I got this from Pat Kane, an initiative that resonates with Umair Haque's Capitalist Manifesto<br><br>See: <a href="http://fearlessrevolution.com/blog/introducing-common.html" target="_blank">http://fearlessrevolution.com/blog/introducing-common.html</a> <br>
<br>"Benefiting people, communities, society, the environment and future
generations is the new advantage in business. Our <em>new capitalist</em>
brand is about transitioning from competitive advantage to
collaborative advantage. COMMON is a brand that is community designed,
community owned, and community directed. It is a single open source
brand � a living network � for rapidly prototyping many progressive
businesses that unleash creativity to solve social problems."<br><br>Michel's comments:<br><br>why is this interesting, well, in the context of the stress that our friends like Massimo and Silvia Federico place on opposing 'capitalist commons'<br>
<br>my question is the following, generally, as I don't know much about this particular initiative:<br><br>- are these people 'enemies' simply because they are 'pro-capitalist'<br><br>- or are they friends because their heart is in the right place, and they want to create and share value, and have generally progressive social goals<br>
<br>This is not just a matter of analysis, but also of language, and it poses a key question: should a new 'hegemony' (not the right word, I know, but even in a distributed world, something like that does exist) for a progressive commons approach, not necessarily include progressive social and other enterpreneurs ?<br>
<br>My answer would tend to be yes, as many young people in the West, but even outside the West, especially here in East Asia, think that way; they want to see progress, don't believe in old-style socialism, believe in cooperation and sharing, but believe only free enterpreneurship offers progress and dynamism for their society and their own projects.<br>
<br>Such an approach would require an analysis that distinguished exploitative commons approaches, from genuine commons; but also in a language that doesn't construct such people as enemies, and a pragmatic openness.<br>
<br>To come back to the notion of capitalist/anticapitalist commons, through an example.<br><br>Take the free software movement, a movement of a particular labour aristocracy, that has resulted in the creation of a strong commons, strong relatively autonomous communities, but also with a strong ecology of supportive corporate entities, that both profit from those commons, but also, pay wages to free software developers, practice various forms of benefit sharing, and support the communities and commons in various ways. (this of course needs to be problematized, but nevertheless, this is an important side of the equation)<br>
<br>So here we have a commons that is both instrumental to corporate entities and 'capitalism', but also beneficial in substantial ways to a particular type of knowledge workers. In this scenario, both sides have both concurring and antagonistic interests.<br>
<br>The model of the free software movement is not unique, as it is now largely replicated in many other open knowledge, open design and open manufacturing projects, for whom it served as a successfull template<br><br>I'm� not advocating either uncritical support of the model, nor a pure antagonistic approach, but rather an approach that starts with the interests of the peer producing communities and their commons, and looks at how they can optimally reproduce within current economic and power structures, and advance their goals, step by step, until they are stronger to achieve more fundamental transformations,<br>
<br>In many cases, the creation of a successful ecology of corporate entities, and the attraction of progressive young enterpreneurs who may be willing to create non profit maximisation market-operating entitities, will be a sine qua non for the social reproduction and growth of the concrete commons and their contributors/users<br>
<br>Michel<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a>� - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br>
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<br>Commons Strategies Group, <a href="http://www.commonsstrategies.org/">http://www.commonsstrategies.org/</a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>