January 2017 - P2P-Foundation - lists.ourproject.org

Fwd: UBI ands the Precariat
by Michel Bauwens 19 Jan '17

19 Jan '17

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Restakis <restakis(a)gmail.com> Date: Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 4:56 AM Subject: Re: UBI ands the Precariat Hi All, Yet one more cautionary tale about the misuse of UBI, this one coming from the much touted initiative in Finland. "It is technically possible to create a broad-based UBI that increases worker bargaining power and leisure while decreasing inequality and poverty, especially in a wealthy country like the United States. But it is just as possible to redirect the energy behind a liberatory UBI into implementing a conservative one <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/universal-basic-income-switzerland-finla…> — forcing unemployed workers into bad jobs while undermining organized labor, earnings equality, and the welfare state. Indeed, it is even possible to pull off such a bait-and-switch while convincing the rest of the world that you are engaged in progressive policymaking." https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/ubi-finland-centre- party-unemployment-jobs/ John

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Jan 25: Building Community with the Help of Information and Commmunications Technologies: Opportunities and Challenges (netCommons/WIAS event)
by Christian Fuchs 18 Jan '17

18 Jan '17

BUILDING COMMUNITY WITH THE HELP OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES – OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES Wed, 25/1/2017 6pm University of Westminster, 309 Regent St, London W1B 2HW Fyvie Hall Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/building-community-with-the-help-of-informat… Accessing the Internet day in, day out is part of everyday life. But we take for granted that the way we access the Internet is via a service provider, usually among the largest for-profit corporations in the world. We rarely think about whether there are alternative forms of Internet infrastructure that do not operate access as profitable business. This event explores community networks as alternative forms of Internet access and presents two talks on community networks by experts who come from academia and industry. Prof Claire Wallace, University of Aberdeen, will present work carried out in Aberdeen among four rural communities that have used information technology in different ways to help build community networks and an enhanced sense of identity and social cohesion. The research was sponsored by the EPSRC as part of the Cultures and Communities Network+ initiative and as part of the Aberdeen Digital Economy hub. Adam Burns, member of the netCommons project advisory board and a long-time community network practitioner, will talk about his experiences, motivations, and the realities of community networks. He will report on how from his experience alternative Internet access and infrastructure can be organised and what the opportunities and challenges are in doing so. This public event is organised by the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies (WIAS) in the context of the EU Horizon2020 project netCommons (http://netcommons.eu/) Forthcoming WIAS events: Fri, Feb 3: China’s Economic Transformation in the New Media Era, https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/chinas-economic-transformation-in-the-new-me… Fri, March 3: The Unreality of Reality TV: From "After Dark" towards Twitter, Big Data, and "Big Brother" https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/unreality-of-reality-tv-from-after-dark-towa… For WIAS infos about events, publications, calls, etc, subscribe to the WIAS Newsletter https://www.westminster.ac.uk/newsletter

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Jan 25: Building Community with the Help of Information and Commmunications Technologies: Opportunities and Challenges (netCommons/WIAS event)
by Christian Fuchs 18 Jan '17

18 Jan '17

BUILDING COMMUNITY WITH THE HELP OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES – OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES Wed, 25/1/2017 6pm University of Westminster, 309 Regent St, London W1B 2HW Fyvie Hall Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/building-community-with-the-help-of-informat… Accessing the Internet day in, day out is part of everyday life. But we take for granted that the way we access the Internet is via a service provider, usually among the largest for-profit corporations in the world. We rarely think about whether there are alternative forms of Internet infrastructure that do not operate access as profitable business. This event explores community networks as alternative forms of Internet access and presents two talks on community networks by experts who come from academia and industry. Prof Claire Wallace, University of Aberdeen, will present work carried out in Aberdeen among four rural communities that have used information technology in different ways to help build community networks and an enhanced sense of identity and social cohesion. The research was sponsored by the EPSRC as part of the Cultures and Communities Network+ initiative and as part of the Aberdeen Digital Economy hub. Adam Burns, member of the netCommons project advisory board and a long-time community network practitioner, will talk about his experiences, motivations, and the realities of community networks. He will report on how from his experience alternative Internet access and infrastructure can be organised and what the opportunities and challenges are in doing so. This public event is organised by the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies (WIAS) in the context of the EU Horizon2020 project netCommons (http://netcommons.eu/) Forthcoming WIAS events: Fri, Feb 3: China’s Economic Transformation in the New Media Era, https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/chinas-economic-transformation-in-the-new-me… Fri, March 3: The Unreality of Reality TV: From "After Dark" towards Twitter, Big Data, and "Big Brother" https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/unreality-of-reality-tv-from-after-dark-towa… For WIAS infos about events, publications, calls, etc, subscribe to the WIAS Newsletter https://www.westminster.ac.uk/newsletter

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Fwd: [members] Open position DECODE
by Michel Bauwens 17 Jan '17

17 Jan '17

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Mayo Fuster Morell <mayo.fuster(a)eui.eu> Date: Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 12:33 AM Subject: [members] Open position DECODE To: P2P Value Members List <members(a)lists.p2pvalue.eu> Hello I hope everyone is fine. At Dimmons - UOC we have an open possition on distributed/open digital architectures and the Collaborative Economy, in case someone of you or someone you know might be interesred, and thanks to help the word spread out. Mayo Open position: Researcher (DECODE) *Dimmons research group at IN3-UOC is seeking, for a new European project (DECODE), a researcher who is passionate and engaged about topics in the area of distributed/open digital architectures and the Collaborative Economy* [image: 800px-random_geometric_graph-svg] Position as part of the European project DECODE (See description below) *Requirements:* - Late PhD or postdoc in the area of Collaborative/Sharing Economy, peer production, platform cooperativism or related topic, or expert in the area. - Excellent written communication skills in English. *Nice to have:* - Experience in EU funded projects. - Experience with web-based software office suites (word processor, spreadsheets, presentations), WordPress and project management apps. - Statistical skills (i.e. SPSS or R programs). - Acknowledgement of blockchain technology. - Català and Spanish. *Duration*: 1 to 2 years position. Part time or full time. *Tasks description* *Project coordination:* Deadlines keeping; Preparation of yearly reports; Bookkeeping; Support event organizing; Support research communication (via different online and communication tools). *Research development*: - Research support to build a multidisciplinary framework on Commons oriented Collaborative/Sharing Economy - Theoretical framework of data driven society and empirically grounded theory on both the Commons and oriented Sharing Economy, and its intersections. Multidisciplinary framework integrating judicial-legal, economic, socio-governance and policy perspectives. - Sustainability framework of Collaborative / Sharing Economy - Empirical base: - Mapping Sharing Economy in Barcelona - Characterize data practices and technological base - Economic models of Commons Sharing Economy - Assessment of Sharing Economy impact in Barcelona - Support pilot design and development of af pilot connected to alternative tourism practices and economical enterprises. - Coordinate preparation of a portal of data repository on Sharing Economy research. *Workplace* Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (Open University of Catalonia) <http://www.uoc.edu/portal/en/in3/index.html>: Av. Canal Olímpic s/n Parque Mediterráneo de la Tecnología, 08060 Castelldefels (Barcelona) *About the DECODE project* Today’s Internet is becoming increasingly centralised, slowing innovation and challenging its potential to revolutionise society and the economy in a pluralistic manner. DECODE will develop practical alternatives through the creation, evaluation and demonstration of a distributed and open architecture for managing online identity, personal and other data, and collective governance in a citizen-friendly and privacy-aware fashion. Strong digital rights that makes it possible for data subjects to determine access rights to their information through flexible entitlements and open standard-based agreements regarding data governance (on the model of Creative Commons licenses) will be woven into the technological architecture. DECODE will increase digital sovereignty of European citizens by enabling them to produce, access and control their data and exchange contextualised information in real-time, and in a confidential, and scalable manner. DECODE will develop a modular privacy-aware IoT hub with a free and open source operating system backed by a state of the art blockchain infrastructure supporting smart-contracts and privacy protections. The architecture will be demonstrated through four pilots in Barcelona and Amsterdam, in the field of digital democracy, citizen sensing, and collaborative economy. The pilots will be run with the active involvement of social entrepreneurs, hackers, and makers. Innovators will be able to build solutions on top of the platform through hackathons and open challenges, while ensuring their security, resilience and privacy preserving qualities. This aims to create a decentralised innovation ecosystem that will attract a critical mass able to shift the current centralised data- driven economy towards a decentralised, sustainable and commons-based economy. DECODE puts agency and data control in the hands of citizens, to improve citizens’ well-being and society for the collective benefit of all. *About Dimmons research group* Methodological approach: - Commitment to rigor, front-line innovation & open access. - Methodological pluralism though quan(li)tative multi-methods triangulation. Comparative perspective. - Experimenting with online/virtual methods, agile frameworks, design thinking and lean research. - Action-participation. Research that inform technological or/and social processes design. - Prioritize open access publications and multi-canal dissemination. More info here <http://dimmons.net/> *Interested candidates*: send CV and letter with personal statement of interest to info(a)dimmons.net -- «·´`·.(*·.¸(`·.¸ ¸.·´)¸.·*).·´`·» «·´¨*·¸¸« Mayo Fuster Morell ».¸.·*¨`·» @Lilaroja «·´`·.(¸.·´(¸.·* *·.¸)`·.¸).·´`·» Faculty Affiliated. Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Harvard University. Director research on digital commons. Internet Interdisciplinary Institute. Open University of Catalonia. Researcher. Institute of Government and Public Policies. Autonomous University of Barcelona. Ph.D European University Institute Website: http://www.onlinecreation.info Phone: 0034-648877748 The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination, distribution, forwarding, or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited without the express permission of the sender. If you received this communication in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from any computer. -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: Obery Hendricks on MLK's legacy--with comment by Rabbi Lerner
by Michel Bauwens 17 Jan '17

17 Jan '17

please read Rabbi Lerner's critique of identity politics: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Rabbi Michael Lerner at Tikkun/NSP <magazine(a)tikkun.org> Date: Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 9:41 AM Subject: Obery Hendricks on MLK's legacy--with comment by Rabbi Lerner To: Michelsub2004(a)gmail.com <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=CsusTvZoV1hQet7iaWPrV7wIG3mQQl…> You can read this article by Obery Hendricks on line at: www.tikkun.org/nextgen/obery-hendricks-on-mlk-jr-and-his-legacy Editor's note: Having just returned (Monday, Jan. 16, 2016) from participating in a demonstration and march in Oakland, Ca. today in honor of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr, I was glad to receive this submission to Tikkun (below) by African American studies professor (and Tikkun magazine author) Obery Hendricks. It is an important counter to the kind of rhetoric and tone I heard at today's demonstration. At the rally before the march began I heard one of the M.C.s ask the crowd to repeat "we will win by ANY MEANS NECESSARY"--a slogan I first heard from the Black Panther Party in 1968--in clear attempt to repudiate King's message both then and now about how to fight racism. *King, as you will recall, was a devout believer in the sanctity of the means, not just the ends, and hence insisted that the movement he led must be committed to nonviolence. *When I met with King a month before he was murdered, I mentioned to him that his commitment to nonviolence was part of what many Jewish interpreters of the Torah's command "Justice, Justice shalt thou pursue" (*tzedeck, tzedeck tir'dof*) insisted upon. "Why repeat the word "justice" twice?" they asked. And their answer: "because the struggle for justice must be pursued in a just manner," which for many of them meant in a nonviolent manner. Those who cheered the "by any means necessary" slogan may not have even understood that they were repudiating King's message--but they did know that those words have been understood by demonstrators and activists for the past fifty years to mean that if some of them believe that violence is necessary that it is an acceptable choice--just the opposite of what King taught. This same distortion of the ethical message of our movement is part of why it was such a sin for the Nobel Prize committee to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama, whose speech in acceptance of the award was really an apologia for "any means necessary" and whose subsequent years as president in which he acknowledged directing drone attacks at suspected terrorists in circumstances where innocent civilians were certain to also be killed ("collateral damage" is one of the most disgusting phrases of contemporary government sanctioned mass murder) makes him yet another U.S. president who leaves office with much blood on his hands (his Administration acknowledges hundreds of such victims; human rights monitors of his attacks estimate the numbers in the thousands). One reason nobody challenged this discourse is that it was said at the rally by an African American woman. As one activist said to me, "white people have privilege and therefore have no right to challenge African American women in their discourse." This, of course, is the curse of "identity politics" with its silencing of debate not on the basis of having a better argument, but rather because whatever is being said is coming from someone judged to be "more oppressed than you." I know this discourse well, because I grew up in a Zionist world where many Jews used this same argument to silence others (both Jews and non-Jews) who dared to challenge Israel's oppressive treatment of Palestinians. The Holocaust, not some distant 19th century slavery but the actual murder of their own family members (one out of every three Jews alive on this planet in 1939 were murdered by 1945), became the basis for insisting that no one had a the ethical standing to question the means that the Jewish people had chosen to create safety for ourselves in the 20th (and now 21st) century. So I learned early how perverse identity politics could and would become, as very decent Jews replaced the injunction to nonviolence that had predominated through much of Jewish history with a blanket "by any means necessary" of our own!!!! No wonder that it is hard to build a powerful enough anti-racist movement in the U.S. if its public spokespeople allow such discourse in their name, a discourse which besmirches the high ethical goals and means that made Martin Luther King Jr. a hero to tens of millions of Americans and who got Americans to rally against racism both during his lifetime and for several decades thereafter. Lets make MLK, Jr's message, as beautifully remembered and reframed by Obery Hendricks below, become the central discourse of our struggle for a world of love and justice! To see what that might look like, please also read the vision of the Network of Spiritual Progressives at www.tikkun.org/covenant and then join us! --Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor, Tikkun RabbiLerner.tikkun(a)gmail.com *Meeting Martin Luther King Again for the First Time* by OBERY HENDRICKS I first met Martin Luther King at the age of seven at Bob’s Barber Shop (“Baba Shop” we pronounced it) on a once busy avenue in East Orange, NJ, a few blocks from the Newark line. The federal government’s voracious Urban Renewal (read: “Negro Removal”) Program has long since reduced Bob’s and everything around it to rubble, but what I heard and learned there throughout my youth informs and enriches me still. Like so many black folks’ barbershops, Bob’s was much more than a place for a shave and a haircut. It was a welcoming epicenter of cacophonous organic intellectual exchange by passionate, good-natured men who, though mostly unlettered – forced by poverty to leave school early for sweltering fields and stifling timber mills, or consigned to Southern chain gangs for trifling or imagined offenses to white folks’ sensibilities – they were nonetheless possessed of intuitive intellectuality, clear-eyed political instincts, and thankful appreciation for a place to unleash the soaring thoughts their workplaces had no use for. I loved their earthy speech, the poetry and drawl of their humor, the sheer musicality of their words. But no matter how their discussions began, no matter how or where they wandered, without fail they found their way to the cocoa-skinned young preacher with the sober affect and voice like cool thunder who was their Moses and Joshua both. To them his was a one-word name, a title even, intoned in their unstripped Southern accents with such breathless respect that they barely took time to pronounce it: “MarthaLuthaKang,” he was. *Martha Lutha Kang*. The sound of his name comforted them, inspired them, imbued them with a species of hope and pride that none but those who have been broken and reborn can rightly understand. “MarthaLuthaKang integrated them buses and lunch counters, even got folks voting, and ain’t fired one shot. Ain’t used fist nor gun.” “I got to give that MarthaLuthaKang a whole lot of credit, cause I’ll be dog if I’ma let some white folks beat on me until they get tired.” “MarthaLuthaKang say it ain’t just about taking a beating. He calls it ‘nonviolent resistance’. Let white folks get all their hate out so we can all love our neighbors as Jesus say.” “MarthaLuthaKang the only Negro that one set of white folks put in jail for a criminal and another set of white folks take out for a hero. Now, that’s integration.” But where there are thinkers with strong passions, there is always some measure of dissent. “Well, y’all can go on with that integration stuff if you want to. But me myself, I ain’t interested in riding nor eating with no white man. I just want somebody to integrate my money is all, turn my money green. If MarthaLuthaKang do that, I’ll eat a hamburger with George Wallace anywhere he say.” “MarthaLuthaKang ain’t interested in no money like some of these preachers thinking they supposed to live like kings. He just wants justice in America for every colored man, woman and child. Poor white folks, too. And for all of us to love our neighbor the same way we love ourselves. That’s all he want and all he do. ” “That MarthaLuthaKang is something else, ain’t he?” The admiration of the barbershop men for King perched on the precipice of awe. For my part, I beheld him with the wonderment that young boys reserve for superheroes. Away from the barbershop environs I pronounced his name as it was intoned at Sunday School, on the radio and the six o’clock news. But in my heart he was who I first knew him to be: MarthaLuthaKang, who was revered second only to Jesus by everyone important in my world. So MarthaLuthaKang he remained. Until he did not. As I struggled through the confusions and recalibrations of pubescence, my imagination was captured by a force that changed me forever: the Black Power Movement. Its rumblings were brash, its rhetoric defiant, its styles and symbols, seductive. After a steady diet of Kingfish, Beulah, Aunt Jemima and Buckwheat, I saw young black folks standing tall, standing firm, proud of who they were and dedicated to serving their beloved and beleaguered communities; neither skinning nor grinning nor in any way paying deference where it was not due, standing up for themselves and their communities against police who sometimes would rather crack a black skull than eat lunch. When these rogue bearers of badges betrayed their oaths to protect and defend, choosing instead to brutalize and humiliate, these brave young men and women defended their communities with eloquence of speech, unwavering courage and dedication, sophisticated strategies and knowledge of the law, and the occasional fist if circumstances demanded. King’s appeals for love, for “redemptive suffering” and nonviolence –which, I realized, I’d never been fully comfortable with – now seemed both foolish and sadly weak compared to the fearless young people with their black berets, their black leather jackets, their dashikis, orbital Afros and intricate hair braiding. Martin Luther King in his funereal suits and his tradition-laden preachments did not stand a chance with urban youths like me. So with palpable disdain I cast aside the saint of black barbershop philosophers and beleaguered black folks everywhere. But why was it so easy for me to so unceremoniously throw aside a man behind whom so many willingly ventured through the valley of the shadow of death, a man who’d long been my hero, and was still hero to so many? I see now that I was able to dismiss him with such youthful arrogance because I had no idea who Martin Luther King really was. By then MarthaLuthaKang the venerated had been replaced in my mind by Martin Luther King the defamed and woefully misportrayed: King the “We Shall Overcome” dreamer of toothless dreams, King the world-class panderer to white largesse, King the preacher of celebrated oratory and naïve, self-abnegating pleas to embrace those who would slaughter our young and often did. So in truth, I banned King from my pantheon of heroes because I did not know the truth: that beneath the carefully disciplined oratory, beneath his trenchant appeals to love and forgiveness, beneath the countless unchallenged beatings and homicidal assaults, in reality, Martin Luther King, Jr., was more radical than I could have ever imagined. Despite my years of barbershop tutelage and the ubiquity of his singular voice and visage, despite my certainty that the six o’clock news and Black Nationalist rhetoric had taught me all there was to know about him, it is clear now that I knew him not. Seduced as I was by the blanketing gaze of those who opposed him in life (and now misportray him in death), I had no way of knowing that when King said, “America, you must be born again;” that when he said, “You have to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values;” and when he said, “There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism,” that in these pronouncements he was not simply talking around the edges of the challenges America faced; he was calling for sweeping changes in the very economic and political structures on which America stands. I mean, how could I have possibly known that when he said, “Our goal is to create a Beloved Community” which “will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives,” that he was not just spouting smarmy sentimentality, but meant instead an America radically reconfigured as an egalitarian democratic socialist political economy (with the emphasis on “democratic”), in which all of God’s children would have equal access to the fruit of the tree of life? But now I do know. And may it be known by all that Martin Luther King was not only a dedicated fighter for racial justice. He was also a politically radical thinker who had long nursed the visionary hope of restructuring in the image of justice the economic order in this country that so routinely profits the rich and even more routinely impoverishes the poor. To one reporter he acknowledged as much. “You might say that we are engaged in a class war,” he said without remarkable boldness. But today we have hollowed the boldness of Martin Luther King by hallowing him into America’s apostle extraordinaire of kumbiyah and teary-eyed handholding. The radicality of his vision and praxis is all but lost. Yet in these fraught times we need to reclaim the boldness and clarity of vision of the leader of the most effective movement for justice that this nation has seen, or at least be informed by it. For if the hateful, divisive campaign of Donald Trump is prologue to his presidency, we are faced with the greatest potential onslaught on civil liberties, love for our neighbors, justice under the law and social responsibility that America has endured in half a century; it threatens to rend the very fabric of our democracy society. Martin Luther King, Jr., was slain as he forged ahead with that “class war” that still confronts us today, slain on the cusp of realizing a last dream that we must now claim as our own – a Poor People’s Campaign to press for a restructuring of America’s social architecture into a nation that will wax ever more just and ever more equitable – wax and never again wane. Not a utopia, but a true Beloved Community, imperfect yet perpetually trying to do right; ever striving through its legislated policies, its dedicated laws and most love-tempered edicts to answer the call of the prophet that long ago set King upon his own Samaritan’s road, to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Obery Hendricks teaches religion and African-American studies at Columbia University. He is the author of *The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Teachings and Jesus and How They Have Been Corrupted *(Doubleday, 2006) ------------------------------ Click here to unsubscribe <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=HIVXcY99OM0Lyqtsm%2ByKdrwIG3mQ…> if you are having trouble unsubscribing Click here <kay(a)tikkun.org> Copyright 2015 Tikkun Magazine. Tikkun is a registered trademark. 2342 Shattuck Avenue, #1200 Berkeley, CA 94704 510-644-1200 Fax 510-644-1255 [image: empowered by Salsa] <http://www.salsalabs.com/?email> -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Without Commons there is no Community; Without Community the is no Commons
by Kevin Flanagan 13 Jan '17

13 Jan '17

Hello, As we begin 2017 and leave 2016 behind I want to share with you a personal reflection on the Commons and the experience of the Commons Space at the World Social Forum 2016. https://medium.com/@flgnk/without-commons-there-is-no-community-without-com… Best Wishes Kevin -- Skype: kev.flanagan Phone: +353 87 743 5660

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China’s Economic Transformation in the New Media Era: From Economic Miracle towards Financial Bubbles and Crisis?
by Christian Fuchs 13 Jan '17

13 Jan '17

China’s Economic Transformation in the New Media Era: From Economic Miracle towards Financial Bubbles and Crisis? Fri 3 February 2017 18:00 – 19:30 GMT Univ of Westminster, London https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/chinas-economic-transformation-in-the-new-me… https://www.facebook.com/events/937726506360023/ This event hosted by Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies (WIAS) explores China’s economic development model since 2008. Public discussions about China’s economy tend to be fascinated by the high growth of China’s gross domestic product and to celebrate such figures as economic miracle. In this context, often China’s Internet economy is presented as being the largest online market of users in the world and experiencing similar growth. In summer 2015, China saw a drop of its stock-market values. Commodity prices for oil, gold, food, iron, metal and coal fell on the world market. The Chinese economy’s growth rate slowed down. Will China see the bursting of financial bubbles and economic crisis? What are the underlying forces of China’s economic development? And what are the implications for the Chinese Internet economy? The event will explore these questions in the form of two talks by experts on the Chinese economy – Dr Dic Lo and Dr Bingqing Xia. Dr Dic Lo (SOAS University of London) will speak about the financialisation of the Chinese econoy and the role of productive investment. Dr Bingqing Xia (research fellow at WIAS) will focus on the financialisation of capital accumulation process in the Chinese Internet industry. WIAS director Christian Fuchs will chair the event and discussion. Other forthcoming WIAS events: January 25: Building Community with the Help of Information and Communications https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/building-community-with-the-help-of-informat… March 3: The Unreality of Reality TV: From After Dark towards Twitter, Big Data, and Big Brother https://www.westminster.ac.uk/events/the-unreality-of-reality-tv-from-after… For updates, subscribe to the WIAS newsletter: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/newsletter

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Strategy for building a socialist counterpower
by Kevin Flanagan 12 Jan '17

12 Jan '17

There is a little more to the article than the title suggests. He draws on Erik Olin Wright's analysis of the various strands of activism and how they could work together more effectively. http://www.redpepper.org.uk/shock-doctrine-of-the-left-a-strategy-for-build… -- Skype: kev.flanagan Phone: +353 87 743 5660

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Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: The Struggle for Meaningful Work (GTN Discussion)
by Eric Hunting 06 Jan '17

06 Jan '17

When I was a kid, growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, my mother arranged for a part time job for me where she worked at the now defunct Hercules explosives plant. It was my first, and last, salary job. The plant was a historic facility that had been producing nitrocellulose for artillery applications from very early in the 20th century and was notable for its occasional massive explosions (often associated with union conflicts...), which could shatter windows as far away as the neighboring state of Pennsylvania. I was assigned a simple task of file sorting in a very old, decrepit brick building the staff referred to as the 'bag house' because it was used to store records that had simply been stuffed into large canvas bags and dumped there to be forgotten for decades. My task was to go through some bags of old medical records and sort out which would be saved and which would be sent for incineration. There was no heat in the building and only one working overhead light so I was left there alone with a kerosene space heater to keep me more-or-less warm through the evening. For a teenager it was a simple, easy, job, but I didn't last long. You see, the files I was sorting were medical records for deceased workers going back as far as WWI. Each file listed a few details, their cause of death, and a passport style photo. And as I sifted through them, I found that nearly all these workers had died in much the same way; black lung and its complications caused by the constant exposure to graphite dust common on the plant. (so common, all the squirrels that wandered the wooded area were black) Night after night I was there alone reading these files, looking into the faces of these men in their thousands, and seeing their ultimate fate. Black lung, lung cancer, black lung, esophageal cancer, black lung. On and on. I came to realize what a horrific meat-grinder America was. How these thousands of men had died trying to earn a meager living making stuff to kill other people in other countries. It was a bit much for a teenager, and the worsening kerosene fumes and encroaching autumn cold and darkness didn't help. I gave up after a month, vowing to never work for a corporation and choosing a life of entrepreneurship instead. Of course, I didn't have much choice in the matter, later succumbing to environmental illness and chronic bronchitis myself from too many years subject to NJ's pollution and the common abuse of antibiotics by doctors back then. On 1/5/17 4:00 AM, p2p-foundation-request(a)lists.ourproject.org wrote: > Subject: > [P2P-F] Fwd: The Struggle for Meaningful Work (GTN Discussion) > From: > Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com> > Date: > 1/4/17, 10:51 PM > > To: > p2p-foundation <p2p-foundation(a)lists.ourproject.org> > > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: *Great Transition Network* <gtnetwork(a)greattransition.org > <mailto:[email protected]>> > Date: Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 5:34 AM > Subject: The Struggle for Meaningful Work (GTN Discussion) > To: michelsub2004(a)gmail.com <mailto:[email protected]> > > > > >From Eva-Maria Swidler <eva.swidler(a)goddard.edu > <mailto:[email protected]>> > > ------------------------------------------------------- > Hello everyone, > > The degradation of work is an issue largely ignored in academia today, > perhaps reflecting the fact that academics, who are the ones who do > most writing about work, like their own (craft) work a lot. The actual > lived day-to-day reality of a strong majority on the planet is that > work is a demeaning experience of frustration. So thanks very much to > Kent Klitgaard for raising this issue! > > I have here a series of somewhat unrelated thoughts inspired by this > very important subject. > > 1) The key feature of degradation that Klitgaard points out takes the > form of a lack of control over the immediate labor process, leading to > what I would call alienation. But that problematic powerlessness of > workers also extends into many other facets of an undemocratic > workplace. Workplace decisions that exclude the actual workers include > the choice of the purpose or mission of work (to use corporate > parlance), the creation of strategies and priorities, juggling > trade-offs, and formulation of pay and profit distribution structures. > In many ways the labor process is merely the endpoint of those > undemocratic workplace decisions, as the labor process is shaped by > the economics and efficiencies demanded by those larger institutional > decisions. I would like to see our idea of and hopes for worker > control, even as we pragmatically imagine it or fight for it in the > immediate future, expand from struggling for control over the labor > process itself into these wider contextual realms of > workplace decision-making, which after all ultimately drive the labor > process itself. > > 2) Economists such as Steven Marglin and David Noble, but also many > others, have shown that technological “progress” often does not > produce greater efficiency. Efficiency itself is always a relative > term—maximizing A in terms of B—and not absolute. For instance, an > agricultural technique may maximize calories grown per acre-foot of > water used, but at the expense of more labor. Is that an efficient > technique? Yes, it is water-efficient, but no, it is not > labor-efficient. Beyond the fact that the terms of efficiency must > always use defined inputs and outputs, however, is a larger and > oft-ignored fact that often new production processes are less > efficient in terms of all inputs and outputs, but are adopted because > they afford greater control or predictability to the boss. Here we can > see how the economic and institutional context of a workplace—that > un-democraticness of priorities, strategies, purposes, etc.—actually > does directly impinge on the details of the organization > of the labor process. Often bosses mechanize at great expense merely > to be able to guarantee less possible disruption by discontent > workers. So we have to be wary of assuming that technological > developments that degrade work actually equate to greater output. They > often don’t. They may just equate to an interchangeable worker who can > be replaced during a strike, or who can’t effect a slowdown or some > other work disruption now that skill or decisions have been automated. > > In other words, what we have seen in the development of increasingly > degraded workplaces is not necessarily a simple exchange of the higher > quality of work for a greater quantity of output or profits. Sometimes > the quality of work degrades and output does not rise, or may even > fall. And sometimes the increased work that is required is never even > tallied. How many of us have wasted hours on hold with a phone company > or health insurance? Those hours I would argue are unpaid work and > result in high inefficiency in any complete economic calculation. > > If there is not a direct relationship between the degradation of work > and efficiency of output, the scenario to be tackled to create > meaningful, undegraded work is on another order of complexity > altogether than a simple continuum of trading one for the other. > > 3) I approach many of the issues raised in this piece with a more > central location of economic concepts such as “capitalism” (not > mentioned by name here in this essay) and the “productivity dividend”. > After all, as Klitgaard points out, the technology for vastly shorter > work weeks is there. It is used or spent to produce greater profits > rather than fewer labor hours, by making people work just as many > hours even though they produce more, and thereby making workers > produce greater profits rather than being able to enjoy a shorter work > week. This way of distributing the productivity dividend is a question > of workplace struggles and political economy, and I find economic > concepts such as capitalism and the productivity dividend to be > essential in understanding the situation we are in. > > 4) An important question is certainly how to make work meaningful, but > also whether we need work to have meaning. It does seem to be a > capitalist preoccupation to define ourselves and our lives’ meaning in > terms of work. In fact, I’d say it is the fundamental > spiritual/personal/psychological lie of capitalism—that without work, > we are nothing. We tend to create an opposition between work/meaning > on the one hand and leisure/individualistic hedonism on the other. > What if by leisure we include participation in community, social life, > and cultural creativity, not merely what you could call entertainment? > Could we not attain all the meaning we want or need through that > leisure? What about instituting a campaign for meaningful leisure (by > which we don’t mean volunteer work, but something else altogether)? > Benjamin Hunnicutt describes the development of what we could call a > leisure ethic rather than a work ethic in his most recent book, Free > Time: The Forgotten American Dream. Paul > LaFargue’s classic pamphlet “The Right to Be Lazy”, or Kathy Weeks’ > The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Anti-Work Politics and > Post-Work Imaginaries take an even stronger anti-work view. I’d > venture that a working-class leisure ethic is what has served > historically as the cultural foundation of a rejection of constant and > increasing consumption, expressed through various forms of work > resistance. My piece “Radical Leisure” in Monthly Review this past > summer has more thoughts on this > monthlyreview.org/2016/06/01/radical-leisure/ > <http://monthlyreview.org/2016/06/01/radical-leisure/> . > > In fact, I think that the meaningfulness of much of caring work has > more in common with the kinds of meaning a well-developed leisure > ethic can provide than with the meaning that stems from a craft work > ethic. A struggle for meaningful leisure might shed light on caring > work that the current discourse on work has a hard time with. > Certainly there are craft issues of skill in caring work (as an RN and > midwife of 20+ years clinical practice, I staunchly support this > view), but many satisfactions of care work stem from the rewards of > companionship, accompaniment, support, and love, which are experiences > that might be more likely to come from meaningful leisure rather than > meaningful craft work. The craft-work-oriented rewards of mastery or > the “transcendence of setbacks” Klitgaard describes are rewards that > result from what is to me a somewhat gender-limited experience of > work. Renewed intellectual attention to leisure, which seemed as > though it would be an academic field of note a > few decades ago, might allow a different kind of understanding of care > work. > > Thanks again for this essay raising a topic of crucial importance. I’m > looking forward to the conversation to come. > > Eva Swidler > Goddard College > > ************************************* > > On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Great Transition Network wrote: > >From Paul Raskin > > ----- > Dear Great Transition Network, > > As we bid adieu to 2016, a banner year for the Fortress World > scenario, what can we do but turn with renewed resolve to the work of > transition? There is no alternative (to hijack TINA, Margaret > Thatcher’s infamous justification for neoliberalism). Anyway, the work > itself is a privilege and a gratification. > > This brings me to the topic of our JANUARY discussion: “The Struggle > for Meaningful Work.” Kent Klitgaard’s Viewpoint, so titled, argues > that the degradation of work, like the degradation of community and > the environment, is inherent in the logic of capital accumulation, but > receives insufficient attention. The struggle for meaningful jobs, he > contends, ought to stand alongside parallel struggles for justice, > equity, and sustainability as core components of a transformative praxis. > > Kent’s thoughtful piece is inspired by his own search for meaningful > work in a career that has spanned cabinet-making to ecological > economics. It highlights a critical dimension of a Great Transition > that warrants heightened emphasis, or so it seems to me. Do you agree? > Would you revise its formulations? Please read it at > www.greattransition.org/publication/meaningful-work > <http://www.greattransition.org/publication/meaningful-work>, and > share your thoughts. > > This Viewpoint will be published in February, along with selected > comments drawn from the forthcoming discussion and an interview with > Nancy Folbre on “The Caring Economy.” > > Comments are welcome through JANUARY 31. > > Warm wishes to you and yours for a healthy and meaningful 2017. > > Looking forward, > Paul Raskin > GTI Director > > ----- > Hit reply to post a message > Or see thread and reply online at > greattransition.org/forum/gti-discussions/187-the-struggle-for-meaningful-w… > <http://greattransition.org/forum/gti-discussions/187-the-struggle-for-meani…> > > Need help? Email jcohn(a)tellus.org <mailto:[email protected]> -- Eric Hunting erichunting(a)gmail.com

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Fwd: The Struggle for Meaningful Work (GTN Discussion)
by Michel Bauwens 05 Jan '17

05 Jan '17

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Great Transition Network <gtnetwork(a)greattransition.org> Date: Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 5:34 AM Subject: The Struggle for Meaningful Work (GTN Discussion) To: michelsub2004(a)gmail.com >From Eva-Maria Swidler <eva.swidler(a)goddard.edu> ------------------------------------------------------- Hello everyone, The degradation of work is an issue largely ignored in academia today, perhaps reflecting the fact that academics, who are the ones who do most writing about work, like their own (craft) work a lot. The actual lived day-to-day reality of a strong majority on the planet is that work is a demeaning experience of frustration. So thanks very much to Kent Klitgaard for raising this issue! I have here a series of somewhat unrelated thoughts inspired by this very important subject. 1) The key feature of degradation that Klitgaard points out takes the form of a lack of control over the immediate labor process, leading to what I would call alienation. But that problematic powerlessness of workers also extends into many other facets of an undemocratic workplace. Workplace decisions that exclude the actual workers include the choice of the purpose or mission of work (to use corporate parlance), the creation of strategies and priorities, juggling trade-offs, and formulation of pay and profit distribution structures. In many ways the labor process is merely the endpoint of those undemocratic workplace decisions, as the labor process is shaped by the economics and efficiencies demanded by those larger institutional decisions. I would like to see our idea of and hopes for worker control, even as we pragmatically imagine it or fight for it in the immediate future, expand from struggling for control over the labor process itself into these wider contextual realms of workplace decision-making, which after all ultimately drive the labor process itself. 2) Economists such as Steven Marglin and David Noble, but also many others, have shown that technological “progress” often does not produce greater efficiency. Efficiency itself is always a relative term—maximizing A in terms of B—and not absolute. For instance, an agricultural technique may maximize calories grown per acre-foot of water used, but at the expense of more labor. Is that an efficient technique? Yes, it is water-efficient, but no, it is not labor-efficient. Beyond the fact that the terms of efficiency must always use defined inputs and outputs, however, is a larger and oft-ignored fact that often new production processes are less efficient in terms of all inputs and outputs, but are adopted because they afford greater control or predictability to the boss. Here we can see how the economic and institutional context of a workplace—that un-democraticness of priorities, strategies, purposes, etc.—actually does directly impinge on the details of the organization of the labor process. Often bosses mechanize at great expense merely to be able to guarantee less possible disruption by discontent workers. So we have to be wary of assuming that technological developments that degrade work actually equate to greater output. They often don’t. They may just equate to an interchangeable worker who can be replaced during a strike, or who can’t effect a slowdown or some other work disruption now that skill or decisions have been automated. In other words, what we have seen in the development of increasingly degraded workplaces is not necessarily a simple exchange of the higher quality of work for a greater quantity of output or profits. Sometimes the quality of work degrades and output does not rise, or may even fall. And sometimes the increased work that is required is never even tallied. How many of us have wasted hours on hold with a phone company or health insurance? Those hours I would argue are unpaid work and result in high inefficiency in any complete economic calculation. If there is not a direct relationship between the degradation of work and efficiency of output, the scenario to be tackled to create meaningful, undegraded work is on another order of complexity altogether than a simple continuum of trading one for the other. 3) I approach many of the issues raised in this piece with a more central location of economic concepts such as “capitalism” (not mentioned by name here in this essay) and the “productivity dividend”. After all, as Klitgaard points out, the technology for vastly shorter work weeks is there. It is used or spent to produce greater profits rather than fewer labor hours, by making people work just as many hours even though they produce more, and thereby making workers produce greater profits rather than being able to enjoy a shorter work week. This way of distributing the productivity dividend is a question of workplace struggles and political economy, and I find economic concepts such as capitalism and the productivity dividend to be essential in understanding the situation we are in. 4) An important question is certainly how to make work meaningful, but also whether we need work to have meaning. It does seem to be a capitalist preoccupation to define ourselves and our lives’ meaning in terms of work. In fact, I’d say it is the fundamental spiritual/personal/psychological lie of capitalism—that without work, we are nothing. We tend to create an opposition between work/meaning on the one hand and leisure/individualistic hedonism on the other. What if by leisure we include participation in community, social life, and cultural creativity, not merely what you could call entertainment? Could we not attain all the meaning we want or need through that leisure? What about instituting a campaign for meaningful leisure (by which we don’t mean volunteer work, but something else altogether)? Benjamin Hunnicutt describes the development of what we could call a leisure ethic rather than a work ethic in his most recent book, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream. Paul LaFargue’s classic pamphlet “The Right to Be Lazy”, or Kathy Weeks’ The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Anti-Work Politics and Post-Work Imaginaries take an even stronger anti-work view. I’d venture that a working-class leisure ethic is what has served historically as the cultural foundation of a rejection of constant and increasing consumption, expressed through various forms of work resistance. My piece “Radical Leisure” in Monthly Review this past summer has more thoughts on this monthlyreview.org/2016/06/01/radical-leisure/ . In fact, I think that the meaningfulness of much of caring work has more in common with the kinds of meaning a well-developed leisure ethic can provide than with the meaning that stems from a craft work ethic. A struggle for meaningful leisure might shed light on caring work that the current discourse on work has a hard time with. Certainly there are craft issues of skill in caring work (as an RN and midwife of 20+ years clinical practice, I staunchly support this view), but many satisfactions of care work stem from the rewards of companionship, accompaniment, support, and love, which are experiences that might be more likely to come from meaningful leisure rather than meaningful craft work. The craft-work-oriented rewards of mastery or the “transcendence of setbacks” Klitgaard describes are rewards that result from what is to me a somewhat gender-limited experience of work. Renewed intellectual attention to leisure, which seemed as though it would be an academic field of note a few decades ago, might allow a different kind of understanding of care work. Thanks again for this essay raising a topic of crucial importance. I’m looking forward to the conversation to come. Eva Swidler Goddard College ************************************* On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Great Transition Network wrote: >From Paul Raskin ----- Dear Great Transition Network, As we bid adieu to 2016, a banner year for the Fortress World scenario, what can we do but turn with renewed resolve to the work of transition? There is no alternative (to hijack TINA, Margaret Thatcher’s infamous justification for neoliberalism). Anyway, the work itself is a privilege and a gratification. This brings me to the topic of our JANUARY discussion: “The Struggle for Meaningful Work.” Kent Klitgaard’s Viewpoint, so titled, argues that the degradation of work, like the degradation of community and the environment, is inherent in the logic of capital accumulation, but receives insufficient attention. The struggle for meaningful jobs, he contends, ought to stand alongside parallel struggles for justice, equity, and sustainability as core components of a transformative praxis. Kent’s thoughtful piece is inspired by his own search for meaningful work in a career that has spanned cabinet-making to ecological economics. It highlights a critical dimension of a Great Transition that warrants heightened emphasis, or so it seems to me. Do you agree? Would you revise its formulations? Please read it at www.greattransition.org/ publication/meaningful-work, and share your thoughts. This Viewpoint will be published in February, along with selected comments drawn from the forthcoming discussion and an interview with Nancy Folbre on “The Caring Economy.” Comments are welcome through JANUARY 31. Warm wishes to you and yours for a healthy and meaningful 2017. Looking forward, Paul Raskin GTI Director ----- Hit reply to post a message Or see thread and reply online at greattransition.org/forum/gti-discussions/187-the-struggle- for-meaningful-work/2194 Need help? Email jcohn(a)tellus.org ------------------------------------------------------- Hit reply to post a message Or see thread and reply online at http://greattransition.org/forum/gti-discussions/187-the- struggle-for-meaningful-work/2201 Need help? Email jcohn(a)tellus.org -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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