to increase in
the future, that will exist as free software that do not exist as
proprietary software, and won’t ever exist as proprietary software.
Second..., I would say that as software industries become the leading
sector of the economy, in many ways they’re a sector which is not really
producing profits; they’re a sector which is taking profits from other
parts of the economy.... It’s not, on the whole — commercial software, I
do not believe, is on the whole, a large-scale creator of profits in
itself. It’s a reorganizer, redistributor of profits held by monopoly
and the law of copyright....
Personally ... I think that the value of that software is the value of
the CD that it’s on, it’s the value of the work that went into copying
the CD, and so on; and is absolutely minimal. So, in my opinion, nearly
all of the price of that comes purely from laws which allow monopolies
over software, it comes from copyright laws and so on....
Okay, so you have a market; you have some elements of the old system
being unable to actually continue making a profit in the leading sector
of its economy without the help of quite repressive, and increasingly
repressive laws, that as far as I can see are going to go on to become
even more repressive and interfering in ever-larger areas of peoples’
lives, that go well beyond these non-material products themselves. You
have people working completely outside that system producing products
which become very difficult for the old system to produce and you have
the old system being forced by standard economic reasons to take up the
new products. You have free software working its way into the old
economy, spreading throughout it at quite a high rate, not just people;
partly this is because firms are, especially over the last couple of
years, have been forced to reduce their IT costs, so there is a big
temptation, especially for the bigger firms, to say “Well, why can’t we
use free software instead of paying for the new Microsoft licensing
system?” So that’s happening. You have companies that are starting to
say, “How can we as a small company compete with the big software
houses?” One way to do that is to use free software as a kind of tool
for competition.... But in doing so, they bring free software practices
inside their own companies; they start to lose control. This gets to a
point where, to some extent, managers just can no longer make arbitrary
decisions about the form of software, about the contents, about the way
it’s developed, because they can’t alienate the external people who work
with them; they have to conform to their ideas, practices of free
software developers. So you have the new system spreading back into the
old, and starting to affect it.
There’s a lot of discussion of the specific ways that the new system is
affecting the old, and a libertarian Marxist class analysis of the
groups in the new economy with an interest in breaking through the
restrictions of the old, that’s too complicated to summarize here.
Definitely worth checking out, though. He seems pretty sympathetic to
the “petty bourgeois,” libertarian-capitalist segment of the free
software community.
Anyway, at some point, as the saying goes, quantity gets transformed
into quality:
So, what you have to be talking about instead is some way of actually
spreading from this small social group here, to larger social groups.
Now these are gonna be — if you’re starting to talk about spreading to
other groups, and they’re probably still gonna be in these circles of
unemployed, self-employed still, although not in the programming sector.
You’re talking about people who don’t necessarily know how to program,
or have any interest in programs, programming, or want to become
programmers. If there’s going to be a world based on free software
principles, it will not be a world which is entirely composed of
programmers. Most people find it incredibly tedious and boring and don’t
even want to understand it. So you have to talk about spreading in
stages from this; you have to talk about defining, how is it possible to
get to other groups? Eventually, you hope it will have spread far enough
that the ideas and practices become commonplace for people. And then,
the person stuck in the factory making washing machines can say, “Well,
yes, but in the factory I do this, but when I’m outside here I want to
listen to some music, I do something quite different. And if I need a
program for my computer and it doesn’t work, I ask somebody and they
tell me. Why is it in here that I do everything by orders?” And once
large chunks of people’s lives have become the other way, then there’s
the possibility that they might start to think, “How do I organize this
other stuff that I’m doing differently?” But it’s not going to come all
at once. So...
The application of this “free software” spirit to manufacturing, as
Seamans says, has been quite common in the early, libertarian stages of
modern revolutions. For example:
Now I would claim that it has been done before, that people have
produced material goods on free software principles before, and quite
regularly, but for very short periods of time. Basically, during every
left-wing revolution this century, there has been a period where it’s
happened. It doesn’t happen for very long: if the revolution loses, it
gets squashed; if the revolution wins, it’s being squashed; but it
happens for a short period. There is an enormous amount of creativity,
of wanting to do things, that is in people. So this is something that
does not seem to get documented. I thought this would be so easy to find
out about, getting lots of examples of from books. I found it very hard
to get many examples of this from books, but I’m quite certain it’s
something that happened. I can tell from my own experience where I have
seen, for example, people working in a Peugeot car factory that was
under worker’s control and were getting poor quality input parts coming
from a French factory; communicated with the French factory and telling
them, “We’re running this now. Please, we’re having major problems
because you’re sending us bad parts”. And they got good parts, fixed it.
Those same people then found that Peugeot didn’t want anything to do,
after a few months with the factory, with worker’s control. They went
around the area and said, “What is most in demand here?” And this was a
city on the edge of a farming area. And they got the reply that there
was a real shortage of fridges, so they converted — especially for
people who were in the local farms that found fridges too expensive to
buy — there was a need for fridges. They converted the car plant to
fridge production. God knows how they did that. I knew people who worked
in there, but I don’t know anything about how the thing actually worked.
All I can say is, during that time, people were working on what I think
of as free software principles: they were cooperating with one another
to do things, asking one another what they wanted. I have no idea what
the techniques are involved. I know a little bit about software, I know
absolutely nothing about fridge manufacture. The fridges were a complete
coincidence; it really was fridges, not washing machines; but it was
very, very close.
I couldn’t tell them how to do that; people find their own solutions;
people in that situation find their solutions. Yep....
So, another example which I have seen more of — I should say this, to
give this some context, this was in Portugal in 1975 — people building
their own houses, people living in slum areas, with cooperation from
architects, getting together, and on a really large scale, actually
building housing estates. Very good housing estates, housing estates
that I have found — I have relations who are living in one of these
houses still. It’s very solid; they built it very well. But it was built
by local people; it was built with the design that was done together
with architects. So there were people who came and gave their skills as
well. But it wasn’t somebody coming in from outside and saying, “I’m
doing a bit of slum clearance here. I’m gonna give you new houses.”
People actually built the houses themselves.
So, I mean these things can be done; but, I’ve said, that has been
happening in the middle of revolution.
Murray Bookchin wrote an excellent multi-volume history of the
phenomenon, The Third Revolution. In the period between the
disintegration of the old central state, and the rise of either a
counter-revolutionary regime or a new centralized “People’s State,”
there’s commonly an interval with quite a bit of genuine bottom-up
organization: genuine power exercised by local soviets, workers’
councils, neighborhood committees, and the like. In Soviet Russia, the
one thing Lenin and the Whites had in common is that they didn’t much
care for that sort of thing (although Lenin thought the name was worth
keeping, under new management). In republican Spain, the Madrid
Communists and the Falangists competed fiercely to see who could
suppress such forms of self-organization more quickly in the areas under
their respective control. Interestingly, one of the first forms taken by
the anti-Soviet revolts in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia was
workers’ councils in the factories; the victims of the Soviet bloodbath
in Budapest, so beloved of the American Right, were the sort who would
have been called up before the HUAC in this country.
And of course, as Seaman points out, all of those revolutions were
eventually supressed, along with the factory committees, either by
counter-revolution or the triumph of the “workers’ party.” Whether its
Kronstadt or the Santiago stadium, it’s pretty much the same.
So the main lesson I’m drawing from this is that the way to get there
from here is “building the structure of the new society within the shell
of the old.” The revolution, in the sense of a dramatic collapse of the
old political order and the substitution of a new way of doing things,
can only succeed if it’s an afterthought to a real revolution built up
over the previous generation or two. And the only way to accomplish the
real revolution is by changing the way we do the most ordinary things
and organize our daily lives. The political revolution, when it comes,
will be only a final cracking of the shell.
Not that there’s no room for political action in the meantime. But the
main arena for political action is simply, as Seaman says, the law.
Seaman’s first priority is replacing the present neoliberal framework of
IP law with a much more free software-friendly system. But the same
principle can be applied more generally: push back, as much as possible,
the framework of state laws that impedes our process of building
counter-institutions.