From legal commons to social commons: Brazil and the cultural industry in the 21st century

This article describes some of the current transformations regarding the processes by which information and culture are generated, from the point of view of developing countries. In this brief analysis, the article discusses the role of projects such as Creative Commons for developing countries. It also discusses the idea of legal commons and social commons. While the idea of legal commons can be understood as the voluntary use of licenses such as Creative Commons in order to create a “commons”, the idea of social commons has to do with the tensions between legality and illegality in developing countries. These tensions appear prominently in the so-called global “peripheries”, and in many instances make the legal structure of intellectual property irrelevant, unfamiliar, or unenforceable, for various reasons. With the emergence of digital technology and the Internet, in many places and regions in developing countries (especially in the “peripheries”), technology ended up arriving earlier than the idea of intellectual property. Such a de facto situation propitiated the emergence of cultural industries that were not driven by intellectual property incentives. In these cultural businesses, the idea of “sharing” and of free dissemination of the content is intrinsic to the social circumstances taking place in these peripheries. Also, the appropriation of technology on the part of the “peripheries” ends up promoting autonomous forms of bridging the digital divide, such as the “LAN house” phenomenon discussed below. This paper proposes that many lessons can be learned from the business models emerging from social commons practices in developing countries. The tension between legality and illegality in “peripheral” areas in developing countries is not new. The work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos and others in the 1970s was paradigmatic for the discussion of legal pluralism regarding the occupation of land in Brazil. This paper aims to follow in that same pioneer tradition of studies about legal pluralism, and to apply those principles to the discussion of “intellectual property” rather than the ownership of land.

The revenge of the market on the rentiers why neo-liberal reports of the end of history turned out to be premature

Starting from the perspective of heterodox Keynesian-Minskyian-Kindlebergian financial economics, this paper begins by highlighting a number of mechanisms that contributed to the current financial crisis. These include excess liquidity, income polarisation, conflicts between financial and productive capital, lack of intelligent regulation, asymmetric information, principal-agent dilemmas and bounded rationalities. However, the paper then proceeds to argue that perhaps more than ever the ‘macroeconomics’ that led to this crisis only makes analytical sense if examined within the framework of the political settlements and distributional outcomes in which it had operated. Taking the perspective of critical social theories the paper concludes that, ultimately, the current financial crisis is the outcome of something much more systemic, namely an attempt to use neo-liberalism (or, in US terms, neo-conservatism) as a new technology of power to help transform capitalism into a rentiers’ delight. And in particular, into a system without much ‘compulsion’ on big business; i.e., one that imposes only minimal pressures on big agents to engage in competitive struggles in the real economy (while inflicting exactly the opposite fate on workers and small firms). A key component in the effectiveness of this new technology of power was its ability to transform the state into a major facilitator of the ever-increasing rent-seeking practices of oligopolistic capital. The architects of this experiment include some capitalist groups (in particular rentiers from the financial sector as well as capitalists from the ‘mature’ and most polluting industries of the preceding techno-economic paradigm), some political groups, as well as intellectual networks with their allies – including most economists and the ‘new’ left. Although rentiers did succeed in their attempt to get rid of practically all fetters on their greed, in the end the crisis materialised when ‘markets’ took their inevitable revenge on the rentiers by calling their (blatant) bluff.