Re: [ox-en] New economic model for free technology?
- From: Michael Bouwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com>
- Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 21:19:23 -0700 (PDT)
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Stefan,
My apologies for this very late reply, I was abroad for ten days, attending the re-activism conference.
It was not really a great conference for me. I found Yochai Benkler to be very inspiring, but Lessig, though having a strong presence, to be somewhat arrogant, needing to 'put down' Benkler on several occasions. Also, he does not have a concept of peer production at all, for him P2P is filesharing, nothing more. Overall, being out of the activist milieu for so many years, I was surprised by how professional it all has become, how focused on micro-issues. I missed the enthusiasm of yore. My own disappointment also had to do with the relatively muted reaction to my own lecture, after the good panel discussion, that was it. I'm in the process of reconsidering my future, continue to go against the stream and follow the interior light, a 'traversee du desert' as they say in French, or reconsider my investment in this theory building.
I'm answering below, but one general remark about your intervention. Which I find surprising in some ways. You seem to accept that in order to do self-unfolding, one must have traditional and 'alienated' employment. But why would we have to accept that? I left the corporate world because it had become so corrupt and dehumanising. If I'd find another job like that, I could spent just a few tiny hours per day on a project like this. So my conundrum, and that of many others is to find a sustainable way to be creative, outside of the market, or through some kind of compromise. Surely that is one of the priorities for peer production, both short term, individual solutions, but looking for a general social solution in the long term.
I'M USING CAPITALS, so you can recognize the replies in the jumble of back and forth,
Michel
Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de> wrote:
To preserve 'peer production' as such, the basic
income is the only solution I see to create the
independence of the producers, but it will
probably
never cover the full needs.
Why? People have lots of hobbies and creation of
Free Software is
surely among the cheapest. >
If you are not paid in an open source project, and have to do it 'after hours', and if you want a balanced family life (unless you want to spend an average of eight minutes per day talking to your children, as does the average western dual income family), how much time can you actually devote to it. Would you not want to do it full-time, rather than selling more coca-cola?
Because we have to eat.
Just BTW: We do not eat money, do we. So "we have to eat" is a bad
reply. This is an otherwise important difference but I think that you
meant "We need money (to buy food, cars, pay rent, ...)".
OF COURSE. NO MONEY, NO FOOD.
Probably I was not clear enough above. The point is that people not
only *can* do (useful) things in their free time but actually *do*
(useful) things in their free time. For some of them they even pay
lots amount of money. Just think about some (all?) types of sports
needing expensive equipment, playing music needing expensive equipment
and instruments, doing expensive voyages and so on.
They are not receiving money for this and do it nonetheless. Obviously
there is no need to pay them. And they eat. And they may use Free
Software (and as a perspective more Free Products) which reduces their
need for money.
I still don't understand why this seems to be no viable solution for
you.
SEE THE REPLY ABOVE IN THE INTRODUCTION. BUT I AM SURPRISED THAT YOU REDUCE FREE PRODUCTION TO THE HOBBY SPHERE.
Also there is already a big share of people with
basic income: the
unemployed. Wouldn't it make sense to activate this
potential? Or: Why
is this potential not realizing itself?
Yes, absolutely, if more unemployed would realise that
a life of 'full activity' is open to them, it would
change their lives for the better, and they would feel
part of society, rather than excluded.
Actually I think there could be a deeper reason for this. Those people
who have the abilities(!) to do useful things in their Free time tend
to stay employed. Their abilities are not only useful in Free Projects
but also to earn money. Their abilities are scarce.
IT SEEMS HERE THAT YOU ARE REPEATING THE STANDARD LIBERAL ARGUMENT THAT THE UNEMPLOYED ARE IN THAT SITUATION THROUGH THEIR OWN FAULT. DO THEY REALLY HAVE NO SKILLS TO OFFER TO SOCIETY AT LARGE. NOT EVERYBODY NEEDS TO BE A PROGRAMMER. THERE'S LOTS OF THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH BODY AND SOUL. PART OF THE PROBLEM IS NOT HAVING ENOUGH MONEY FOR SOCIAL REPRODUCTION, BUT THE OTHER IS SURELY PSYCHOLOGICAL, A LOSS OF SELF-CONFIDENCE, BECAUSE IN OUR PRODUCTIVE SOCIETY, NO JOB MEANS NO IDENTITY AND LOSS OF (SELF-) RESPECT. BUT THAT CAN BE WORKED ON THROUGH SELF-UNFOLDING.
On the other hand many of those who become unemployed for a longer
time have little potential. Thus they have not much to contribute to
Free Projects either.
Therefore, following Fiske's fourfold
intersubjective
typology,
What is the missing sphere?
there are for: equality matching, authority ranking,
market pricing and communal shareholding
I still have little idea of what this means.
I SUGGEST TAKING AN HOUR TO VISIT THE FISKE WEBSITE, THERE'S A GOOD INTRO ARTICLE OF JUST A FEW PAGES.
But while we are at equality. Equality (of individuals) seems to be a
high value to you. I for one became sceptical about the concept of
equality because mainly it is not oriented at concrete needs but in
some abstract equality.
Once again I think equality is an interesting concept to share pain.
But instead of sharing pain I'd like to strive to remove pain
completely.
For example for what is the concept of equality useful in Free
Software? To my mind come only examples where pain is to be shared and
these are relatively few.
Also equality is a concept which on a societal scale have been
invented with bourgeoise societies and alone from this I'm sceptical
whether it will help us shaping a non-bourgeoise society.
EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IN SELF-UNFOLDING. EQUALITY IN COLLECTIVE DECISION-MAKING ABOUT SOCIAL LIFE. ARE THESE NOT APPEALING TO YOU???
Two questions: Why is human society thinkable only
with
reciprocity-based relations? Why must they resolved
by something like
money?
I'M SCEPTICAL ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF MONO-FORM SOCIETIES, I.E. BASED ON ONE MODE OF EXCHANGE ONLY. Historically, some form of the four modes seem always to have existed to some degree, with one mode dominating and in-forming the others. Even if we admit the possibility of non-reciprocal relations at some point, a transitory period with market exchange and recirprocity schemes seem necessary, wherever there is scarcity. What do you see as alternatives to money.
As recognized by Marx, we cannot get through the a
full communist society, full indifferientated sharing,
without passing through a socialist economy, based on
equality sharing, you get what you contribute.
Well AFAIK it was not Marx who (rightly) mostly kept silent about a
communist society but Lenin. These two, however, have completely
different points of departure and completely different agendas. Thus
I'm not agreeing here. In fact I think we are already beyond this
point.
COULD YOU SPECIFY YOUR LAST SENTENCE?
Thus a market exchange sphere, and a reciprocity based
sphere (based on time dollars) would provide the
necessary support for pure peer production. It's not
an either/or thing, but a way to get there.
I see you bought these ideologies of alternative money. Money is
always frozen labor time and so it simply makes no sense to say "time
dollar". Every dollar in every currency already is a time dollar.
In market exchange, money reflects different amounts of scarcity, monopoly and power relations, it is a vehicle of inequality and exclusion. In reciprocity-schemes, everyone's time is considered to be of equal value. There is room for both. Money is the protocol of social exchange, if you change its rule of circulation, that has a large effect on the type of society that is promoted.
To me reciprocity-based relations are mainly a mean
to distribute
pain. If it would not mean pain to do / produce
something but pleasure
I hardly would make it subject to reciprocity.
Yes, but in some cases, reciprocity is better, more
fair, more just, than market exchange.
Ahm - now I'm completely puzzled. Market exchange is complete and
perfect reciprocity (mediated by money). If reciprocity can be fair at
all than market exchange is already.
MARKET exchange is not reciprocity at all, just exchange, there is no long term relationship established, it is just a point in time.
In reciprocity,
one hour of labour equals another.
This is only true if you forget about any economics. If you do this,
however, you can forget about reciprocity altogether - which I'd
strongly support ;-) .
It is ideal for the
exchange of services, while market exchange works
better with products.
Well, I think this is mostly phantasy. There is no fundamental
difference between labor time done for service as labor time done for
producing a product. (Well, service labor doesn't produce exchange
value but I'd rather not expand on this here.)
I guess when you say service then you are talking of personal services
like cutting hair or teaching a language. The type of things usually
traded in LETS. But this is only a small part of the labor in
services. Industry knows *a lot* of services which are not personal in
any way.
AGREED, but personal services are a very large part of people's well-being, especially in the poorer countries. It makes a huge difference to enable reciprocity and exchange outside the sphere of the capitalist market.
More and more I think this is why for personal services LETS may work
but if you try to scale it up you either fail or end up with the
standard money system.
I THINK YOU ARE RIGHT. THIS IS WHY LETS and open money schemes are called complementary. But this is not to say that even the standard money system cannot be reformed, see Bernard Lietaer.
<.I don't think that this can be accomplished by putting energy into
alternative money systems. It's simply a waste of time. The basic
income idea is IMHO more fruitful here but I think this is not
realistic when capitalism is stumbling and falling anyway.
IT IS VERY dangerous in my opinion, to base any theory or practice on the 'imminent fall of capitalism', it may or may not happen, but in any case, the alternative will be the result of collective human intentionality, this is why the building of a new social life TODAY is so important.
On the other hand I can imagine an evolutionary way to the GPL
society. Free Software is one building block, Wikipedia another one
and in the other thread we are exploring what could be there. It will
take time but I think it is completely unrealistic to expect changes
of eons happen in ten years.
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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