Now that I have stupidly missed my flight to Montreal and I will not be able to confront with our friends and comrades on a friendly open spaces we could have been building together in corporeal, I like to share and remind this alternative vision for transition to a new economy; I tried to draft, as a summary of what I learned and deduce from the collective and truly open discussions that took place on the lists like p2p-f, and networked labour, since more then 2 years. Here is the presentation mode: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_kM4x3RhnHdSWRGeXY3TGk1aTA/edit?usp=docslis... Will be hoping to translate into broader text, in article form, but still hoping that it would make any contribution to any event taking place on commons, and transition, or exodus from capitalist mode of free fall. Best, Orsan

On 4 aug. 2016, at 08:50, Pat Conaty <[email protected]> wrote:

This is an interesting, frank and robust discussion. Thanks Peter for your comments on dialectics.

Bob I like your reference to the Non-partisan League in North Dakota that built on the agrarian socialist activism over decades and reaching back to the Greenback Labor efforts to practically tackle the root and branch land and money questions. I refer to all this and other forgotten bits of co-operative economics history in the three part paper I sent to Orsan at the outset of this exchange.

The work of Jessica Gordon Nembhard in her book Collective Courage and her recent paper on building co-operative commonwealth is on the same page with what Michel and I are advocating. She has recently set this out in a Next System paper for the Democracy Collaborative in the USA along with other recent papers by David Bollier and my colleague Mike Lewis in Canada. Mike’s paper is on co-operative economic democracy in action. To get a flavour of Jessica’s argument see her interview on the rich but completely repressed history of co-operative economics and the civil rights movement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TVIghQMkBg

All the best

Pat

...

On 4 Aug 2016, at 01:05, Frederic Janssens <[email protected]> wrote:

For the general question of the 250 year old battle between revoluton and reformism, and possiblity or not to escape this dualist perspective; I have discovered and am now reading Dave Elder-Vass.

http://www.eldervass.com/publications.htm

I have not not read enough to know if I agree with everything, but he seems to have a philosophically/sociologically argued set of concepts that enable to escape dualism in reasonning about those matters. Quite compatible with what Michel and Pat try to do.

I am now reading his last book :

Elder-Vass, D. (2016). Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dave Elder-Vass's The Causal Power of Social Structures (2010)

is available online : http://profs.basu.ac.ir/spakseresht/free_space/the%20causal%20power%20of%20s...

...

On 3 August 2016 at 22:49, Bob Haugen <[email protected]> wrote: Yup.

On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 3:48 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:

...

It often seems to me that the need to justify ones own position as opposed to, rather than in addition to, or including others, comes from the structural imperative to earn a living, which necessitates offering something different and therefore of value in

the market place. This is the inevitable concomitant of a capitalist economy which requires people to have something of value which they can sell to earn a living - labour, intellect, care, etc.

Anna

On 3 Aug 2016, at 21:31, Bob Haugen <[email protected]> wrote:

One of your comments resonated with me. We have pretty much abandoned seeking funding and have also stopped responding to request from other people to help them with funding. That leaves holes. But I think we gotta figure out how to support our own activities as much as possible. I know, not always possible.

We could try dues...that's what the old Nonpartisan League did and they took over North Dakota and created the state bank, among other things.

On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 3:25 PM, Orsan <[email protected]> wrote:

Well I was expecting you and Peter would make this warning. And this argument is about the methodology of analysis, or as Madron put it, and Fabians would totally agree 'operational complexity management'. I think at the current point of time complexity managers has more advanced tools and infrastructures to manage the complexity that opposition forces added on the complexity created by the intra-elite struggle. On the one hand there emerges an alliance of 'delayists' (around next system project, new economy alliance, de-growth so on) and on the radical left 'acclerationists' are forming a constellation (around Negri and so on). Some from left like Michael Aalbert, and parecon, David Harvey and rabel cities, negrists or cognitive captalists 'platform cooperatvism', Eric Olin Wright and real Utopias.. are counted in the next system alliance. On the driving seat, as John Restakis prompted sometimes ago, there are networks which are funded by OAK foundation of UK Royal-state, Rockefe

llar, Ford, Soros foundation so on. These formed a founder alliance called Edge Funders, whom Michel thinks are radicals. They fund all sort of spaces, from WSF, to Left Forum, from the events Michel and Pat mentioned, to Ripess -Synergia people (social solidarity economy discourse), from TNI to all sort of movement building hubs. Yes There are contradictions every where, there is a chaos too, but also there are some orders and regularities that are telling us something, and most worrisome is no one is talking about with the fear of not getting any funding and suffer economically. That state of 'being determines the consciousness'. The more no one is willing to talk about these openly the more things go worse. That is all I wanted to say..

Orsan

On 3 aug. 2016, at 22:03, Bob Haugen <[email protected]> wrote:

I snipped the previous contents, they were overloading my email

viewer. And deleted the WSF from the distro list so they stop

complaining at me.

Dear Orsan, I agree that alliances with aspects of the powers-that-be

pose dangers. And co-optation happens. Fortunately, they don't want to

ally with me anyway, otherwise I would need to thread some of those

needles.

I would, however, repost what I understood from Peter's message. If we

are dialectical materialists, we gotta do a dialectical analysis of

all these forces and their contradictions and also and maybe

especially their internal contradictions.

And even after the revolution or transformation or whatever, there

will still be contradictions. That's life.

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