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3 Political Economy of Peer Production

      Benjamin J. Birkinbine

1 Introduction

      Understanding the political economy of peer production requires consideration of at least two interrelated factors: the economic factors that enabled the rise of peer production and the unique cultural factors within peer production communities that have the potential to subvert the prevailing tendencies of global capitalism. The economic factors can be found in the broader structural changes occurring within capitalism throughout the 20th century, particularly after World War II and in the run‐up to the Vietnam War era when global geopolitics was being reshaped by a wave of independence movements in the Global South as well as increased war expenditures in the United States. All of these factors set the stage for a response to the economic crisis of 1970s. It was during this time that capital responded to the long downturn by searching for new opportunities for boosting profitability (Brenner, 2006). On the one hand, these changes had dramatic effects on labor processes, commodity supply chains, and manufacturing practices, all of which became increasingly networked to maximize efficiencies and reduce excess capacity.

      On the other hand, these changes – and especially the rise of computers and networked communication systems – enabled greater interconnection between people who could collaborate with one another to produce collectively governed resources. As such, there were contradictory forces at play in the increasingly networked global economy. Networking capabilities not only began to transform labor processes across the globe, but simultaneously allowed for production that was no longer driven by market demands. Communities of peers connected by networked communication technologies began producing informational or digital commons, which were made freely available to others. Benkler (2006) framed this type of production as commons‐based peer production, which he defined as “a new modality of organizing production: radically decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands” (p. 60). For example, the free and open source software movement provides an exemplary case of what commons‐based peer production enables, in that it was driven by an ethos of sharing and a strong belief in productive freedom (Coleman, 2013). This community, as well as other communities of commoners around the world, challenged longstanding assumptions in economics about competition, self‐interest, and the maximization of individual profit. Indeed, these communities challenged fundamental definitions of value, including what it meant and how it circulated within communities.

This chapter considers the political economy of peer production by contextualizing the rise of peer production within capitalism and evaluating to what extent peer production contradicts, or reinforces, these global economic trends. To that end, I begin by tracing the structural changes of capitalism in the 20th century that provide the economic foundation upon which peer production arose. Accompanying these changes was also a shift toward more flexible work routines that privileged creativity, autonomy, and innovation. I argue that the roots of peer production lie in these transformations. Finally, I discuss some more recent scholarship about how value is created and circulates within commons‐based peer production communities and discuss how these circuits of commons value intersect with capital accumulation circuits. One of the pressing questions running throughout this discussion is whether this emergent value system has the potential to bring about a postcapitalist future, in which the values of care, trust, mutual aid, and conviviality are prioritized rather than capital accumulation.

2 Transformation of Capitalism in the 20th Century

      The historical changes of capitalism that enabled the rise of peer production can specifically be found within the 1970s and the response to the economic crisis. In making such an argument, I draw from critical scholars like David Harvey (1989, 2010) and Robert Brenner (2006) by focusing on the structural changes in the global economy and how those changes affected the broader geopolitics of global capitalism and the labor processes. I also draw from Dan Schiller’s (1999, 2014) theory of digital capitalism in foregrounding “communication and information as an emerging pivot of the ever‐mutating political economy,” as it was during this time that global commodity supply chains, financial networks, and military technologies were becoming increasingly networked through information and communication technologies (Schiller, 2014, p. 5). The goal of this broad overview is to identify important historical trajectories, even if this means sacrificing some of the nuance in particular details.

      Prior to the 20th century, the early stages of capitalism were marked by industrial growth and increasing complexity in the division of labor. To address this complexity and streamline production, scientific principles were applied to the production process, which simplified the labor process by breaking down various stages involved in the production process into its component parts. These changes are often associated with Taylorism, as it was Frederick Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) that outlined the inefficiencies of human work and identified ways of optimizing efficiency in production. Once these distinct stages of the production process were identified, those same scientific principles could be used to construct machinery that would supplement or altogether supplant increasingly deskilled human labor. The pressures to increase productivity and the development of assembly‐line production are also associated with Fordism, as Henry Ford’s assembly line in 1913 made