Workshop on 21st century tools for organisation. November, 2013. Flickr. Some rights reserved.Our world is once again hurled into a deep socio-economic crisis, in which the current extractive model of value creation is facing a series of structural crises. But as the old world is dislocating, the seeds of a new one are being sown.
The peer-to-peer capacity to relate to each other over the Internet entails the emergence of what Yochai Benkler in the The Wealth of Networks called 'commons-based peer production' (CBPP). CBPP is a new pathway of value creation and distribution, where peer-to-peer infrastructures allow individuals to communicate, self-organize and, ultimately, co-create non-rivalrous use value, in the form of digital commons of knowledge, software and design. Think of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, the myriad of free/open-source projects or open design communities such as Wikihouse and Farmhack. In these open systems, there are many reasons to contribute beyond or besides that of receiving monetary payment.
CBPP is fundamentally different from the incumbent models of value creation under industrial capitalism. In the latter, owners of means of production hired workers, directed the work process, and sold products for profit. Such production is organized by allocating resources through price signals, or through hierarchical command. It is a system based on subordinate labor forced to sell its work power to the owners of the companies that employ them.
