Re: [ox-en] Re: Business opportuities based on Free Software
- From: Michael Bouwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com>
- Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 04:45:17 -0700 (PDT)
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Franz,
about the power of business.
I don't know if the people of this list know that i was a dotcom entrepreneur, as well as a strategic mgr. for a large telco at some point.
When I abandoned my original leftism in my mid-twenties, it was because I could not see any progress from these type of efforts; it was the seventies and everything was going in the opposite direction. Like many of my generation, this didn't mean that we were ready to abandon all our ideals, but wanted to find other means to achieve a more livable world. At that time, business was rife with talk about cultural change, creativity, corporate social responsibility, greening, stakeholder governance, and the like. But in the eighties all this got largely swept away, and business were increasingly run by the numbers, creating stifling hypercompetitive atmosphere's, etc.. By the end of the 90's, I was radicalising again, because I saw the destruction of the biosphere, and the destruction of the 'psychosphere' in western society, not to speak of the corruption which was rife in large corporations, with endemic manipulation of the numbers, which lost any objective
meaning.
In any case, I decided at one point that no progress could be expected from any corporate machines, and not from the political machines that they now almost completely control. On the other hand, civil society was thriving through internet experimentation, the social had taken over the dotcom era, and new participatory technologies were being developed at breakneck speed, creating all kinds of sharing practices and communities of exchange. Seeing this is what decided me to break with the corporate world, and to eventually create p2pfoundation.net
However, it seems that we are seeing a revival of corporate change thinking recently: the social capital movement, bottom of the pyramid movements, social entrepreneurship, purpose driven entreprise, the for-benefit sector, the business ethics movement.
My question is, given that my personal experience has driven me to scepticism, how real is all that? what do you think are the prospects of such efforts?
Michel
Franz Nahrada <f.nahrada reflex.at> wrote: Michael Bouwens writes:
Please correct me if I'm wrong: When capital emerged, I do not think it
was in any way 'anti-feudal'. It was a section of the feudal class,
together with some new segments from the cities, that invented the new
mode of production. It is only when the political system was too much of
a blockage, that conflicts and 'bourgeois revolutions' occured. It was
only the worker's movement which had an explicitely political goal, and
perhaps for this reason, it failed, as it could not offer a superior
mode of production.
Interesting observation: it was when Venices abilities to trade were
substantially cut by the Turks, they developed a different way to the
"terra ferma" and the possibility to produce themselves, locally, istead
of simply trading surplus.
The culture of that time was called "villegiatura" - and I would really
like to study how much it helped boost capitalism.
Toda'ys postcapitalist mode of production similarly does not appear as
an explicitely anti-capitalist project, and as Christophe points out, it
emerges many times out of sections of the business community, but that
does not change it's essential characteristics. The key important
conflict is perhaps not between the post-capitalist mode and the
capitalist mode, but within the postcapitalist mode itself. As for
example, the efforts to develop the IANG License as a clearer community
alternative to the General Public License, and other similar efforts.
Well, Robert Kurz and others have de-mystified the marxists concept of
"class struggle" as the motor of history. Real historicalk dynamics were
always differently. We are far away from understanding them all, but I
think McLuhan and others contributed much to our understanding on how
changes in media and technologies trigger social processes.
I think that calling Jimmy Wales an arch-capitalist is an exagerration.
For example, I believe I saw a calculation that if Wikipedia accepted
Google Adsense, it would make over $300m, but they've always refused,
relying instead on donations of the community. An arch-capitalist would
have taken the money and ran. (Firefox makes $72m through google).
People like Wales, are former, and perhaps present and future
entrepreneurs, but they also have ethical ideas, some of which are
postcapitalist in nature. Starting Wikipedia was a huge gamble, that had
no certainty of succeeding, and in fact for a number of years failed to
advance, but his ideal, and not his need for money, kept his engagement
going. For a number of people, once you have a measure of monetary
security, what in fact emerges are post-material ideals and ethics. In
fact, many social advances are the result of the existence of such a
rentier class (F. Engels as one of them). The whole emergence of
peer production, is in fact dependent on this abundance (of intellect,
of time, of creativity, of excess computing power, etc..), which emerges
from within capitalism.
It is, maybe, also the insight that you cannot have both: be productive
and follow the laws as usual. Many people within the system that have
learnt the rules are simply the first to learn that we have entered a mode
where "economy" increasingly equals "destruction". There was a paradigm
shift in the eighties that led from former "progress" to a shere
"simulation of progress by numbers" and is definitely comparable to the
absurdities of soviet propaganda. You need to have a very strong stomach
to go on with business as usual, it has lost its general social usefulness
and is increasingly becoming predation. The exciting thing is, if business
is the most powerful institution on this planet, how will people use their
power? And can they use it differently, do they have choices?
The ideological stance of the actors doesn't really matter. Some of
those advancing peer production will be liberals and libertarians, other
will have a more left orientation. Instead of complaining of the former,
in general, it is more fruitful to preserve the community ethics,
whenever they are concretely in danger, and advance solutions that
foster and strengthen it. For example, whenever a corporation enables
participatory platforms, they will have a double identity and interest,
part dolphin, relying on the commons produced by the community, part
shark, pushed by its shareholders to betray it in exchange for short
term profit. As it does with Amazon, the community has to be awake to
such dangers, and react in due time.
That is why the community needs to watch and communicate, and make people
listen.
Thanks Michael, and I hope this list becomes more useful in the support of
this historical process.
Franz
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Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de