Re: [ox-en] Re: Open Money?
- From: "B. Fallenstein" <b.fallenstein gmx.de>
- Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 00:46:07 +0100
Stefan Merten wrote:
So your comparison to economy of attention ("Aufmerksamkeitsökonomie")
is a bit flawed because by basing *money* on reputation, by
transferring reputation into money, you leave the realm of reputation
and enter the realm of money.
Well, I replied to you saying:
So my creation of money is limited by the amount of reputation I have.
And this reputation is scarce.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
But I agree that's not so important.
However, the same applies to community money. If it would not be
scarce, he would have enough of it to supply his need. But actually,
as he told, us he has not. So he can't supply his needs with community
money either. It's as a scarce resource to him as conventional money
is. That is what I wanted to point out basically.
He said he wants programmers to start accepting community money-- I
understood him as saying that once they did so, it would not be scarce.
(I don't think it makes sense to say that Canadian dollars are "scarce"
in Germany because they don't buy anything here.) I'm understanding the
open money people as saying that albeit accepted community money may be
more or less limited, it will not be *scarce* to most and most of the
time, because if you generally "behave well" on the system, nobody will
have a problem if in some situations you 'generate' a little more money
than usual (going further 'in debt'). Thus if you "behave well," you
will always have enough money, even in situations where in today's
society you'd be out of luck.
The question of uni/bidirectional flow seems to be a central one: If I
get something, do I have to give something back? I think it's
interesting to look at money from this point of view: In barter, one
useful good is exchanged for another, forming a bidirectional flow. But
as societies develop, this becomes more and more of a hazzle: The people
I have to offer something to will usually not have most of the things I
desire. Therefore, we need money as an exchange medium. Now, the
bidirectional flow has different qualities: in one direction go the
useful goods (Warenstrom), in the other direction goes the money
(Geldstrom). So the useful goods form a unidirectional flow.
No. What is flowing here are two different commodities. The use value
of one commodity is secondary.
I think there's miscommunication here. I am comparing the unidirectional
flow we see in e.g. Free Software to the bidirectional flow we see in
societies based on exchange. You say that the important point is that
there are two commodities flowing; if we look from that point of view,
my comparison does not make any sense in the first place, because in
unidirectional flow, it's not *commodities* that are flowing. It's
useful goods.
So I'm looking at how useful goods flow in capitalist society. After
all, as humans, we still have to acquire them, no? So I am looking at
the situation that is similar to the unidirectional flow from above: and
this is the situation where the *buyer* buys a product because of its
use value. Of course there are situations where different commodities
without use value are traded for each other (stock exchange) and
situations where things with use value are bought not for their use
value, but for their value (supermarket buying from wholesale retailer).
But that's not what I'm talking about.
So if we compare unidirectional to bidirectional flow, looking only at
the cases where things are somehow transferred because of their use
value, we see that it gets pretty hairy if in bidirectional flow, if
both partners have to come up with something that has use value for the
other. Therefore, the more advanced the society, the more often is even
if in one direction what moves has use value, in the other direction
what moves is not useful for the reciever. And money serves this purpose
best of all commodities, in its role of a general medium of exchange. So
in the advanced, money-based exchange societies, if we look at the
situations where things are acquired for their use value, we see that
this happens in only one direction: in the other direction goes money,
which is (today) completely without use value.
My point is that if we look only at how the things with use value move,
they are *already* in unidirectional flow. I'm having this diagram in
mind, where the movements of useful goods are green arrows and the
movements of money (or stock options or whatever) are golden arrows.
Then, in an animation, the golden arrows fade away. The remaining green
arrows show a rough approximation of what a GPL society could look like ;-)
The point in producing things *for* exchange is the alienation
inherent in that sort of activity. This alienation is the very basis
for all the problems we see in societies based on exchange - not the
scarcity of money. And so we basically need to abolish alienation.
That's what is done in Free Software and that's the very basic reason
I think Free Software is so interesting.
Agreed.
- Benja
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