Project anarchism approaches (was: Re: [ox-en] There is no such thing like "peer money")
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:07:53 +0200
Hi StefanMz and all!
Last month (48 days ago) Stefan Meretz wrote:
The question is: How do we conceptualize our projects?
I absolutely agree with this.
Do they base on
money, market success, and exchange or not?
I'd go one step further: Are they based on abstract labor? To me
abstract labor is given when you start to measure concrete work and
reduce it to some abstract number. How you call the currency is
unimportant.
Next question: How can a project making no money survive in an
environment, where things are bought with money?
Just take a look at the existing peer projects. They all work on this
basis. Oekonux for instance pays it's bills purely by donations which
entitle you to nothing (well the conference sponsors get something in
return - and it is a good example that you need to be careful with
that...).
Here, it is useful to
distinguish between internal project relationships and the
relationships to the outside world: Inside a project the relationships
should be free of money and exchange, while it may not avoidable to
have money-based relationships to the outside money driven world.
Well, this all has not only be thought before but even tried out. One
main current putting this forward was project anarchism. See
http://www.dadaweb.de/wiki/Neoanarchismus#Der_.22Projektanarchismus.22:
(German only unfortunately).
During my anarchist times back in the 1990ies I had once in a while
contact to *the* project of that sort in Neustadt/W. (Wespe). That you
probably never heard of it is a good prove that it did not change the
world - though it was one of the most promising projects and also had
really good preconditions. Try
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Stowasser
for the initiator of that project (German only unfortunately).
Again Christians peerconomy model. We don't have that peereconomy based
society yet. How can we start? If we want to create a peerconomy
project (or better a bunch of), then the project need things from the
capitalist world which we cannot produce self. Thus you need money.
Now, this need of money *must* be decoupled from the internal
functioning of the project in the sense, that, say, products from the
project can not be "exported" to the money world, in order to finance
the project. The "money interface" should be as slim as possible. For
instance bounty-based. Or by fixed contributions by the members. Or, as
Christian proposed, bringing money into the project is viewed as
a "task" and accepted as a "contribution" (in the special meaning of
his concept) like other tasks done are contributions.
In Christian's book contributions are just a sort of payment.
Otherwise I'd need nobody who accept them. I see absolutely no need in
making things more complicated without changing them really when
simple money will do as a contribution.
Etc. Assuming
there are more peerconomy projects, then the relationships
between these projects must be as money-free as the project-internal
relationship are. Ok, I stop here -- this needs a careful discussion
and a lot of new ideas.
What this idea really needs is historical research. Horst Stowasser is
still alive and it could be possible that I create a connection to him.
Conclusion: We'll have to do our projects without money from the very
start in the sense, that money must not be part of the project core
principles. Perform this test: If you beam the project into a
peerconomy society, then generally the project have to work the same way
as it works being an island in the capitalist ocean.
Which implies that there needs to be external openness - thus no
inside and outside. And no abstract labor.
I resonate much more with this approach:
Charles Eisenstein:
"In a highly specialized, technological society, most of us need to
perform exchanges to live. To do so we need a medium of exchange ?
money. Some people, noting this inescapable fact, can see no
alternative but to return to a primitive society, to undo the
millennia-long course of civilization, which they quite
understandably view as an enormous mistake.
Outch, I don't want to read more of this crazy stuff. It declares
exchange to an intrinsic human property, it identifies money with
civilization, it lifts capitalism to heaven and so on.
I agree with this though I would not formulate it as hefty as you ;-) .
But I want to point out the error in this quote.
Charles Eisenstein:
"In a highly specialized, technological society, most of us need to
^
perform exchanges to live.
^^^^^^^^^
Charles writes about *a* highly specialized, technological society.
But there is no natural law that in such a society anybody *needs to
perform exchange*. It is logical that there needs to be a flow of
goods - but there are lots of ways to organize this flow. Peer
projects as well as families are the observable proof that Charles'
statement is only a myth.
I think if we want to think about a new society we should be able to
leave that error behind mentally.
Gr?ü?ße
Stefan
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