Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 32

Mathieu O’Neil & Sébastien Broca

This chapter examines the claim that peer producers can meaningfully oppose the social harms of neoliberal capitalism and the democratic failures of the state in liberal democracies. We distinguish “political” actions from “economic” ones, as separating terms enables a clearer delineation of recurrent tensions between social change today and tomorrow, between grassroots activism and electoral politics, between the commons for capital and the commons as the “germ” form for a post‐capitalist society. We critically engage with this radical vision, as peer production projects are often absorbed within neoliberal digital capitalism: what if the commons now enable the metastasizing of a capitalism beyond the commodity form into the heart of peer production projects? Inside some free and open source projects, financial rewards are rejected on the grounds that they might distort the self‐directed means of determining the relative value of project goals. Not only does this rejection reproduce class and gender inequalities, it also hinders the evolution of the commons into a sustainable mode of production. We conclude that the capacity of peer production principles to inform a believable alternative depends on peer producers’ capacity to make the commons economy more connected to wider society and more robust, challenging the structural imbalance between what digital capitalism obtains from the commons and what it gives back.