The Handbook of Peer Production

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1 1Although in theory peer production has a high degree of openness, in practice fewer women and people of color (especially from the Global South) are part of peer production. There are several “cultural” barriers that prevent people from joining. Patriarchy and racism are two flagrant examples. For instance, see Reagle (2010) regarding Wikipedia’s barriers to genuine openness, and Reagle (2013) for the gender gap within free and open source software.

Benjamin J. Birkinbine

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.