Peer to Peer:
The Commons Manifesto
Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, and Alex Pazaitis
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Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 What is P2P and How is it Related to the Commons? 21.
2 Are P2P technologies Good or Bad? 31.
3 How Does P2P Relate to Capitalism? 41.
4 How is P2P to be Implemented in Practice? 61.
5 towards a Commons-centric Society? 72
P2P and a New Ecosystem of Value Creation 11
2.1 Diverse Skills and Motivations 11
2.2 Transparent Heterarchy 12
2.3 A New Ecosystem of Value Creation 12
2.4 Four Short Case Studies 19
2.5 From Contradictions to an Integrated Economic Reality 27
3 P2P and New Socio-technological Frameworks 33
3.1 two Generic Models 34
3.2 The Extractive Model of Cognitive Capitalism 36
3.3 The Generative Model of Commons-based Peer Production 39
4 P2P and the Structure of World History 47
4.1 Four Modes of Exchange 47
4.2 towards Associationism 50
5 A Commons transition Strategy 55
5.1 Pooling and Mutualizing Resources Wherever Possible 56
5.2 Introducing Reciprocity 56
5.3 From Redistribution to Empowerment and Predistribution 58
5.4 Subordinating the Capitalist Market 64
5.5 Organizing at the Local and Global Level 65
5.6 Summary of our Proposals 67
5.7 A Last Word 68
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Peer to Peer
Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as theblueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a more profound trans-formation of the fundamentals of our social life. As capitalism faces a series ofstructural crises, a new social, political and economic dynamic is emerging:peer to peer.What is peer to peer (P2P)? Why is it essential for building a commons-centricfuture? How could this happen? Tese are the questions we try to answer, bytying together four of its aspects:1. P2P is a type ofsocial relations in human networks, where participants have maximum freedom to connect.2. P2P is also a technological infrastructure that makes the generalization and scaling up of such relations possible.3. P2P thus enables a new mode of production and property .4. P2P creates the potential for a transition to an economy that can begenerative towards people and nature.We believe that these four aspects will profoundly change human society. P2Pideally describes systems in which any human being can contribute to the creation and maintenance of a shared resource while benefiting from it. There is an enormous variety of such systems: from the free encyclopedia Wikipedia to free and open-source software projects, to open design and hardware communities, to relocalization initiatives and community currencies. Our narrative is structured as follows. This chapter explains what this book is about by introducing some basic concepts. Chapter 2 describes how a new ecosystem of value creation is developed by implementing P2P technologies and practices. Chapter 3 sheds light on how different interests can use P2Pdynamics.Chapter 4 places P2P into the broader context of the world history.
How to cite this book chapter:
Bauwens, M., Kostakis, V. and Pazaitis, A. 2019.
Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto
Pp. 1–10. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI:https://doi.org/10.16997/book33.a. License: CC‐BY‐NC‐ND 4.0
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