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[ox-en] Theory of distribution (was: Re: Gifts?)



Hi Graham, ThomasB and all!

Sorry, but I have not been able to follow the English list for *so*
long now. It's a pity, but seemingly there is nothing much I can do
about it :-( .

2 months (88 days) ago Graham Seaman wrote:
A long commentary.... I've left your original comments intact so
anyone else can pick up on them...

I'll cite a lot so the context is here instead of only in the archive.

On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Thomas Berker wrote:
At 17:28 14.10.02 -0400, Graham Seaman wrote:
But there are other traditions and associations with gifts, linked with
anthropology, literature and art rather than software and left politics.
The best book I know about this is 'The Gift' by Lewis Hyde,  published
in 1979.

I came across similar contributions when I tried to understand the concept
of a "moral economy" (coined in 1971 by the historian Edward P. Thompson).
It seems to me that the meaning of "gift" you are referring to is part of a
strand of academic research, which tried to uncover alternatives to the
capitalist way of circulation and production of goods in pre-modern, not
yet modern (Thompson, for instance, is writing about the transition period
in England), or far-away societies/communities. This often is somewhat
hidden within the contributions themselves, but I assume more often than
not it may have been the actual context and motivation for the respective
anthropological/historical/sociological research. And this, by the way,
pretty much describes the reasons for my interest in Free Software as well.

That gifts continue to exist in modern societies in my opinion speaks in
favour _and_ against using "gift economy" as label for all those things,
which are to do with Internet and which (nevertheless?) are challenging
capitialism. On the one hand, that most people know that exchanging gifts
somehow is (and should be) different from exchanging commodities definitely
is an advantage. However, gifts in commodified societies have connotations,
which were mentioned by Stefan (e.g.: "He gave me a gift worth 20 Euro, now
I can't give him one worth much less or more"), and which can become a
problem for someone who wants to get the message through.

I confess not to have an alternative suggestion. Maybe Negri/Hardt are
right and the time has come for the label 'communism' again? Anyway, I
guess labelling is an important political question in this phase of
Oekonux's fight, since (at least in my experience) arguing against
misunderstandings is its main occupation when it comes to contact with a
broader public - which is a pity, isn't it?

Yes, I agree that 'gift' in this sense is actually a problem in that it
has a slightly different meaning from the normal one. The word
'selbstentfaltung' has a similar problem. There seems to be a consensus
on the list that that kind of problem is inevitable. 'Communism' obviously
has similar problems (not dismissing that point, just leaving it for
another time).

That is exactly the point why in the beginning of Oekonux I was so
keen on having a new word with no connotations whatsoever. I think
today it may have become clearer that this was a wise decision.
Imagine where a project "Free Software Communism" or so might be
today...

And yes it *is* hard to fill meaning into a word, it *is* hard to
create a concept matching some reality. To me one of the more
important tasks of Oekonux is to do exactly that. In another mail in
this thread Graham said:

2 months (86 days) ago Graham Seaman wrote:
I'd rather see it as one of
two ways of looking at what's happening. You can understand everything in
terms of a theory developed to explain capitalism: competition based on
scarcity, marginal costs, etc; which obviously explains some things well,
but badly distorts others (none of the papers that try to bring FS back
in to the marginalist fold seem at all convincing to me). Or you can say
there are two radically different things going on here, each of which
needs its own theory.

Very good point! This is exactly what I mean. And this is what I think
is one of the things I like to see Oekonux doing. On the German list
we have a lot of discussion about certain concepts. To me these
discussions are among the most fruitful ones because in a sense they
make clear where the limitations of the old concepts are when looking
at Free Software.

However, this also means, that people do not easily understand what
Oekonux concepts mean. This is a pity but I guess this is inevitable
for that kind of activity :-( .

In the case of FS the theory still needs developing
(I don't think Marxism helps very much as a potential alternative theory,
because basically as soon as it has said 'there is no exchange value
involved here' there's little positive contribution it can make).

That is a very interesting thought. So in a narrow sense Marxism could
only say: That is not the realm we're talking of.

Now if
something like the 'gift' view is part of this theory, then it's going to
explain what's going on in conventional firms just as partially as
marginalism explains FS. So you need both theories at the overlap, because
reality has both kinds of phenomena.

Good point!

Back to Graham's mail:
 When I said that the idea of the gift economy might be a useful
complement to the idea of selbstentfaltung, I was thinking more of the
concept than just the word as label. I try to follow some of the german
list, but don't always understand a lot,

Ahm - I think we are all struggling to understand what is happening.
This includes: What we are saying ;-) .

so it may be I've misunderstood
the ideas - if so please correct me - but summarizing some of the
oekonux.de ideas in a brutally over-simple way:

Free software development can be organized completely differently from
capitalist work; it may be the kernel ('keimform') of a different mode of
production. But we can only tell it may be one because it produces a
product (free software) of general use; unlike, say, woodcarving for a
hobby. The product is the guarantee of existence of the really important
thing, the new way of working. But - free software is also produced by
people working in the old way. Sun employees developing Tomcat, say, or
even any firm which wants to look good and has some old unused proprietary
software they can 'throw over the fence' unchanged, with a gpl stuck on
it. So now we need to make a distinction - there is free software, which
is copylefted, but produced in the old way, and 'doubly free software'
('doppelte freie software' (sp?)) which is free software produced in the
new way. If I've got this right, it seems a very convoluted way of looking
at it to me.

This was the original idea of the term "double Free Software". It
developed in a thread that came this way so it may seem a bit
convoluted indeed.

The "double" points to the fact, that the GPL stresses the freedom for
the users of Free Software. So if the producers are Free (in the sense
of selbstentfaltung) when they write Free Software then the freedom is
doubled.

I think the gift economy idea simplifies this a bit without throwing
anything basic out (maybe it could also add the beginnings of a theory of
distribution to the theory of production):

That would be great :-) .

A gift is something that can be passed on to others, something that can be
given (if you keep it for yourself it stops being a gift). In the case of
software, 'giving' implies also improving - I can't give you vi, because
you can take that any time you want without my say-so. But I can give
vi++, my new super-improved version. As a gift, you can take it, produce
vi+++, and give that, and so on. Copyleft is a legal guarantee that once
something has become a gift, it will stay a gift.

For gifts to circulate in this way requires the existence of a gift
economy. This is just another name for the 'keimform' of people producing
in the new way. It's inconceivable that IBM, Sun, and the other companies
could continue producing free software without the people outside the
business world producing free software in the new way - what would they
do, trade it with one another? Now if my company chucks out some old
software with the gpl on it, this is not a gift, because it cannot yet
circulate. If it ever does circulate, it will be because someone thought
it important enough to work on it, understand it, comment it, create
a community around it - that's the point where it becomes a gift, not the
point where someone attaches the gpl to it. It becomes a gift when it
is absorbed into the new mode of production

That is a interesting thought - though to me it looks just as
convoluted as the roots of the phrase double Free Software because to
understand it you have to understand a hell lot of what is meant by
gift in this case.

To me it looks from different perspectives we are converging to a
concept yet to be named. I'd like to follow this path further.

(you could say this is just a
rewording of the 'doubly free' idea, but I think it's clearer because
it's not a static label, it involves some human action)

BTW: IMHO this points to some subtle cultural differences between the
anglo-american way of thinking and the continental one ;-) . At least
Germans tend to think in static categories resulting in static labels
whereas the anglo-american tradition emphasizes action and thus
dynamic. For instance long time ago it puzzled me, that in English
there is no word matching "solidarisch" - a term which is often used
in German leftist language. Of course English speakers usually
understand "solidaric" which is the (static) adjective put on someone
who is acting in solidarity. But in English there is no such word. It
is expressed differently in English with rather subtle consequences.

With the fuzzier cases where commercially produced free software is
genuinely intended to enter the gift economy - say Mozilla - you have
a similar phenomenon, but this time penetrating the firm itself.

Good point!

Now
they are not producing a potential gift, but an actual gift. To do this,
they have to become partly absorbed in the new economy.

What about firms like RedHat or SuSE? They are penetrated by this sort
of gift economy from the start - aren't they? Yet they do some
patches.

They have to
let their design decisions etc be at least partly controlled by the hordes
of Mozilla developers who are not part of AOL and have no connection with
their commercial interests at all. Their own staff have to be using free
software for development. Their staff have to learn how to work in a
co-operative way; etc. In other words, if a company is genuinely producing
a gift it has to be partly taken over by the new potential mode of
production - obviously they are going to gamble that this will only be
on the fringes of the company, that they can limit any damage from it,
and control it if they need to. Which may or may not be true. But what
they produce is not 'singly free software' - the gift economy idea avoids
that bit of metaphysics...

Well, defending the word double Free Software I'd say, it is not
always a clear contradiction to have selbstentfaltung and to work in a
firm. Especially in software firms there may be some ways to have at
least a bit of selbstentfaltung because the very product of a software
firm *needs* this mode of production to be a good product. Software
development needs selbstentfaltung in itself because good software
depends on creative people being absorbed by their activity. That is
the mode of selbstentfaltung. That is what I think the development of
the forces of production is pointing to. That is why I think that Free
Software not by chance is the first product with this keimform
character.


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan
___________________________
Unread: 50 [ox], 99 [ox-en]

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