[iDC] How does social media educate? :: a playlist in response to danah

[Michel Bauwens]

I would like to make two remarks.

I believe that the processes set in motion by peer production, governance
and property, as they are embedded in 'capitalism', are not necessarily
"anti"-capitalist, but more properly non-capitalist or I would say
post-capitalist. Their inner logic, producing directly for use value,
outside of the salary and price system, through a logic of sharing, etc...
are a new system, creating a new reality, rather than partaking of the
dichotomy of industrial society. You can have rabid pro-capitalist free
software coders, yet their practice is non-capitalist.

The second remark is that we have to learn to divorce the market, exchanging
scarce goods for a common denominator, is not the same as capitalism, and
its necessary correlation of unlimited growth in a physically finite
environment. It is logically entirely possible to be pro-market and
anti-capitalist (see mutualist.org).

This also means that the post-capitalist modes of production and governance,
can be embedded in a struggle that aims to reverse the pseudo-abundance of
material goods, and the pseudo-scarcity of cultural goods (the hallmark of
capitalism), while at the same time being sympathetic to fair and
peer-arbitraded market forms.

Michel


John Sobol:

>
>
> maybe not. i waffle on this one. i'd just like to advance the argument
> that sociable web media, or whatever you want to call it, is not just a
> potential player in an anticapitalist struggle but is rather inherently
> anti-capitalist itself, despite all of your emphasis on market
> economics and the costs of accessing infrastructure. I'm saying the use
> of these tools is anti-capitalist, even if the platform is not.
> Obviously we disagree as to which is more important and more
> transformative of the other. It's anti-capitalist because it's of the
> process economy. Literate capitalism is a product-based economy.
>
>
>
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