Introduction : Parallel visions of peer production

communication technologies) and accompanying new forms of social organisation (the existential centrality of what Alain Touraine [] called auto-géstion) have effectively socialised the means of immaterial production, putting them at the direct disposition of the computer-literate multitude. Social production has at the same time been greatly empowered, and liberated from direct capitalist command. Two, the mediatisation of capitalist production (beginning in the  with the large-scale diffusion of computers and intranets) has brought about a number of crucial transformations, such as the automation of material production; the social and geographical extension of the value chain; the speeding up of circulation; and the growing financialisation of value (Barbrook, ). These trends have combined to make such usergenerated immaterial wealth ever more central to both short-term profits and long-term strategy. There is, in other words, an emerging archipelago of social production that is affirming itself as an important social, political and economic reality both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the capitalist system: for instance, in the expanding area of self-organised autonomous production systems such as community based agriculture (McKibben, ). At the same time, it is seems that the capitalist economy as we know it is becoming less and less able to guarantee the satisfaction of basic needs — food and energy, for example — on which its legitimacy ultimately rests. This scenario of a declining social utility of the capitalist economy combined with a growing legitimacy crisis and, at the same time, the growth of an archipelago of self-organised forms of social production, has profound implication for the kinds of futures we can imagine for the twenty-first century. Are we in the midst of the transition from one economic system to another, post-capitalist one, or at the verge of a radical reform of capitalism as we know it? The most important question at this point is whether this archipelago of social production can be understood as a (however embryonic) manifestation of a new economy. That is, do these phenomena contain the possibility of a new, rational way of organising social and economic processes, making their outcome tradable on a world market and determining their relative value? Can social production work according to a new law of value? With few exceptions (Albert, ; Siefkes, ) there has been a widespread reluctance to confront the question of the value of social production amongst academics, the many business consultants who have written on the subject, and the ‘movement intellectuals’ who have emerged from the realities of open-source, peer-to-peer or social movements alike. There are different reasons for this. One is that the question might be premature: social production is as yet in 14 Capital & Class 97