[ox-en] Re: Defintion of exchange
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2002 00:01:18 +0100
Hi Kermit, Benja and all!
Benja already answered the point about Stallman's quote.
2 hours ago Kermit Snelson wrote:
Nor am I convinced by the "Selbstentfaltung" theory of political economy.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Heehee ;-) . Just yesterday I had a similar idea to talk about the
political economy of Free Software - though I didn't.
Indeed that takes a bit more time and explanation. You may have a look
in the archive where some bits have been explained lately, because we
had a number of new subscribers here. But I guess if you track this
list for a while you'll at least learn what we're talking about in
Oekonux. Whether you find that convincing is of course up to you.
If I've understood correctly, the argument restates a platitude [Klischee]
that we sometimes encounter in English as "If you do what you love, you'll
have what you need."
Funny. From the top of my head I find no German equivalent for this
saying.
If that principle is to work as the basis of an entire
society, a lot of people will need to love jobs like garbage collection and
coal-mining [Abfallbeseitigung und Kohlenbergbau]. That's unlikely. As
they say in the movie business, what everyone really wants to do is direct
[Regisseur sein].
Of course that point has been raised often. Several answers come to
mind.
* Our notion of self-unfolding includes to care for necessities. This
means that if there is a need for garbage collection humans are able
to organize a system collecting garbage without any form of
extra-coercion like paying money. The necessity alone is incentive
enough to put it in these terms.
* There may be people having coal-mining or garbage collecting as
their individual form of self-unfolding. Because self-unfolding is a
very individual thing this is not completly unlikely. People can
enjoy the craziest things - why not coal-mining? Indeed we envision
groups of people caring for instance about the ozone hole.
* In a society where the self-unfolding of the individual is the
precondition for the self-unfolding of all and vice versa everyone
has an interest in a maximum of people being able to self-unfold as
optimal as possible. So, ities in amazing self-unfolding projects.
Particularly this may mean that for instance coal-mining is even
more automated than it is today. Lots of human effort will be
transferred to machines and humans get free to do the things humans
can do better than machines - controlling them and being creative
with them.
* You have to distinguish between a want / need ("Bedürfnis") and the
way it is supplied ("Bedürfnisbefriedigung"). For instance today
there is a need that you get to your work-place - but though a car
may be your current form of supply for that need, there is no need
for a car as such. So if we get rid of the things dictated by money
and capitalism, we may reconsider a lot of supplies for needs. I'm
sure in many cases we find supplies which need less human effort
than we have today. After all we all live in societies where the
maximizing of human effort (i.e. jobs) is one of the main aims.
Sure these are not final answers - just as we don't have final answers
to many questions right now and in many fields only reality may give
final answers anyway. However, I think we have some points pointing in
the right direction.
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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