Re: [ox-en] Alternative currencies and Oekonux (was: Re: Autonomy)
- From: Michael Bouwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com>
- Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2006 03:38:37 -0700 (PDT)
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I agree that double free software, or what I call peer production, is a system of non-reciprocal exchange.
I also agree that it is embedded, in complicated ways, with the existing political economy, and that both are dependent on each other. Peer production has both immanent and transcendent aspects, see http://p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Peer_Production_-_Immanence_vs._Transcendence
However, peer production does not exist alone. But rather than be exclusively dependent on a capitalist economy that is destroying the biosphere and increasing inequalities.
It could be embedded in: 1) non-capitalist markets which recognize both external costs of nature, and the cost of dignified social reproduction (the latter can be achieved through peer arbitrage of markets); 2) a field of more reciprocal exchange, inspired by gift economy principles as they still exist in the South and with LETS in the West.
Money is the protocol of our current system, based on scarcity, and itself engineering inequality. It makes sense to reform it.
This is why money reform and gift economy experiments should be debatable in an overall strategy for social change, because free software does not exist in a vacuum and will not survive a collapse of the biosphere.
To see free software as an objective law, that we just have to wait until the GPL society falls in our lap, while all the indicators are going negative, is to make the old Marxist mistake of the inevitability of socialism.
Michel
magius <gmagius gmail.com> wrote: On 2006/4/4, Stefan Merten wrote:
A fundamental insight is that Free Software doesn't work on the basis of
exchange - at least Doubly Free Software. Again there is no room for alternative > currencies because all currencies are only an expression of an alienated form of > exchange facilitation.
Also me, I agree Free Software is not exchange. But there's a sort of
"sliding doors" system between Free Software and Capitalist exchange.
Free Software without Capitalism will not survive. Let me explain
better, through an example. How a Free Software coder will have an
income to live? Not from Free Software development itself (because
there's no exchange). But a good code released under GNU/GPL would
"give" work in the capitalistic system to this coder. A boss will hire
this coder because he's a good developer and the code released under
GNU/GPL (or a code under copyright, it's the same) it's the verifiable
example of his work. Free software code is a way to have work in
Capitalism, this an uncontestable truth.
Imho the correct way to put community currencies (as part of a new
economic system, different from Capitalism) in the Oekonux context, is
to think how to replace, in the "sliding doors" system before
described, capitalistic exchange with a more just e solidal exchange.
And community currencies are a way to facilitate this change.
m
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de
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_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de