Returning Private Property to the Commons
Will Digitalization Really Do This?
Several people have asked me privately about some of the five transformations I outlined in the previous excerpt from my new book What Is Postcapitalism? A new excerpt, this one on the first transformation is below. It is about the battle between private property and the digital commons. If you read carefully, you can see this battle occurring even in the current news. Our current fixation on AI in the tech news looks a lot like more concentration of ownership, and it mostly is. However, part of the buzz around the recent release of the Chinese-made product DeepSeek, is that it was open source and available to anyone who wanted to use it to build their own AI models. I’m not technical enough to know the details of how this is working out, but it is a good example of the ongoing tug-of-war between the commons and privatization in the emerging digital world. This excerpt explains a bit more deeply what I mean.
Transformation 1: Private Property Is Replaced by a Digital Commons
As we discussed earlier in the book, the central issue in the development of agrarian capitalism is private property and the enclosure of the commons. Private property and “improvement” led to the labor theory of value, and John Locke established a moral and philosophical ground for subjecting the land to private, exclusive ownership so that it could be “improved,” which means made profitable and productive—that is, it made money. Dispossession occurred so that the land could be made more productive, and that meant that the commons, over time, disappeared. The primary tool for expropriating land was privatization, the market, and private property.
Digitalization is generating an alternative to capitalist private property—one which would not have a chance at success without the three primary challenges we just described. But in an environment where capitalism is collapsing from its own internal logic, new meanings of property could play a decisive role. Rather than having only a vacuum arise as capitalism collapses, an alternative consistent with digital principles could provide a new path forward.
Private property enables people to own things, buy things, and trade them. But what if there is no way to own something? For example, digitalization offers a way for people to work together over digital networks to produce products of value to thousands or even millions of users. The beachhead for this kind of production is represented in open-source software, in which people from around the world collaborate to create software. They do so without pay, and the software is open sourced, which means that no one owns it and the product is free. Think about that for a minute. People collaborate over digital networks without pay to create valuable products without remuneration. Anyone can use these products for free. And most impressively, many of our leading technologies are being driven by exactly such software.
In the world of supercomputing, for example, software products like Hadoop and Spark are open-sourced system software that enables supercomputers to operate. Rather than a company like Microsoft developing DOS and then Windows, collaborative communities are creating the software that will run the computers of big data, artificial intelligence, and other leading-edge technologies. Linux is similar, and there are countless open-source programs that do the same thing.
The method of production is voluntary and collaborative. No one gets paid. People do it because they are interested, they are passionate, and they believe in making knowledge available to people. Wikipedia is another example of such a community (although recently, they are soliciting user contributions rather heavily).
So are the blogs, communities, forums, and other places where people just want to participate, discuss, share, teach, and learn.
But here’s what is revolutionary: No one owns the product. It cannot be sold. So, in a world in which the capitalist laws of motion are bringing down the coercive production models and forcing products to be free, here we have a model designed specifically to create free products that no one owns but which are enormously valuable. If markets could be expected to continue functioning, this would be nothing but an interesting side note. The disruption of markets, however, indicates that an alternative is needed, and lo and behold, there is such a replacement living right within the digitalized economy.
This new reality means that the capitalist assumption of private ownership and the hierarchical ownership and production structures that support it are transitory; they are not the way the world works; they are only the way capitalism works. Other models are available. This is not socialism or state planning, nor is it corporate or privatization. It is completely novel, especially as a core method of production and ownership. In essence, it is the human, social creation of a digital commons—one that cannot be easily enclosed.
More importantly, this method of ownership provides a way to create products for the free economy that postcapitalism suggests is on its way. We will cover more of this in the next section. Still, the point is that intrinsic to digitalization, there is a solution already waiting for the method of production questions any economist will ask. Any dirty work, so to speak, will go to the robots. Knowledge work will go to artificial intelligence.
Much of the work humans are inspired to do will be collaborative and, therefore, productive of free products people need. Capitalistic incentives will not be needed; the incentives of interest, fascination, and real passion will drive production. To the skeptics who say no one will do that, I say: Look at open source. It is already happening.
The point is that private property, which is absolutely central to capitalism, is already giving way to the ideas and supporting infrastructure of a free collaborative economy. It is arising spontaneously. Free products, created voluntarily, are already happening. Digitalization is already creating an alternative ownership structure to private property. The commons are being recreated, but this time in the digital world. Whether we like it or not, society is already transforming its own foundation with a model for the future.
Thanks for reading. If you are intrigued, the book is available here.
I wonder why it is that love bombers always fall in love with people who don’t appreciate their bombs. I am a love bomber who would love to be love bombed by someone else, but it hasn’t happened.