http://www.consejolocal.org/foro-clpp/read.php?f=1&i=200&t=200
('The time for organized people's power has arrived')
which is mainly about political perspectives for grass-roots politics
over 2004, but has one short mention of free software in a context
I thought interesting (it's kind of the obverse of my idea you objected
to so strongly!); here's a rough translation of the relevant para, which
is basically about direct versus representative democracy [1]:
'We won't go into depth here about the arguments - well-known -
which justify a direct coincidence between full political rights
for the population and economic and social efficency. We will just say
that they have to do with a correct definition of social priorities
based on the real preferences of the population (and not those induced
or manipulated by the media, or betrayed by the promises of opportunist
electoral representatives); the guarantee of the elimination of the
problem of the 'principal agent' betwen the representer and the
represented in public affairs; the superior and cheaper validation
of the execution of a plan by the population itself, and the drastic
reduction in corruption as a result; the decrease in insecurity and
elimination of the poverty trap through long-term growth due to the
elimination of majority inequalities in opportunity; and finally, making
full use of the minimization of economic inefficiency through solidarity
in aspects where both the market and the traditional state fail, as
with
- the provision of public goods (for example the Free Software
movement and the creation of the 'community of knowledge')
- the lack of complete financial markets (for example, the solidarity
between neighbours in poor districts, and the creation of mutual
funds for insurance)
- information asymmetry (for example, the co-operatives, which resolve
problems of information transmission between owners and managers, between
managers and employees, as well as problems of bad distribution of income
among the beneficiaries of shared economic activity)
- problems of the definition of property rights (for example,
co-management in public companies which go on to be de facto co-property
of the workers, which have shared goals with the state which, as
representative of the whole society, establishes objectives and priorities
for the whole population), etc.'
It's not the clearest piece (partly my bad translation), but the thing
that struck me was the way that software is made a sub-case of 'things the
capitalist economy is bad at doing', and so free software is put as one of
a group of radical alternatives ('the economy of solidarity'), rather
than, as with the oekonux argument (I guess partly because of a
marxist/productivist heritage) being made central because of it's nature
as production. That is, Perez Marti (I think) is opposing a 'democracy
comes first' argument to a (oekonux-ish) 'politics is superstructure; free
production comes first' approach. The advantage that gives his argument is
that there's immediately a bridge between all these aspects rather than an
unresolvable question of 'how do we jump from immaterial to material
goods'. The disadvantage is a real lack of clarity in his argument - what
kind of economy is he envisioning? Cuban-style? Mixed? Councilist? Free
software-style? Any might fit.