Dear Marty, apologies, I have read your two contributions today, 12 days late because of email overload, but found them very interesting, I take it in as great info and experience on your part, but don't have a specific reaction to challenge your points, Michel On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 7:20 AM, Marty Heyman <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear Michel,
As you rightly point out, I am new to this P2P space with you all. I come from a different vocabulary and point of starting perspective and some of your language causes me to stumble and lurch a bit.
I agree that we need to maximize the number of persons and teams working on the material and immaterial “Resources” that would contribute to the various “Commons” (plural) of interest. I also agree we have much work to do to actualize the link between the voluntary (unpaid, uncorked) contributions to various Bazaars and the production of the means of sustenance (contributions to livelihood). My personal work and that in which I am involved with GEO is pretty direct as we are VERY focused on bringing help to communities in precarity or outright poverty.
I don’t respond so well to the “self-reproduction of the commoners” point as that is an educational and personal-transformational issue. You can teach someone to fish and they can feed their family and neighbors. It is a bigger problem to teach them to teach others to fish and to reach out for others to teach (self-reproduction of the “communing urge” as it were). We find this secondary step quite problematic even after we get buy-in on the first step.
As an Open Source Software company, we save discarded programmers of note when we have the surplus cash-flow to make that possible. The number discarded by the big sponsors, annually, as they stumble and bumble from one “objective” to the next is much larger than we can afford to rectify. We concentrate on a few leaders in a very specialized niche (several in the past couple of years) and mourn for all those we know who we simply can’t help. Your point is philosophically reasonable but often, it is all we can do to place good people in wildly inappropriate positions for lack of opportunities to provide for their “means of sustenance” any other way.
As a member of GEO, I DO get to see many of the folks you point to and the energy and commitment is always an inspiration. We are particularly focused this past year or so on the Federation of co-operative ventures (commons’s in the vocabulary I see in places in Europe) to get the solidarity economic benefits of tighter value-flows, increased value velocities and the like. Some of us are convinced that alternative currencies are a critical foundation piece. Others are more focused on democratic solidarity construction in “the community.” There’s a lot of room to make a difference.
— Marty Heyman 510-290-6484
On Jul 27, 2015, at 3:17 AM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 2:12 PM Subject: Re: Continuing to fill in the context
I'll share my perspective on this, which may not be that of the others copied in,
my first inclination today is that the focus needs to be on constructing commons, immaterial and material, everywhere we can, and to create vehicles so that this allows the creation of livelihoods and the self-reproduction of the commoners. While the struggle between labor and capital remains a reality as long as the current political economy dominates, I think personally that all struggles that focus on bringing more labor into subordinate working relations in view of redistribution, are no longer operative, and that we must focus on counter-economic networks, with decommodified cooperative labor co-constructing commons. This means, as first suggested by Pat Conaty on this list, to create a in-between between the commons and capital, i.e. to focus on cooperative accumulation. But that cooperative accumulation can no longer be merely a coop that competes on the capitalist marketplace, but a coop that co-produces commons, and works with non-capitalist capital in a non-capitalist market. This means concretely working on the creation of entrepreneurial coalitions that are co-dependent and organized around the commons that they are co-creating.
Concretely, at the territorial level, this looks like what Stephanie Rearick is doing in Madison, https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/100-women-who-are-co-creating-the-p2p-society..., or what Marion Rousseaux is trying to do in Lille with Encommuns.org https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/100-women-who-are-co-creating-the-p2p-society..., i.e. create interlocking value chains for the cooperative commonwealth, at the local or the translocal level.
At the more 'trans-national' level, this means a direct focus on the creation of phyles, i.e. ethical, 'generative' business networks that sustain a community and its commons. This means projects like lasindias.net, enspiral, ethos, and others. (marty, you'll find descriptions of all those in the p2pfoundation.net wiki, via the search box on the top right)
On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 11:08 PM, Marty Heyman <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi to the others on the list.
My quibble, such as it is, is that Capital (Finance) pervades and largely controls … especially “the conversation.” A program to reverse its enclosures of the economic, political, and social spheres would appear to need a core of equally committed and motivated strategists with the resources to create a contrary “movement” to mobilize wealth, power, and public sentiment. Absent the “Davos” of anti-Capitalism (most importantly it’s “core team”), I don’t know how to unseat them and their “system.”
We need to continue to educate me on the philosophical underpinnings of terms like “the common good”. Language that feels like it pits “the common good” against “the private good” most broadly seem overly broad. Certainly the “common good” is the aggregate of the “private good”(s) of some collection of persons (and institutions). The usage here seems to want to exclude the “private good” of Finance, Capital, and Corrupt Politics …but such distinctions are hard to draw accurately as the Commons (Co-operative) and Solidarity movements rely heavily on Capital from somewhere for seed money.
Finally, not all the “Externalities” lead to desertification and useless waste. Vast bodies of code, design, and other technological artifacts are abandoned by Capital and Finance to our “Digital Commons”. I often think of Open Source Software as much a vast scrap-heap of discarded and abandoned code as I do a bazaar or innovation. There is too much redundant, self-gratifying “Innovation” and not enough refinement of the material already just sitting there waiting to be improved. I think, ultimately, we are seeing much the same with agricultural lands in climate zones considered non-optimal for industrial agriculture. Opportunities abound for self-directed, democratically governed initiatives and ventures IMHO.
— Marty Heyman 510-290-6484
-- 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/