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[ox-en] Material peer production is possible!



Michel Bouwens writes:

(p2p production can) 
not work with rival material goods, unless you find a solution for
cost-recovery and future investment.

Dear Michel.

the secret is in the word "rival". So, material goods need to be made
"non-rival". Another word for this is "abundant" or (since some seem not
to like this word) "sufficient".

at this point there is only one solution, and it is not one that depends
on the external economy and its scarcity of value (see the remark on
Dmytryi at the very end of this post). You are right that there should be
a sharp distinction between cooperatives and p2p production, but at the
same time it is imagineable that cooperatives work out arrangements that
lead to a circulation of material goods and therefore enable mutual supply
in a circular process, to some degree eliminating the need for monetary
income. This economy would work in a biomorphical way, the surplus on one
point being the input on others.

I think this is not a mere utopian vision, but the tendency of automation
is that production is becoming increasingly biomorphical (as I laid out in
OS yearbook) - . Increasingly material goods can be produced wherever they
are needed, with miniaturized production equipment. Why should there not
be a tendency from sharing designs to arranging material flows that enable
some parts in the network to provide specialized kinds of goods and have
them shared with others, knowing that more and more nodes in the network
are doing the same? Automation is the key to reduce the factor of labor
drastically, to embed production in units of the right size to establish a
circular exchange.

I have recently seen images of the perfect organisation of the feeding of
Buddhist monks by the general population somewhere near you. Now imagine
an "order of technoscientists" constantly improving the tools and the
flows between production units which are controlled and run by general
population. Of course this is just a mental model, we do not like to
create an exclusive elite, but for the understanding of the process its
very vital to see that the material system feeds into the system of
culture without expectation of equivalent exchange. Software developers
are the Buddhist monks of tomorrow, but the general population has not
understood yet that feeding them provides abundance.

In the moment when the system of production is sufficiently close to
natural processes like photosynthesis, driven by design intelligence and
the general intellect of the global communities of practise (which now
replace our mental image of the monks),, the sharing and moving of
material goods could be done in similar ways like filesharing. You get a
taste of this when you look at peer networks like bookcrossing or
couchsurfers, which are allready doing it - use the abundance of the
existing capitalist production process which allready often provides us
with much more than we need -  to undermine the monetary exchange which is
clumsy, boring and without fun.


Once we really get a grasp of really efficient home production, the rules
of the games will change drastically. In this respect I share Stefan
Mertens optimism, allthough I hate to bring it all down to the notion or
image of the fabber. There are very interesting intermediate schemes which
work at community level - technologically possible, but neglected from the
point of view of capitalist production. These are the ones that carry
quality and potential to encompass substantial areas of human needs.

+

Concernig Dmitryi, I think that his rent-sharing models will not work. Its
based on a short moment in history, where additional capital was provided
in the form of debts in expectation of future profits. Its a
dot-com-bubble dream that is obsolete because there is too much business
for the proceeding of business. In this respect I share the criticism of
the crisis groups: unless you free production from the contradictions of
value and its descendants (money, capital, rent) you will never get
another result than poverty on one side, accumulation on the other, and a
society falling way behind its potentials.

all the best

Franz (in recovery)




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