External openness as essential factor (was: Re: [ox-en] Re: Project anarchism approaches)

• From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
• Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:06:20 +0200

Hi StefanMz and all!

2 days ago Stefan Meretz wrote:

On 2008-08-26 20:07, Stefan Merten wrote:

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.

Could you explain this a bit more? Especially the "external openness - 
thus no inside and outside" point.

Sure. One of the most striking features of peer production is - of
course - that the results of the production are free for everyone who
needs them. This applies to Free Software as well as to Wikipedia as
well as to OpenAccess as well as to Free Music... This is what I - but
I think once upon a time it was actually you - call xexternal openness.
(The internal openness is the freedom to engage in the project for
everyone).

To me external openness is an inalienable feature of peer production.
If you omit this then you have something else.

Do you remember about eight years ago when we visited this workshop in
Frankfurt. There I learned that the fundamental difference between the
cooperative movement and peer production is that cooperatives lack
external openness. And they need to because they want to sell their
goods (productive cooperatives) or want to have their flats (housing
cooperatives) for their members. This defines a clear inside and
outside. The inside gets some goods while the outside does not.

External openness removes this barrier between inside and outside as
far as the use of the products is concerned. If you keep that barrier
then you have laid the foundation for alienation. The only possible
use of that barrier is to make the outside exchange with the inside -
otherwise what should the barrier be good for? And this very exchange
is abstract labor. Abstract labor you need to measure somehow to make
it comparable at all. Knowing Marx quite well you probably know in
what this all ends up...

And in addition: Being abstract labor it is not Selbstentfaltung.
Selbstentfaltung IMHO being the second inalienable feature of peer
production is thus destroyed together with external openness.


						Grüße

						Stefan
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• References:
  • [ox-en] Re: Project anarchism approaches
    • From: Stefan Meretz

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