Skip to main content

Home/ Commons.fi/ Group items tagged P2PFoundation

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Jukka Peltokoski

Postcapitalism and the city - 0 views

  • bullshit jobs
  • Capitalism’s response mechanisms
  • a) to maximise capacity utilisation of low-skilled labour and of assets.
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • b) to artificially inflate the price and profitability of labour inputs
  • 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
  • capital migrates away from production and from private-sector services towards public sector services.
  • capitalism being replaced by a stagnant neo-feudalism
  • central bank, pumping money into the system
  • the state, propping up effectively insolvent banks
  • the migrant labour exploiter
  • the innovator someone who invents a way of extracting rent from low-wage people
  • 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.
  • Wikipedia
  • 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.
  • Linux
  • the platform co-operatives
  • The technology itself is in revolt against the monopolised ownership of intellectual property, and the private capture of externalities.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The city is where the networked individual wants to live
  • First—be overt. Help people to conceptualise the transition by actually talking about it.
  • Next—switch off the great neoliberal privatisation machine.
  • 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
  • The next proposal is more radical: model reality as a complex system.
  • Next—promote the basic income.
  • 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.
  • However, it’s a transitional measure.
  • Next—actively promote the collaborative sector over the market and the state.
  • You have to understand the benefits of these entities are not completely measurable in GDP terms.
  • 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.
  • You have to promote new ways of measuring activity and progress.
  • Finally, understand and fight the battle over the externalities.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • Would capitalism collapse?
  • 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.
  • No. The desperate, frantic “survival capitalists” would go away—the rip-off consultancies; the low-wage businesses; the rent-extractors.
  • 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.
  • a common platform for the left, for social democracy and for liberal capitalism
  • 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?
  • the collaborative city, the city of participatory democracy, the networked city
Jukka Peltokoski

Connecting the Dots 8: The Commons as the Response to the Structural Crises of the Glob... - 0 views

  • In our contribution, we want to stress the key importance of what we call a “value regime,” or simply put, the rules that determine what society and the economy consider to be of value. We must first look at the underlying modes of production — i.e. how value is created and distributed — and then construct solutions must that help create these changes in societal values. The emerging answer for a new mode of value creation is the re-emergence of the Commons.
  • In our view, the dominant political economy has three fatal flaws.
  • Pseudo-Abundance
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • “Intellectual property”
  • continuous capital accumulation
  • overuse and depletion of natural resources
  • Scarcity Engineering
  • Scarcity engineering is what we call this continuous attempt to undo natural abundance where it occurs.
  • We could call this pseudo-abundance,
  • the ability of this privatized knowledge to create profits
  • A good recent example of this “patent lag” effect is the extraordinary growth of 3D printing, once the technology lost its patents.
  • Perpetually Increasing Social Injustice
  • The global open design communities engaging in peer production and mutualization of productive knowledge have no such perverse incentives. These communities design to ensure participation and are “naturally” inclined to design sustainable products and services.
  • To what degree does the Commons and peer-to-peer production function as a potential solution for these three interrelated structural crises of capitalism?
  • Digital networks (such as the internet) have recently enabled a new type of Commons where the knowledge required for human action and value creation has been mutualized. This has led to global open design communities, which jointly create open knowledge pools (e.g. Wikipedia), free software (e.g. the Linux Operating System) or open designs to enable physical production
  • Commons-based peer production emerges when technology enables the creation of open, contributory systems that create Commons.
  • more and more wealth into fewer hands through compound interest, rent seeking, purchasing legislation, etc.
  • The privatization and patenting of knowledge and technical solutions hampers the widespread distribution of necessary innovations. No such impediments exist in the open contributory systems of peer production communities, where innovation anywhere in the network is instantly available to the whole.
  • Peer production, independent of the profit motive, invites and facilitates the creation of solidarity-based forms of economic entities. Being generative towards human communities, these entities are more likely based on socially just forms of value sharing.
  • The Revolution Is Already Happening
  • responses take three forms:1. The sustainability and ecological/environmental movements, attempting to find solutions for the planet’s survival;2. The “Open,” “Commons” and “Sharing” movements, stressing the need for shareable knowledge and mutualized physical resources;3. The cooperative and solidarity economy, focusing on fairness.
  • The good news is that Commons-based peer production is the best way to bring these three necessary aspects together into one coherent system. However, for this to happen, the various movements need enabling tools and capacities. An example is the open source circular economy
  • Similarly, open and platform cooperativism — the convergence of socially just forms of production with shareable knowledge — allows all contributing citizens to create fair, generative livelihoods around the shared resources they need and co-create.
  • We’ve seen post-capitalist practices emerging since the late 20th century — for example, the 1983 invention of the universally available browser. Citizens have been empowered to create value through open contributory systems; these create universally available knowledge, which in turn can be used for material production.
  • emerging globally
Jukka Peltokoski

Book of the Day: Funding an Economy of Civic Spaces in the Cooperative City through Com... - 0 views

  • Funding the Cooperative City focuses on the post-welfare transition of today’s European societies: with austerity measures and the financialisation of real estate stocks and urban services, the gradual withdrawal of the state and municipal administrations from providing certain facilities and maintaining certain spaces have prompted citizen initiatives and professional groups to organise their own services and venues.
  • The self-organisation of new spaces of work, culture and social welfare was made possible by various socio-economic circumstances: unemployment, solidarity networks, changing real estate prices and ownership patters created opportunities for stepping out of the regular dynamisms of real estate development.
  • cooperative ownership
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • new types of investors, operating along principles of ethics or sustainability, or working on moving properties off the market.
  • inventing new ways to enable, finance and govern community-run spaces.
  • European municipalities responded to this challenge in a variety of ways.
  • The question if community capital can really cure the voids left behind by the welfare state has generated fierce debates in the past years.
  • crowdfunded urban infrastructures.
  • in the course of the economic crisis, many European cities witnessed the emergence of a parallel welfare infrastructure:
  • This collection brings together protagonists from various cities to help shaping a new European culture of urban development based on community-driven initiatives, civic economic models and cooperative ownership
  • participatory budgeting,
  • crowdfunding
  • community organisations
  • invest
  • pre-financed
  • some cities chose to support local economy and create more resilient neighbourhoods with self-sustaining social services through grant systems
  • priority neighbourhoods
  • The granted projects, chosen through an open call, have to prove their economic sustainability and have to spend the full amount in one year.
  • the public sector plays an important role in strengthening civil society in some European cities, many others witnessed the emergence of new welfare services provided by the civic economy completely outside or without any help by the public sector
  • n some occasions, community contribution appears in the form of philanthropist donation to support the construction, renovation or acquisition of playgrounds, parks, stores, pubs or community spaces. In others, community members act as creditors or investors in an initiative that needs capital, in exchange for interest, shares or the community ownership of local assets
  • Besides aggregating resources from individuals to support particular cases, community infrastructure projects are also helped by ethical investors.
  • Creating community ownership over local assets and keeping profits benefit local residents and services is a crucial component of resilient neighbourhoods.
  • complementary currencies
  • The fact that many of the hundreds of projects supported by civic crowdfunding platforms are community spaces, underlines two phenomena: the void left behind by a state that gradually withdrew from certain community services, and the urban impact of community capital created through the aggregation of individual resources.
1 - 20 of 26 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page