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Re: [ox-en] Re: Two texts



Hi Raoul and lists!

Last month (35 days ago) Stefan Merten wrote:
Hi Raoul and list!

I understood this mail is for public distribution so here it is with
the texts translated to plain texts. Perhaps Raoul can post a link
where the originals (RTF) or HTML versions can be obtained from?

Is there a link other than that one:

	http://www.oekonux.org/list-en/archive/msg00745.html

PS: I did not read the (rather long) texts yet :-( .

I just read the first text. It's *great* :-) !

Actually JC's questions you're answering in the first text "FREE
SOFTWARE AND MARKET RELATIONS" pop up very often. Your text answers
them very good. And your text has the special advantage that it is in
English :-) . I think about whether to add it to the English Oekonux
texts at

	http://www.oekonux.org/texts/

Would you mind doing so? If you like I could use the original RTFs
transform them and embed them in the web site. It would be good if you
could give us a real name for that.

How about creating a OpenTheory project [http://www.opentheory.org]
for each of the texts so they can be commented easily?

I was very happy discovering Oekonux (in fact two Stefan Merten's
interviews, in English, my german being really too poor). I found
the same ideas, some times formulated with the same words, I was
arriving to (at least part of them, as I still do not know enough
Oekonux).

And I guess it is really difficult without a good knowledge of German
:-( .

I come from a marxist tradition... may be what Johan Soderberg and S
Merten call the "ivory towers" of "conventional marxism" in their
mails of October?

Yes. To my experience there are very few like you who can follow Marx
far enough to think beyond the intrinsic(?) limitations of Marxism
(i.e. Marx' thinking with a heavy dose of Lenin, Stalin and workers
movement). Unfortunately many Marxists are *so* limited to the
knowledge of the past they have to deny new developments like the ones
we're discussing in Oekonux.

Before concluding this part on "the ideology of the founders of free
software," I want to say a word on a remark by JC, who wrote: "These
proclamations [of Raoul] are very close to those of certain
free-software activists. Like the members of Oekonux." (6)

I have not had the occasion to read all the documents on this site,
unfortunately because most of them are in German. I do not know up to
what point Stefan Merten, the most well-known of the members of
Oekonux, could be considered on the same level as most of the
"free-software activists," as JC says, in the measure in which he
situates himself in an explicitly Marxist optic. But, as far as I
know, , it is certain that I share certain important points of view
with them, like the context of Marxist theory and the idea that free
software constitutes a germ of a new society: "In Oekonux there is the
idea that free software could be exactly that: an embryonic form of a
new society materialized in the midst of the old." [7]

You are definitely right :-) .

One paragraph I particularly like to emphasize is this one:

Contrary to the vision of an invariant Marxism that has already
foreseen everything and contains no possible shortcoming, whatever the
development of capitalism, Marx and Engels always stayed true to their
critique of dogmatic religious thought: They knew that the role of
theory is not to deny or to ignore facts that contradict it, but to
enrich itself with these new elements, knowing to question itself, to
better develop its explanatory and revolutionary power.

If Marxism has not specifically foreseen the possibility of the
appearance of "germs" of nonmarket relations in the midst of
capitalism, and thus finds itself contradicted in a particular aspect,
the phenomenon of free software constitutes by that same token a
screaming verification of the more general and fundamental aspects of
Marxist theory.

I totally agree with you defending Marx' theory and method against the
Marxists :-) .


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/



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