bullshit jobs
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shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 12 Oct 16
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Postcapitalism and the city<br /><br /> - 0 views
blog.p2pfoundation.net/...12
'paul mason' p2pfoundation post-capitalism information jukkap2p technology commons
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Things that in all previous eras of capitalism the elite desired to be as cheap as possible—to ease wage pressures—are now made as expensive as possible
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capital migrates away from production and from private-sector services towards public sector services.
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But as soon as technology allowed it, we started to create organisations where the positive effects of networked collaboration were not captured by the market.
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Fortunately there is a third impact of info-tech. It has begun to create organisational and business models where collaboration is more important than price or value.
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The technology itself is in revolt against the monopolised ownership of intellectual property, and the private capture of externalities.
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We must promote the transition to a non-capitalist form of economy which unleashes all the suppressed potential of information technology, for productivity, well.being and culture.
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The strategic aim is: to reduce the amount of work done to the minimum; to move as much as possible of human activity out of the market and state sectors into the collaborative sector; to produce more stuff for free.
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If the aim is for humanity to do as little work as possible, you can do it through three mechanisms. One is to automate. The other is to reduce the input costs to labour, so that we can survive on less wages and less work. The third is to push forward rapidly the de-linking of work and wages.
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We know what it’s there for—to hand public assets to the private sector so that the profits of decaying businesses are temporarily boosted
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The basic income is an idea whose time is coming, because there won’t be enough work to go around. For me the basic income is a one-off subsidy for automation—to un-hook humanity from bullshit job creation and promote the delinking of work and wages.
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The building block is the co-op, the credit union, the NGO, the non-profit company, the peer-to-peer lender and the purely voluntary or social enterprise.
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the state and eventually the commons should have first rights to all the data just the same as in a republic it owns all the land
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Ultimately, however, the greatest good comes from the common ownership and exploitation of data, because it establishes the principle that this vast new information resource—which is our collaborative behaviour captured as data—is part of the commons.
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But you would attract the most innovative capitalists on earth, and you would make the city vastly more livable for the million-plus people who call it home.
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No. The desperate, frantic “survival capitalists” would go away—the rip-off consultancies; the low-wage businesses; the rent-extractors.
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All the other challenges would remain: the environmental challenge—not just low carbon but the preservation of quality living environments in a city sometimes deluged with visitors. Also the ageing challenge and the debt challenge.
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I could be completely wrong. But if I am right, it makes sense for all cities to ask themselves: could we become the first city to begin a demonstrable and tangible transition away from neoliberal capitalism, towards a society of high equality, high well-being, high collaboration?
OPINION: Iran's Citizen's Income Scheme and its Lessons | Basic Income News - 0 views
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The Sharing Economy: Capitalism's Last Stand? - Our World - 0 views
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I’d like to set something straight: the collaborative economy and sharing economy (or collaborative consumption) are not the same concept.
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If we want to assess whether it should be seen as the first part of a new economic paradigm or as capitalism’s latest trick to survive at all costs, we have to analyze its likely effects on inequality.
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From a collective standpoint, it might well be better to have access to a resource rather than owning it.
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But if someone asks you to free yourself from all earthly possessions, you should always ask: if it’s not mine, then who owns it?
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Employees and customers are but a mean to an end, and in general, a good way to maximize return on investment is to get your customers to pay as much as possible (non-price competitiveness) and on the other side to pay your employees as little as possible (price competitiveness).
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This point is the most controversial of all. Sharing economy services could accelerate the phenomenon of job destruction.
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Despite all those nice speeches about empowerment and entrepreneurship, people in the sharing economy are nothing but an extreme precariat
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a new deal had to be made: people would no longer be paid according to the value they actually produced, but they would get — seemingly — unlimited access to credit.
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computers and robots will soon replace most human labor anyway. Wage labor cannot be saved, and rather than fighting long-lost battles, people should start thinking seriously about solutions such as Universal Basic Income.
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If you cannot predict something with a reasonable amount of certainty, stop arguing endlessly about it and start acting towards the outcome you would like to see
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What happens next, no one can tell. Are Silicon Valley venture capitalistss currently being fooled into creating the embryo of a P2P economic paradigm, in which they will lose most of their influence? Or are the enthusiasts talking about empowerment being tricked into creating a new kind of serfdom?
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Will big companies be able to face new competition from startups and win over new customers? If that is your main concern, you should probably stop talking about communities and peers. If the collaborative economy cannot help you solve our growing inequality problem, it should be of no interest to you.
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shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 04 Oct 12
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Public Services & Democracy | Unleashing the creativity of labour - 1 views
www.tni.org/...unleashing-creativity-labour
stuttgart commons kaupunki kunnallispolitiikka coops cooperative social commons commons.fi
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Something interesting is going on in the city of Stuttgart, one of the regional success stories of the German system of Mitbestimmung, or ‘co-determination’, where workers have a role in the management of companies. The dominant trend in Germany is of co‐determination becoming ‘crisis corporatism’, in which the unions concede low wages and increases in hours, ostensibly to save jobs. But in Germany’s southern manufacturing centre, in contrast, trade unionists are holding out for workers having real control over the conditions and hours of work – and over the purpose of their labour too.
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In Stuttgart’s public services, the union Verdi has combined a strong fight over wages and conditions with an effective and popular campaign to improve and defend public services. In response, the city government – a coalition of the SPD, Green, Die Linke and local party Stuttgart Ökologisch Sozial – is re‐municipalising several services that the previous CDU city government sold off.
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Meanwhile, among the 20,000 workers at the Daimler Mercedes factories, a radical grouping in the IG Metall union is also looking beyond bargaining over the price of labour, instead holding out for shorter working hours and an alternative view of the future of the car industry. ‘We have a huge amount of intelligence in this factory,’ says works council member Tom Adler, also an active member of Stuttgart Ökologisch Sozial. ‘It’s not beyond the capacity of our designers and engineers to think beyond the motor car.’
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The reaction of Stuttgart workers to the destruction of public services and the perversion of co-determination indicates that austerity measures are coming slap-bang up against the legacy of two periods of democratic and egalitarian reform. The first is post-war reconstruction, including the welfare state. The second is the system of co-determination, which was strengthened in response to rebellions in the 60s and 70s. However, the resistance now, in Stuttgart as elsewhere in Europe, is not simply over the erosion of the institutions created in these periods of reform – after all, that erosion has been taking place for at least a decade. It is a profound and uncertain clash of cultures, expectations and increasingly activities, shaped by these periods of reform and rebellion, across generations. People’s expectations, or at least sense of legitimate claims, are for cultural equality as well as moves toward economic equality, and for meaningful and dignified work to match the decades of expansion of higher education.
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There are also the spreading networks of autonomous hackers and geeks creating open, non-proprietorial, software and therefore effectively creating a key part of the infrastructure of today’s society as a digital commons
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They all involve forms of labour which cannot be understood in the same terms as the conventional wage contract
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nd the list also includes trade unionists who are taking on the role of organising for the common good in defence, or for the improvement of public services, or to push their company towards climate jobs.
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All kinds of co-ops, cultural and social centres have emerged or been strengthened by these combinations of refusal and creation.
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What this variety of activity has in common is that it is based on collaborative forms of creativity
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can the public sector be transformed in a democratic, open and egalitarian direction against the forces of marketisation? If so, it can be a major economic player, especially in urban centres, with considerable bargaining power as contractor, as employer, and as trend-setter and creator of new communicative infrastructure.
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The spread of information, knowledge and communication technologies not only enables theoretical expertise and practical knowledge to be shared on a previously unimaginable scale, but also creates tools for co-operation and self-managed co‐ordination of the most complex, multi-actor, transnational processes.
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All these developments also illustrate the significance of democracy – transparency, participatory decision- making, the recognition of and means of sharing plural sources of knowledge – as a source of productivity, a base for a new economics.
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What would it mean to think about industrial policies not so much in terms of the goal of nudging the private sector to invest, but more in terms of how to release, develop and extend the creativity of labour in its broadest sense?
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How to expand and strengthen ‘productive democracy’? How to enhance the capacities of those whose ‘only’ means of production is their creative potential – and the social co-operation through which they can develop and realise this potential?
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First, it’s come from the kinds of challenges that the trade union movement is facing in defending jobs in manufacturing as well as public services.
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The second sphere for the rethinking of labour has been through the renewal of the co-operative movement. And a third development is the powerful and ambiguous trend opened up by the new technology towards new kinds of collaboration is the peer to peer, distributed productions and the digital commons, as referred to earlier. This ‘sphere’ is not separate: it could expand both the transformative power of workers already rethinking labour in conventional employment, and the scale and reach of co-operatives.
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One increasingly significant context of convergence is over ‘climate jobs’. We’ve noted already the growth of co‐operatives creating and distributing renewable energy. The ravages of climate change are leading some trade unionists to demand that workers, whether currently unemployed or employed in high-carbon industries, be allowed to deploy their know-how to manufacture wind turbines, solar water heaters and other parts of the infrastructure of a low-carbon economy.
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Another potential focal point for the mutual reinforcement of different forms of productive democracy is cities.
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They illustrate ways in which labour could be self-organised, on the basis of social values underlying its purpose, use or context.
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The implication of my argument here is that policymakers now need to work on how to support the economic creativity of millions of people, whether in existing workplaces or working precariously outside the formal labour market. At present these capacities are being wasted.
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They need specific forms of support, some of it from the state, and some of it from organisations that share or could be persuaded to share their goals. These could include the trade unions, the co-operative movement, some parts of the church, foundations, and the growing experiments in crowdfunding, democratically controlled loan funds and so on.
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As far as existing workplaces are concerned, we need states to not only restore and extend rights that protect trade unions in their struggles over wages and conditions, but also to give workers rights to control the purpose of their labour: for example, a legal prohibition on closures or redundancies without alternatives being publicly explored, and in the case of large companies, public inquiries at which alternatives would be presented. Labour is a commons – it should not be wasted. We need a new kind of ‘industrial strategy’ – one designed to support the creation of value that is not only monetary and requires autonomy from the pressures of the labour market. These should include a basic ‘citizen’s income’ (see page 34). Shorter working hours would be another measure that would serve a similar end.
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We also need a regional policy that gives real support to cities as hubs of economic development, through direct public employment, and through support for co-ops involving regional banks. These could learn from the operations of the Mondragon bank and become a source of support and co‐ordination to networks of co-ops and other collaborative means of nurturing and realising the creativity of labour, rather than operating as banks of the traditional kind.
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These are mere illustrations of industrial policies which recognise the capacities of generations shaped by expectations of cultural as well as political and economic equality. To realise these capacities as a resource for a new model of economic development requires rebuilding the distributional gains of the welfare state – but it also requires going further than that. We need to create not simply full employment, but the conditions by which people can creatively collaborate to meet the needs of a changing society and a precarious planet.
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shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 08 Feb 15
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Co-operative Commonwealth: De-commodifying Land and Money Part 2 | Commons Transition - 0 views
commonstransition.org/odifying-land-and-money-part-2
cooperative commonwealth land osuuskunta maanomistus velka debt osuuskuntakeissi Conaty commonstransition
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in Germany, Christian Christiansen championed the founding of a number of rural savings and loan co-operatives that went by the acronym JAK, short for Jord Arbete Kapital (“Land Labour Capital”)
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There were other models that flourished. Dr. Thomas Bowkett introduced a mutual organization in the 1840s to provide housing and smaller loans interest-free.(7) Twenty years later, Richard Starr made some adjustments to the system, and the “Starr-Bowkett” societies spread fast.
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During the industrial revolution English working people were excluded from bank lending though pawnbroking was rife. Mutual aid savings clubs developed interest-free lending systems for housing. The most successful were the Terminating Building Societies for buying land and building houses.
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Operationally, JAK is very similar to a credit union, except that members do not earn any interest on their savings or dividends on their shares.
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The total cost of a JAK loan covers four things:(12)loan appraisal and set-up cost at a fee that is 2-3% of the approved loan value.an annual administration fee equal to 1% of the loan.an annual fee of approximately $30 to support the JAK educational system and volunteer services.(13)an equity deposit equal to a 6% of loan value to cover risk on any loan in the portfolio.
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Members are strongly encouraged to pre-save in order to qualify for a loan.(15) Members also contract to continue saving while they are repaying their loans.
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The Greenbacks would not be backed by gold, but by the farmers’ crops, which would be stored in sub-Treasury warehouses paid for by the government.
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he had led the introduction of a paper money not backed by gold or silver, and had shown that the government could create, issue, and circulate by fiat the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers.
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the privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity.
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JAK banking, CoopHab and Community Land Trusts work well but are below national policy radar. This is not entirely the case for co-operative commonwealth systems.
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National Farmers Alliance and Co-operative Union, led by Charles Macune, developed the Sub-Treasury Plan.
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So this was not simply a co-operative currency. It was a new national currency under a co-operative and state partnership to expunge the debt peonage imposed by merchants and bankers.
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Infuriated, farmers and workers created their own party in 1891 to carry forwardmonetary reform and a co-operative economy. The new Populist party won some local, state and Congressional elections before falling into decline after 1895.
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He argued that a clear-cut and labour-saving solution would be for Government to create new money, interest-free as “Social Credit.”
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Second, Douglas proposed that publicly-owned producer banks be set up in each region of the UK to provide finance debt-free to industry and enterprises.
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From 1929 monetary reform attracted a wide audience In the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada with growing grassroots calls ranging from public banking to universal basic income.(34) The New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt took inspiration from John Maynard Keynes.