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Jukka Peltokoski

Owning is the New Sharing | Open Co-op Commons - 1 views

open.coop/...owning-is-the-new-sharing

osuuskunta omistus yhteisötalous coop opencoop jakamistalous neweconomy osuuskuntateoria commons p2p sharing owning jukkap2p

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 28 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “I’m working to find a steady economic base,” he said. “I don’t really want to put it into the hands of the VCs.” Venture capitalists, that is — the go-to source of quick and easy money for clever tech entrepreneurs like him. He’d get cash, but they’d get the reins.
  • new company,Swarm, the world’s first experiment in what he was calling “cryptoequity.”
  • Swarm would be a crowdfunding platform, using its own virtual currency rather than dollars; rather than just a thank-you or a kickback, it would reward backers with a genuine stake in the projects they support.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • Entrepreneurs could sidestep the VCs by turning to a “swarm” of small investors — and maybe supplant the entire VC system. By the end of the summer, he’d raised more than a million dollars in cryptocurrency. The legality of the model is uncertain,
  • High hopes for a liberating Internet have devolved into the dominance of a few mega-companies and the NSA’s watchful algorithms. Platforms entice users to draw their communities into an apparently free and open commons, only to gradually enclose it by tweaking terms of service, diluting privacy, or charging fees for essential features.
  • Facebook started flocking to Ello
  • The line between workers and customers has never been so blurry. Online platforms depend on their users
  • looking for ways to build platforms of their own.
  • VC-backed sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber have caused trouble for legacy industries, but gone is the illusion that they are doing it with actual sharing.
  • OuiShare, which connects sharing-economy entrepreneurs around the world
  • it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.
  • Loomio is now being used by governments, organizations, and schools; a significant portion of the current usage comes from Spain’s ascendant political party, Podemos.
  • new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between.
  • aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.
  • Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “zero marginal cost society” in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations.
  • People are recognizing that doing business differently will require changing who gets to own what.
  • form of ownership
  • Cooperative intelligence
  • Occupy’s kind of direct democracy and made it available to the world in the form of an app — Loomio
  • It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus — though they prefer the term “collaboration” — about decisions that affect their lives.
  • Rather than giving up on ownership, people are looking for a different way of practicing it.
  • Enspiral, an “open value network” of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.
  • The worker cooperative is an old model that’s attracting new interest among the swelling precariat masses
  • Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits
  • multi-stakeholder cooperative — one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once
  • “It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”
  • Sensorica pays workers for their contributions to the product. Unlike Sovolve, they participate in the company democratically. Everything from revenues to internal criticism is out in the open, wiki-style, for insiders and outsiders alike to see.
  • Only one device has been sold
  • Bitcoin
  • makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs,
  • The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum,
  • to develop decentralized social networks,
  • even an entirely new Internet
  • Swarm’s competition makes it hard not to notice the inequalities built into the models vying to disrupt the status quo. Bitcoin’s micro-economy holds the dubious distinction of being more unequal than the global economy as a whole. On a sharing platform, who owns, and who just rents? In an economy of cooperatives, who gets to be a member, and who gets left out?
  • Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes — it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows. This recognition has been built into some of the most significant efforts under the banner of the so-called “new economy” movement. They’re often offline, but that makes them no less innovative.
  • connecting them to large anchor institutions in their communities; hospitals and universities with deep pockets can help a new enterprise become viable much more quickly than it can on its own
  • Government is an important source of support, too. Perhaps more than some go-it-aloners in tech culture might like to admit, a new economy will need new public policies
  • The early followers Francis of Assisi at first sought to do away with property altogether
  • There are many ways to own. Simply giving up on ownership, however, will mean that those who actually do own the tools that we rely on to share will control them.
  • changing what owning means altogether.
  • Jukka Peltokoski on 28 Oct 16
     
    Omistaminen on uusi yhteinen.
Jukka Peltokoski

New Era Windows Cooperative Forms in Chicago | American Worker Cooperative - 0 views

www.american.coop/...dows-cooperative-forms-chicago

New Era cooperative coops osuuskuntakeissi osuuskuntakirja

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 26 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • "In 2008, the boss decided to close our windows factory on Goose Island and fire everyone. In 2012, we decided to buy the factory for ourselves and fire the boss. We now own the plant together and run it democratically.
  • The workers called in help in the form of the United Electrical Workers Union, whom had been with them since the beginning, The Working World, which had worked with dozens of worker controlled factories in Latin America, and the Center for Workplace Democracy, a new organization in Chicago dedicated to supporting worker control.
  • It seemed the reason workers were losing their jobs might not be because they weren't doing profitable work.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • When the announcement to close the plant was made, the workers were told that their jobs would be terminated immediately, and that they would not be given their contractually obligated backpay or severance
  • The workers decided to occupy the factory in protest, and the community came out in extraordinary numbers to support them. See the Michael Moore Short about it.
  • The workers and the community won enough of this struggle to get the money that was owed to them. A new green construction company, Serious Energy, took control of the factory and partially reopened it.
  • Serious Energy's business plan, which only involved the windows factory in a tertiary role, never functioned
  • The plan to start a new worker owned cooperative business began.
  • In 2008, after many decades of operation, Republic Windows and Doors went bankrupt and was shut down. This seemed odd as the windows business appeared profitable
  • we have decided to call it New Era, as we hope it will be an inspiration
  • Everyone can participate in building the economy we all want
  • no one should be treated as temporary or just raw material for someone else's business.
  • We have built the highest quality windows ever made in Chicago, ones that are soundproof and extremely energy efficient, meaning they are both green and save money. Our windows will be the best on the market at prices no one can beat.
  • More resources on the formation of New Era Windows Cooperative   New Era Windows, The Working World  Grand Opening of Worker-Owned Factory, As Former Republic Windows Workers Launch New Era Windows Cooperative, United Electrical Workers Worker Co-op New Era Windows Opens For Business, CommunityWealth.org Republic Windows Opens New Era for Coops in Chicago, Race, Poverty, and the Environment New Era Windows Cooperative Is Open for Business in Chicago,The Nation Chicago Workers Open New Cooperatively Owned Factory Five Years After Republic Windows Occupation, Democracy Now Window makers start manufacturing cooperative in Chicago, ABC News Former Republic Windows Employees Start Their Own Factory, CBS News
  • Video and Radio


  • CBS News

Jukka Peltokoski

Economic Democracy and the Billion-Dollar Co-op | P2P Foundation - 0 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...24

cooperative osuuskunta energia energiaosuuskunta sähköverkko demokratia yhteisötalous jukkap2p Unioni

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 25 May 17 - No Cached
  • Candidate Donald Trump made a campaign stop in February 2016 hosted by South Carolina’s Broad River Electric Cooperative.
  • By the onset of the Great Depression, few people in the rural United States had electricity at home—about 10 percent. The power companies that had lit up the cities simply didn’t see enough profit in serving far-flung farmers. But gradually some of those farmers started forming electric cooperatives—utility companies owned and governed by their customers—and strung up their own lines.
  • We typically think of our democratic institutions as having to do with politicians and governments. But there are democratic businesses, too—not just these electric co-ops, but also hulking credit unions, mutual-insurance companies, and ubiquitous cooperative brands from Land O’Lakes to the Associated Press. Their democracy is fragile. When it’s not exercised or noticed, these creatures act on their own volition.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Local co-ops band together to form larger co-ops of co-ops—power suppliers that run power plants, cooperatively owned mining operations, and democratic banks that finance new projects.
  • It’s also a neglected democracy
  • by member-owners of the co-ops
  • and by a society that forgets what cooperative economic development have achieved.
  • Electric cooperatives are conservative institutions, carrying out the business of reliability while balancing their members’ interests with formidable inertia. But they’re also poised to lead a radical shift to a more renewable distributed-energy grid. They can be fiefdoms for long-entrenched establishments, but they’re also bastions of bottom-up, local self-governance.
  • depends not just on the whims of investors or on the promises of presidents, but on the readiness of the people who use it to organize.
  • We Own It, for instance, is a new network started by young but seasoned cooperators determined to support organizing among co-op members
  • Heneghan believes that co-ops are uniquely positioned to benefit. Their lean, local, customer-centered kind of business has already made them pioneers in easy, low-risk financing for energy-efficiency improvements and renewables.
  • Co-ops not locked into G&T contracts have been especially ambitious in switching to renewables.
  • electric co-ops still lag behind the national average in their use of renewables. The local co-ops are bound to their decades-long G&T contracts, and the G&Ts say they can’t walk away from their past investments in coal anytime soon.
  • co-op staffs know as well as anyone that their democracy is in some respects nominal—an opportunity, but by no means a guarantee.
  • According to Derrick Johnson, the president of One Voice and the state NAACP, “Our ultimate goal is to help them understand how to develop a strategy to maximize members’ participation.” Then, he hopes, “they can begin to think about renewable energy differently.”
  • Without member pressure, for instance, managers often have an incentive to sell more power rather than helping members reduce their consumption, their costs, and their carbon footprints.
  • In particular, he pointed out the billions of dollars in “capital credits” that co-ops collectively hold—excess revenues technically owned by members, but that often go unclaimed, serving as a pool of interest-free financing.
  • “There are so many things that point to a structural change in the electrical industry.” He compared the change to what cellular did to telephones.
  • By way of explanation, a staff member repeated what I’ve been told by the leaders of other big co-ops: Low turnout means that members are satisfied.
  • “If the members are not involved in any significant way, the directors become very insular, and they can basically do with the co-op as they please.”
  • As the Trump administration assembles its promised trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, it seems unlikely to unleash a fresh spree of cooperative rural development.
  • Jukka Peltokoski on 25 May 17
     
    " "
Jukka Peltokoski

Worker-Owned Cooperatives: Direct Democracy in Action - 3 views

truth-out.org/...ves-direct-democracy-in-action

coops tesa osuuskunta-keissi osuuskunta-teoria cooperative osuuskuntakirja

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Flashpoints—those unexpected events that movements gather around, when everything is accelerated, exciting, and energizing—fizzle.
  • The cooperative movement is experiencing a string of these moments now, and is burgeoning with renewed activity. I see this first­hand as a co­-owner of the Toolbox for Education and Social Action (TESA), a worker­-owned cooperative
  • It’s our philosophy that cooperatives enable direct democracy and local control over the economy. As participants in the co­op movement, we help to turn flashpoints into lasting social change.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The organization is structured as a worker co­op, and operates by consensus with a membership comprised of representatives from other worker co­ops.
  • Even though only 1% of the cooperatives in the United States are worker owned, their organizing success has recently made them a focal point in the struggle for economic justice. Indeed, Occupy Wall Street participants launched a worker-run co-op print shop in Brooklyn called OccuCopy.
  • Guided by cooperative principle number six, which promotes cooperation amongst cooperatives, partnerships between co­ops were easily realized. They multiplied and soon turned to regional alliances, which snowballed into national networks.
  • Inspired by the Mondragon cooperative network, the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives (VAWC) came together in Western Massachusetts in 2005. The group first met at the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives Eastern Conference on Workplace Democracy, and they are a direct result of national networks crystallizing at the regional level. What sets VAWC apart is a strategy of co­op-led development. The organization helps start­up or transitioning co­ops get their footing; they provide technical assistance to their membership in the form of skill­sharing and professional guidance.
  • VAWC recently launched an inter­cooperative loan fund. Through the fund, members tithe 5% of profits to help one another and to invest in new co­op ventures.
  • information and resources according to the membership’s needs, such as meeting facilitation, or research into health plans
  • VAWC enjoys an exceptionally cooperative cultural context in the Pioneer Valley, where there is a strong desire for economic democracy, and a history of collective management.
  • As many look for ways out of the capitalist morass of boom­-bust cycles, worker cooperatives have taken center stage. Cooperatives are democratic enterprises where both ownership and decision­-making power are democratically shared. As a result, they keep money and power in the hands of the community.
  • A stunningly large network—nearly one out of every five U.S. worker co­ops are part of NoBAWC —most member co­ops are in Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley. Like other membership organizations, NoBAWC grew out of a need to collaborate and share best practices amongst like­-minded organizations.
  • The members now share resources and incentivize collaboration by offering each other reduced rates on their goods and services.
  • As the first and primary national hub, the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC) brings together the full array of players within this movement. After many years of organizing, they were incorporated in 2004 to provide support to their membership, as well as educational outreach to the public. A small organization with a two­-person staff, USFWC’s extensive work to promote cooperation puts them in the center of a dynamic movement.
  • regular conferences and events
  • A similarly rich cooperative culture exists across the country, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives, or NoBAWC (pronounced "no boss"), is a hub for the region, literally centralized within 30 minutes of each member organization.
  • USFWC capably handles a membership representing over 1,300 workers
  • the Democracy At Work Network (DAWN), a peer adviser system
  • The co­op movement is gaining steam, drawing from new energies and a renewed interest in the model. All movements have these periods of acceleration, times when opportunity comes knocking at every turn. Typically, such are the times when reflection is most needed, because new dynamics can dramatically change the situation.
  • David Morgan is a worker-owner at the Toolbox for Education and Social Action, a worker-owned cooperative created to democratize education and the economy while furthering the cooperative movement. The Toolbox designs curriculum and next-generation resources for learning, such as Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives."
Tero Toivanen

Peer to peer production as the alternative to capitalism: A new communist hor... - 0 views

peerproduction.net/...a-new-communist-horizon

commons communism P2P Marx

shared by Tero Toivanen on 30 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • This article argues that a section of knowledge workers have already created a new mode of production termed Peer to Peer Production (P2P) which is a viable alternative to capitalism. Although still in its emerging phase and dominated by capitalism, P2P clearly displays the main contours of an egalitarian society.
  • This mode of production is very similar to what Marx (1978 a, 1978b) described as advanced communism.
  • Commons have existed since the inception of humanity in various forms and among various civilizations (Marx, 1965; Polanyi, 1992; Ostrom, 1990). But all of them, except commons of knowledge, have always been territorialized, belonging to particular communities, tribes, or states. Hence, as a rule, outsiders were excluded. The GPL created a globally de-territorialized, almost all-inclusive commons. It only excluded those users who would refuse to release their own products under the GPL license
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • As knowledge became a major factor of informational capitalism a draconian copyright regime grew dramatically (Lessig, 2005 ). The GPL/GNU pioneered a juridical-productive strategy for producing global commons of knowledge and protecting them against the invasion by capitalism. In this sense, Stallman’s initiative was a major milestone in the struggle of knowledge workers against informational capitalism
  • The production of Linux was truly a revolution in the organization of cooperation among a large number of producers. Marx argued that any scientific knowledge was a product of collective work (Marx, 1981: 199 ), as each scientist built upon the achievements of previous ones. But this collective aspect of science was not a result of conscious and simultaneous cooperation among scientists but of contingent transfer of knowledge along a time and space axis.
  • The combination of GPL license with the Linux mode of cooperation represents the gist of the P2P mode of production, which coincides with the general principles of advanced form of communism, described by Marx.
  • 1) There will be no equivalence, between each individual’s contribution to social production and their share from the total social products. They will contribute according to their ability and will use products according to their needs. Money as the quantitative measure of value will disappear (Marx, 1978b). Money does not play any role in internal P2P system, though it still constitutes its external context and inserts pressure on it.
  • 2) In Marx’s advanced communism the division of labor, and with it the state and market vanish (Marx, 1978 a, b). In P2P the division of labor is replaced by the distribution of labor (Weber, 2004) and the logics of state and market are questione
  • 3) Advanced communism, Marx (1978a) envisaged, would transcend alienation not only by abolishing the logic of quantitative equivalence in the realm of exchange between individual and society, and among individuals, and the division of labor, but also by allowing and enabling individuals to use socially produced means of production to materialize their own creative powers. My ethnographic findings show that creativity and peer recognition are among the strongest motivations of P2P producer
  • At this point we can raise the following questions: 1-Is P2P really a new historical mode of production, or just an appendage to the capitalist mode of production? 2-What is its relation to the capitalist mode of production? 3-To what extent can P2P be applied to material production? 4-What are the possibilities that it will replace or displace the capitalist mode of production altogether
  • The P2P production productive forces correspond to what Manuel Castells (2010/1996:70-72) defines as the Information Technological Paradigm (ITP). The all-encompassing ITP emphasises informal networking, flexibility, and is characterised by the fact that technology acts on information, information acts on technology, as well as by the integration of various technologies such as micro-electronics, telecommunications, opto-electronics and computers in a larger system. It is important to emphasise that knowledge workers themselves are an important component, or the most important components, of ITP productive forces.
  • Yet capitalism prevents the free flow of knowledge in all directions in the net. It is true that the capitalist mode of production, adapting itself to ITP, has become global, and has increasingly adopted a network form. However, the sum of all potential links in the net exceeds dramatically the sum of links of the global networks of capital. Hence, the potential of the net, as a paradigmatic productive force of our time, exceeds the capitalist mode of production (Hardt and Negri, 2000)
  • I described briefly above major aspects of P2P that accord to Marx’s understanding of communism. All these aspects contradict the logic of capital. Here I will show how the logic of P2P profoundly contradicts the capitalist division of labour, because division of labour is the key component of any mode of production. Let me emphasize that in P2P we have a distribution of labour and not a division of labour
  • The scholars of post-Fordism argue that post-Fordism has transcended Taylorism by enhancing workers’ skills and involving them in decision making
  • Such claims are at best controversial (Castells, 2010/1996). Many argue that Taylorism is still the dominant form of the organization of the labor process
  • Post-Fordism has replaced the Taylorist impersonal and mechanized despotism with new forms of personal enslavement. Individual producers do not choose their tasks, or the pace, time and place of their work. In other words the work process is micro-territorialized both spatially and temporally. In this sense the contrast with P2P cooperation cannot be stronger. In P2P cooperation the work processes are globally de-territorialized, in terms of both time and space.
  • Brook (1975) showed that in a centralized organization the increase of the number of engineers who work on a particular software problem decreases the efficiency by creating unnecessary complexities at an exponential rate. Raymond (2001) demonstrated that this was not true of de-centered networked cooperation of P2P. Here, the increase in the number of workers increases efficiency and improves the product. This hypothesis can be true of all forms of cognitive production.
  • The commercial use of P2P’s products does not make them commodities because the user does not pay for them and therefore they do not enter the costs of his own commodity. From this follows that the total labor which is globally spent today on different forms of P2P is outside the capitalist social division of labor and circumscribes it.
  • A fully fledged P2P society is not compatible with money and commodity. The commodity form inherently circumscribes the freedoms that are guaranteed in the GPL
  • To sum up, the ITP productive forces combined with the de-centered network-based form of cooperation, the absence of wage labor, voluntary contribution, and the commons form of products constitute the main features of the P2P mode of production
  • Although the P2P mode of production is still an emerging phenomenon, its logic is clearly different from that of capitalism and has been created as a response to the requirements of the new productive forces. Therefore, its historical significance, urgency and novelty can hardly be exaggerated. The capitalist mode of production is a barrier to the realization of the potentialities of knowledge in the era of Internet. It limits human creativity and the development of knowledge workers in general. Therefore, it is no coincidence that a section of knowledge workers have rebelled against capitalist relations of production by lunching P2P. As Söderberg (2008) argues this is a form of class struggle.
  • The new social production consists of islands in the sea of the capitalist mode of production. The relation between the two, as pointed to above, is one of mutual dependence and antagonism. The social production depends on capitalism for acquiring some of the means of production and wages of its contributors, whilst capitalism on the other hand uses the commons of social production for free.
  • The social formation is an integrated socio-economic-ideological/cultural system. It may consist of more than one modes of production. However, one mode of production dominates the others and its imperatives define the overall characteristics of the social formation. In this sense we can speak of feudal and capitalist social formations as distinct from feudal and capitalist modes of production. Although the dominant mode of production dominates other modes of production, it cannot erase their specific logics. The continuous tension and dependency between the dominant mode of production and subordinated ones make social formations dynamic, uneven, and complex phenomena.
  • The capitalist social formation has gone through three partially overlapping phases: the emerging, the dominant and the declining ones. In the emerging phase (1850-1950) the capitalist mode of production dominated the feudal, domestic and other pre- capitalist modes of production worldwide, extracting labor and value from them (Mandel, 1972: chapter 2 ). In the second phase (1950-1980) the capitalist mode of production eroded the pre-capitalist mode of productions profoundly, and replaced them with the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism expanded both intensively, penetrating new domains of productive activity such as services, and extensively, conquering the whole globe. The third phase (1980- onwards) is characterized by the emergence of the ITP paradigm and the social mode of production within the capitalist social formation. This period has been described in terms such as “Network Society” (Castells, 2010/1997 ), “Empire” (Hardt and Negri, 2000), etc.
  • Although the P2P mode of production is still under the sway of the capitalist mode of production, its standing vis-à-vis capitalism is different from that of pre-capitalist modes of productions. While in the two first phases capitalism represented the new productive forces, in the third phase P2P is the new and emerging mode of production and capitalism is the declining one.
  • If P2P dominates capitalism we will have the emerging phase of P2P social formation. I do not want to give the impression that the victory of P2P over capitalism is either a smooth evolutionary process or inevitable. It is fully contingent upon the orientations and consequences of the current social struggle, particularly the struggle of P2P communities.
  • Automation will be a pillar of this transformation, though automation is not a necessary pre-condition for material P2P. In a fully automated production, the P2P production of cognitive factor (research and development, design and software) will bring material production under the sway of P2P.
  • The natural limit to raw material will also place a limit on material wealth and will require rules of distribution. But the criterion for distribution in the global community and within each local community cannot be the contribution of labor by individuals and communities, because cognitive work is globally collective, has no exchange value and does not produce exchange value. Only the needs of communities and individuals defined democratically among and within communities can be the criterion for distribution
  • the success of state and capital in preventing P2P from becoming the dominant mode of production is not guaranteed beforehand. Things can go either way depending on the consequence of social struggles. The P2P movement, if supported by all other social movements of the multitude, may prevail. Social struggle will also determine what type of P2P society we will have.
  • What then are the possible scenarios for P2P production to become the dominant mode of production? Will it grow parallel with capitalism until it overtakes it? Or, will its path of development be much more complicated, marked by ebbs and flows, and temporary setbacks? Will a social revolution that expropriates strategic means of production from capitalists be a prerequisite for P2P production to become the dominant mode of production? What will be the role of social struggle and human consciousness in advancing P2P production
  • “the idea of communism” is becoming appealing again. However it is not enough, though really necessary, to say that “another communism is possible” (Harvey, 2010:259) but to imagine the general contours of communist production. Herein lies the historical and political significance of P2P production. It represents, though in embryonic form, a model for communist production and distribution.
  • What then are the strengths and weaknesses of the P2P production social movement?
  • Its weakness, as Söderberg (2008) argues, is that most of the participants in the P2P production lack an explicit anti-capitalist consciousness, let alone a communist consciousness
  • However, the majority’s involvement in production is motivated by personal reasons, such as doing something exciting and creative, and improving their own skills. However participants are aware of, and value the fact, that they are producing commons.
  • No doubt the formation of a solid collectivist and progressive culture which grows organically around P2P production and other social movements will be essential for the formation of a communist society. Despite the significance of this progressive culture-in-making, it cannot remedy the lack of a clear programmatic communist vision and sustained theoretical critique of capitalism among the participants.
  • The lack of a clear collectivist vision combined with the dominant capitalist environment makes P2P production vulnerable to invasion by capitalism
  • No doubt there is a self-conscious communist section among the producers in P2P production. This communist section must carry out an uncompromising theoretical and critical theoretical struggle within the P2P production movement. However, this struggle should be conducted in friendly terms and avoid sectarianism. Communists should not position themselves against non-communist participants in the P2P movement. Actually, as Barbrook (2007) argues, all contributors to P2P production are involved in a communist material practice, regardless of their attitudes to communism.
  • In addition to the lack of class consciousness among P2P producers, and perhaps as a result of this, the absence of sustained connections/alliances between P2P producers and other progressive social movements is another weakness of the P2P movement. This is also a weakness of other social movements
  • The very fact the Occupy Wall Street was initiated by Adbusters and Anonymous, and that its de-centered/network form of organization, alongside that of Indignados, is very similar to that of P2P, is indeed very promising.
  • The academic and the activist left, on the other hand, have not yet grasped the historical novelty and significance of P2P production.
Jukka Peltokoski

Transnational Republics of Commoning | David Bollier - 0 views

bollier.org/...nsnational-republics-commoning

Bollier commons solidaarisuustalous Rifkin Bauwens Mason p2p osuuskunta platformcoop yhteisötalous valtioteoria partner state jukkap2p

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 03 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • The nation-state as now constituted, in its close alliance with capital and markets, is largely incapable of transcending its core commitments to economic growth, consumerism, and the rights of capital and corporations -- arguably the core structural drivers of climate change.
  • Because the piece -- "Transnational Republics of Commoning:  Reinventing Governance Through Emergent Networking" -- is nearly 14,000 words long, I am separating it into three parts.  You can download the full essay as a pdf file here.
  • In moments of crisis, when the structures of conventional governance are suddenly exposed as weak or ineffectual, it is clear that there is no substitute for ordinary people acting together. 
  • ...53 more annotations...
  • collectively our choices and agency are the ultimate guarantors of any values we may wish to secure
  • They can create their own cultural spaces to deliberate, collaborate and share resources without market and state structures that are often cumbersome, expensive, anti-social or predatory. 
  • A key political challenge of our time is to figure out new ways to preserve and extend the democratic capacities of ordinary people and rein in unaccountable market/state power, otherwise known as neoliberalism. 
  • Neoliberal economics and policy insist upon debt-driven economic growth, extractivist uses of the Earth, consumerism and nationalism
  • the creative use of new digital technologies on open network platforms could inaugurate liberating new forms of “open source governance.”
  • The superstructures of law and governance can achieve only so much without the consent of the governed.
  • Benkler
  • Rifkin
  • Tapscott
  • Mason
  • Bauwens
  • potentially transformative Commons Sector
  • the innovations now unfolding in various tech spaces suggest the outlines of new post-capitalist institutions
  • new types of group deliberation and governance software platforms such as Loomio and Co-budget; digital platforms that enable better management of ecological resources; and “blockchain ledger” technology, which is enabling new forms of network-native self-organization, collective action and “smart contracts”
  • online guilds
  • commons
  • open design and manufacturing communities
  • citizen-science
  • a process of commoning
  • to create functioning commons
  • The collaborative communities now emerging on digital platforms do not worry so much about resource-depletion or free riders – problems that affect the management of water, fisheries and land – as how to intelligently curate information from the multitudes and design effective self-governance structures for virtual collaboration.   
  • The point of the commons paradigm, despite its many different flavors, is this:  It provides “protected” space in which to re-imagine production and governance. 
  • “digital divide”
  • more accessible and transparent than conventional state democracy and more solidly grounded through bottom-up participation and ethical accountability
  • Digital networks are becoming deeply entangled with all aspects of life
  • our lives with digital technologies are profoundly affecting how we regard property, political life, and economic life
  • Facebook, Google, Uber, Airbnb and other corporate “gig economy” players
  • Unlike these capital-driven enterprises, the collaborations that I am describing are fundamentally non-market and socially mindful in character. They are less defined by technology per se than by the new social forms and political /cultural attitudes that they engender. 
  • to move people beyond the producer/consumer dyad and formalistic notions of citizenship, and enable people to enact a more personal, DIY vision of self-provisioning and governance. 
  • The state, having cast its lot with capital accumulation and growth, is losing its credibility and competence in addressing larger needs. 
  • With the rise of market-centrism and rational choice economics, government was devalued and allowed a role only in cases of ‘market failure.’ 
  • standard economics today largely ignores the fundamental, affirmative role that government plays in facilitating functional, trustworthy markets.
  • popular distrust of government has soared.  And why not?  Government has lost its actual capacities to serve many non-market social and ecological needs. 
  • Given this void and the barriers to democratic action, many citizens who might otherwise engage with legitimate state policymaking have shifted their energies into “transnational, polycentric networks of governance in which power is dispersed,”
  • the solidarity economy, Transition Towns, peer production, the commons
  • Thus the impasse we face today:  The neoliberal market/state agenda is inflicting grievous harm on the planet, social well-being and democracy – yet the market/state remains largely unresponsive to popular demands for change.
  • The (Still-Emerging) Promise of Open Source Governance
  • commons based on open tech platforms will play a central role in transforming our politics and polity
  • Electronic networks are now a defining infrastructure shaping the conduct of political life, governance, commerce and culture.
  • many legacy institutions and social practices continue to exist.  But they have no choice but to evolve
  • online commons are lightweight social systems that, with the right software and norms, can run quite efficiently on trust, reciprocity and modest governance structures
  • that enable users to mutualize the benefits of their own online sharing
  • Rifkin notes that the extreme productivity of digital technologies is lowering the marginal costs of production for many goods and services to near zero.  This is undercutting the premises of conventional markets, which are based on private owners using proprietary means to extract profits from nature, communities and consumers.
  • We are glimpsing at the outlines of a new economic system based on sharing and the collaborative commons. It is the first new paradigm-shifting system since the introduction of capitalism and communism. 
  • The “collaborative commons” that Rifkin describes is a hybrid capitalist/commons economy that is able to exploit the efficiencies and higher quality produced on open networks. 
  • “prosumers”
  • are able to create their own goods and services
  • But when some good or service is offered for at no cost, it really means that the user is the product:  our personal data, attention, social attitudes lifestyle behavior, and even our digital identities, are the commodity that platform owners are seeking to “own.”  
  • To combat corporate exploitation of open platforms, many efforts are now afoot to establish digital commons as viable alternatives.  The new models are sometimes called “platform co-operativism.
  • Digital commons are materializing in part because it is easier and more socially satisfying to participate in a commons
  • the most valuable networks are those that facilitate group affiliations to pursue shared goals – or what I would call commons
  • Open source tools and principles could unleash this value – but it would subvert the business model.
  • “hacktivists,” makers, software programmers and social media innovators who are consciously attempting to build tech platforms that can meet needs in post-capitalist ways, often via commons
Jukka Peltokoski

The Sharing Economy: Capitalism's Last Stand? - Our World - 0 views

ourworld.unu.edu/...economy-capitalisms-last-stand

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 15 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Access over ownership. After decades of excessive consumerism, this prospect sounded revolutionary.
  • more critical voices are appearing
  • I’d like to set something straight: the collaborative economy and sharing economy (or collaborative consumption) are not the same concept.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • reliance on horizontal networks and distributed power within communities
  • opposed to the competition between hierarchical organisations
  • inequality
  • contradictions
  • Empowerment in an era of growing inequalities
  • the exact opposite of capitalism
  • the exact opposite of homo economicus’ iconic egotism
  • Two main groups of criticism have emerged: one on ownership structures and the other on employment.
  • Growing economic inequalities
  • fueled both by patrimonial inequalities
  • income inequalities
  • 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.
  • From a collective standpoint, it might well be better to have access to a resource rather than owning it.
  • 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?
  • Sometimes, owning is a way not to be owned!
  • sharing economy: after all, it mostly consists of venture capitalist-backed startups
  • 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).
  • shareholders are not peers (from Latin par, “equal”), but overlords
  • your business model is based on your ability to sustain a community
  • This point is the most controversial of all. Sharing economy services could accelerate the phenomenon of job destruction.
  • Despite all those nice speeches about empowerment and entrepreneurship, people in the sharing economy are nothing but an extreme precariat
  • Real wages started stagnating while productivity per capita continued to increase.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • neo-liberal revolution has left the basic structures of welfare
  • relatively untouched
  • 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
  • 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?
  • ancient Skeptic philosophers
  • epoché
  • remarks
  • I will make two
  • First, we should avoid using the concept of a “sharing economy”
  • Men are both altruistic and egoistic, and that’s perfectly fine.
  • 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.
    • Jukka Peltokoski
      Jukka Peltokoski on 15 Oct 15
       
      Voitontekopaine varmasti on, mutta tässä sitä ehkä kärjistetään holtittomasti. Esimerkiksi yhteiskunnallisissa yrityksissä voitonjakoa rajoitetaan tietoisesti, ja ylipäätään suuri osa yrityksistä tekee lähinnä nollatulosta.
    • Jukka Peltokoski
      Jukka Peltokoski on 15 Oct 15
       
      Onkohan ihan näin. Ainakin paineet yksityistää ovat koko ajan kasvussa.
Jukka Peltokoski

What do Bosnia, Bulgaria and Brazil have in common? | ROAR Magazine - 1 views

roarmag.org/...-brazil-turkey-bosnia-bulgaria

Bosnia Turkey Sao Paolo occupy commons-movement

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 15 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Once again, it’s kicking off everywhere: from Turkey to Bosnia, Bulgaria and Brazil, the endless struggle for real democracy resonates around the globe.
  • What do a park in Istanbul, a baby in Sarajevo, a security chief in Sofia, a TV station in Athens and bus tickets in Sao Paulo have in common?
  • Each reveals, in its own particular way, the deepening crisis of representative democracy at the heart of the modern nation state.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • In Turkey, protesters have been taking to the streets and clashing with riot police for over two weeks in response to government attempts to tear down the trees and resurrect an old Ottoman-era barracks at the location of Istanbul’s beloved Gezi Park.
  • Now, protests over similar seemingly “trivial” local grievances are sparking mass demonstrations elsewhere. In Brazil, small-scale protests against a hike in transportation fees in Sao Paulo revealed the extreme brutality of the police force
  • After four nights of violent repression this week, the protests now appear to be gaining momentum.
  • Fed up with increasing inflation, crumbling infrastructure and stubbornly high inequality and crime rates, many Brazilians are simply outraged that the government is willing to invest billions into pharaonic projects that do not only ignore the people’s plight but actively undermine it.
  • Meanwhile, in Sarajevo, the inability of a family to obtain travel ID for their sick baby — who needs urgent medical attention that she cannot receive in Bosnia-Herzegovina — exposed the fundamental flaws at the heart of the nominally democratic post-Yugoslavian state. On June 5, while the government was busy negotiating with foreign bankers to attract new investment, thousands of people occupied parliament square, temporarily locking the nation’s politicians up inside and forcing the prime minister to escape through a window.
  • On Friday, Bulgaria joined the budding wave of struggles that began in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 and that was recently revived through the Turkish uprising. After the appointment of media (and mafia) mogul Delyan Peevski as head of the State Agency for National Security, tens of thousands took to the streets of Sofia and other cities throughout the country to protest his appointment, which was approved by parliament without any debate and with a mere 15 minutes between his nomination and his (pre-guaranteed) election.
  • Greece, in the meantime, finally appears to have been waken up from its austerity-induced slumber. Following the decision of the Troika’s neoliberal handmaiden, Antonis Samaras, to shut down the state’s public broadcaster ERT overnight and to fire its 2,700 workers without any warning whatsoever, the workers of ERT simply occupied the TV and radio stations and continued to emit their programs through livestreaming, making ERT the first worker-run public broadercaster in Europe.
  • At first sight, it may seem like these protests are all simply responses to local grievances and should be read as such. But while each context has its own specificities that must be taken into account, it would be naive to discard the common themes uniting them.
  • If we take a closer look at each of the protests, we find that they are not so local after all. In fact, each of them in one way or another deals with the increasing encroachment of financial interests and business power on traditional democratic processes, and the profound crisis of representation that this has wrought.
  • In a word, what we are witnessing is what Leonidas Oikonomakis and I have called the resonance of resistance: social struggles in one place in the world transcending their local boundaries and inspiring protesters elsewhere to take matters into their own hands and defy their governments in order to bring about genuine freedom, social justice and real democracy.
  • Now that has come to an end. A new Left has risen, inspired by a fresh autonomous spirit that has long since cleansed itself of the stale ideological legacies and collective self-delusions that animated the political conflicts of the Cold War and beyond. One chant of the protesters in Sao Paulo revealed it all: “Peace is over, Turkey is here!”
Jukka Peltokoski

Strengthen the Commons - Now! - Democracy - Heinrich Böll Foundation - 0 views

www.boell.de/...democracy-8099.html

commons benkler commons-liike commoning p2p p2p-manifesti commons-politiikka

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 20 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • By Yochai Benkler “Commons are institutional spaces in which we are free.” Yochai Benkler
  • How the crisis reveals the fabric of our Commons
  • Over the last two hundred years, the explosion of knowledge, technology, and productivity has enabled an unprecedented increase of private wealth. This has improved our quality of life in numerous ways. At the same time, however, we have permitted the depletion of resources and the dwindling of societal wealth. This is brought to our attention by current, interrelated crises in finance, the economy, nutrition, energy, and in the fundamental ecological systems of life.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • These crises are sharpening our awareness of the existence and importance of the commons. Natural commons are necessary for our survival, while social commons ensure social cohesion, and cultural commons enable us to evolve as individuals.
  • A reduction in the GDP does not necessarily signal a reduction in the real wealth of a society. Recognizing this fact widens our perspective and opens doors for new types of solutions.
  • The commons can help us overcome the crisis, but it requires systematic advocacy.
  • What are the commons and why are they are significant?
  • Commons
  • include knowledge and water, seeds and software, cultural works and the atmosphere. Commons are not just „things,” however. They are living, dynamic systems of life. They form the social fabric of a free society.
  • Commons do not belong to anyone individually nor do they belong to no one. Different communities, from the family to global society, always create, maintain, cultivate, and redefine commons
  • We have to constantly revitalize our commons, because everything we produce relies upon the knowledge we inherit, the natural resources that the Earth gives us, and cooperation with our fellow citizens. The activity known as „the economy” is embedded in our social fabric.
  • There‘s something new afoot – a movement to reclaim the commons!
  • Commons are being rediscovered and defended.
  • Commons are newly created and built upon. Countless people are creating new things for all and meaningful social and physical spaces for themselves.
  • Taken together, scientists and activists, citizens and politicians are developing a robust and innovative commons sphere – everywhere.
  • Commons are based on communities that set their own rules and cultivate their skills and values. Based on these always-evolving, conflict-ridden processes, communities integrate themselves into the bigger picture. In a culture of commons, inclusion is more important than exclusion, cooperation more important than competition, autonomy more important than control.
  • Neither no man‘s land nor boundless Property
  • The commons is not only about the legal forms of ownership. What matters most is whether and how community-based rights to the commons are enforced and secured.
  • The usage rights of fellow commoners are the stop signs for individual usage rights.
  • Absolute and exclusive private property rights in the commons therefore cannot be allowed.
  • Each use must ensure that the common pool resources are not destroyed or over-consumed.
  • No one may be excluded who is entitled to access and use the shared resource or who depends on it for basic needs.
  • What is public or publicly funded must remain publicly accessible.
  • The commons helps us re-conceptualize the prevailing concept of property rights.
  • Our shared quality of life is also limited by knowledge that is excessively commercialized and made artificially scarce. In this manner, our cultural heritage becomes an inventory of lifeless commodities and advertising dominates our public spaces.
  • We all need commons to survive and thrive. This is a key principle, and it establishes why commoners‘ usage rights should always be given a higher priority than corporations‘ property rights. Here the state has a duty to protect the commons, a duty which it cannot abandon. However, this does not mean that the state is necessarily the best steward for the commoners‘ interests. The challenge is for the commoners themselves to develop complementary institutions and organizational forms, as well as innovative access and usage rules, to protect the commons. The commoners must create their own commons sector, beyond the realm of market and state, to serve the public good in their own distinctive manner.
  • For a society in which the commons may thrive
  • The rules and ethics of each commons arise from the needs and processes of the commoners directly involved. Whoever is directly connected to a commons must participate in the debate and implementation of its rules.
  • Commons are driven by a specific ethos, as well as by the desire to acquire and transfer a myriad of skills. Our society therefore needs to honor the special skills and values that enable the commons to work well. A culture of the commons publicly recognizes any initiative or project that enhances the commons, and it provides active financial and institutional support to enhance the commons sector.
  • This challenge requires a lot of work, but it is also a great source of personal satisfaction and enrichment.
  • Our society needs a great debate and a worldwide movement for the commons.
Jukka Peltokoski

From the theory of peer production to the production of peer production theor... - 0 views

peerproduction.net/...tion-of-peer-production-theory

commons.fi p2p commons commons-teoria kleiner benkler oekonux caffentzis commons-politiikka

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 15 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • The object of this article is to give an interpretation of the ideological positioning of various movements and intellectual groupings and individuals within the ‘left field’ of peer to peer theory production.
  • What we understand under the concept of “the Production of Peer Production Theory” are the various attempts to make sense of peer production, both in terms of its place in the current dominant economic system of capitalism, and in terms of its future potential.
  • 1. Yochai Benkler: peer production as an adjunct to the market
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • we aim for a fair synthesis
  • Our main counter-argument is this: under capitalist conditions, peer production is not capable of self-reproduction and therefore not a full mode of production or value creation. We make an important distinction between the self-reproduction capability of a peer production project as a whole, and the social reproduction at the individual level. The reason is that there is no real universal possiblity for the reproduction of the human life of peer producers under capitalist conditions.
  • We would characterize Yochai Benkler’s vision as a reformist or meliorist approach, seeking to improve and balance some of the negative aspects of capitalism through increased peer production dynamics.
  • 2. Oekonux: free software as a germ form that is prefigurative of a peer production society
  • free software production is a full mode of production that is born within capitalism but destined to supersede it, based on a understanding of germ form theory.
  • The description of Meretz considers free software as a full mode of production, prefigurative of a wider transformation of the current capitalist mode of production.
  • We would characterize the main argument as stating that the deep lowering of transaction/coordination/communication costs, creates the possibility for a new mode of production next to the market and the firm, which produces value through ‘social allocation’.However, for Benkler, the new modality exists ‘in addition’ and in complementary with market dynamics.
  • On the collective level, we can see that peer production occurs when a pool of voluntary contributors can create commons-oriented value, under conditions of participatory governance, i.e. through the social, and not market or hierarchical, allocation of productive resources. This can occur on a collective level, but only if we abstract from the need for the social reproduction of the individuals who contribute.
  • there is no autonomous social reproduction within the commons itself
  • 3. Dmytri Kleiner’s Venture Communism
  • For Kleiner, peer production can only occur if commoners also own the common stock of production.
  • Kleiner proposes that peer producers would create common stock cooperatives, and use a specific licence, the Peer Production or Copyfarleft license, to protect their shared innovation commons from private appropriation by capitalist forces.
  • Like with the P2P Foundation’s approach, Kleiner also recognizes the continuation of the politics of class, as long as we live in a class-based society.
  • Our contrasting peer production IS a proto-mode of production, which means that indeed value is created in a radically different way in peer production, but that it’s lack of self-reproduction capabilities makes it dependent on capitalism.
  • Kleiner’s strategy is exactly what can make it independent and capable of self-reproduction since its combination with common-stock physical production entities, would guarantee the self-reproduction capability of individuals and collectives contributing to the commons.
  • creating a real counter-economy
  • 4. George Caffentzis and the Anti-capitalist commons
  • two kinds of commons, i.e. anti-capitalist commons which exist to produce value in a different way, and which function against capitalism, and commons which are used by capital for its own self-reproduction and act in favour of capitalism
  • Politically, pro-capitalist commons are represented by the neo-Hardinian school of Elinor Ostrom
  • while the basic premise of the existence of capitalism-compatible commons is correct, the making of a radical dichotomy, based on the necessity to struggle against capitalist commons, is absolutely counter-productive.
  • Our approach stresses that it is more productive to focus on the post-capitalist potentialities of peer production, and make them real and concrete, than to fight against commons that are compatible with capitalism.
  • it makes only sense to undertake efforts to make the commons more autonomous from profit-maximizing entities and the system as a whole. This can be done through strategies such as those proposed by Kleiner and the P2P Foundation.
  • In the interpretation of the P2P Foundation, social change occurs because proto-modes of production, which are initially embedded in a dominant economic system, and benefit that system, become gradually more efficient, and capable of self-reproduction, and therefore create the conditions for a phase transition to occur, in which the new emergent mode of production, achieves its independence over the formerly dominant model.
  • For the P2P Foundation, an integration needs to occur between the new prototype model, i.e. the field of peer production proper, as it emerges in multiple social fields and attempts to become more autonomous; the social mobilization of progressive social forces (i.e. politics and even ‘revolution’ are crucial remaining aspects of social evolution), and political/policy oriented movements that are capable of creating new institutions.
  • Politically, § we differ from the Benklerite approach because we believe peer production has the potential to succeed capitalism as the core value and organisational model of a post-capitalist society § we differ from Oekonux by stressing the lack of autonomy of peer production under current conditions § we differ from the Telekommunisten approach by stressing it a proto-mode of production § we differ from the Caffentzis approach by stressing a post-capitalist approach centered on the autonomy and self-reproduction needs of peer producers, rather than guided by a core hostility to capitalism
  • P2P Foundation also has an integrative and integral approach, this means that despite differences, we seek commonality around aspects of our friends and allies that we may differ from in other aspects.
  • § we agree with Benkler and similar approaches that peer production improves on the current conditions of capitalism, i.e. we generally support the spread of commons and p2p-oriented practices § we agree with Oekonux that peer production carries within itself the seeds of a post-capitalist value system § we agree with Kleiner’s proposal for a peer-based counter-economy § we agree with Caffentzis that we need a preferential treatment towards autonomous commons approaches that create a counter-logic within the present system
Jukka Peltokoski

The Boom of Commons-Based Peer Production - keimform.de - 0 views

keimform.de/...-commons-based-peer-production

commons siefkes linux gpl stallman wealth of commons.fi

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 12 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • In 1991, an undergraduate Finnish computer science student, Linus Torvalds, had a surprising idea: he began to write a new operating system on his PC.
  • He announced his work on the Internet and asked for feedback about features that people would like to see. Some weeks later, he put the software online.
  • Only two years later, more than 100 people were helping develop the software now called Linux (a wordplay on “Linus” and “Unix”). Richard Stallman’s GNU Project was another initiative that had already developed a number of useful system components. The combination of the GNU tools with the Linux kernel resulted in an operating system that was both useful and free.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • The software was met with enormous interest
  • Another crucial factor is the community that coordinates the development of the operating system. The open, decentralized, and seemingly chaotic way of working together pioneered by Torvalds and his collaborators became known as the “bazaar” model of software development (Raymond 2001)
  • With free software, there is no strict boundary between users and developers. Many participants simply use the software, but some help to improve it, either occasionally or even regularly and intensely. The participants themselves decide whether and how to contribute. Participation is not obligatory, but quite easy if you want to get involved.
  • Linux and Wikipedia are important examples of two communities – the free software movement (also called open source movement) and the free culture movement
  • The GNU/Linux story reveals the essential characteristics of peer production. Peer production is based on commons: resources and goods that are jointly developed and maintained by a community and shared according to community-defined rules.
  • If I modify and distribute a GPL’ed software, I must publish my own version under the GPL. This principle is called “copyleft” since it turns copyright on its head. Instead of granting exclusive rights of control and exploitation to the authors, it ensures that all versions of the software will remain in the commons forever.
  • While production for the market aims to produce something that can be sold, the usual goal of peer production is to produce something useful.
  • In contrast to companies and entities in planned economies, peer projects don’t have command structures. That does not mean that they are unstructured; on the contrary, most projects have “maintainers” or “admins” who keep the project on course and decide which contributions to integrate and which to reject.
  • The success of GNU/Linux is based on the fact that – like all free software – it is a commons that everybody can use, improve and share. The freedoms that make free software a commons were first defined by Richard Stallman in the 1980s. He designed the GNU General Public License (GPL) as an exemplary license to legally protect these freedoms.
  • Open hardware projects design physical products by freely sharing blueprints, design documents, and bills of materials.
  • No production is possible without means of production. The RepRap 3D printer has received a lot of attention because it can “print” many of its own parts. Other free 3D printers are the Fab@Home and the MakerBot, around which a large community has formed. Thingiverse is a platform for sharing 3D designs for such printers. Projects such as FurnLab and CubeSpawn design CNC (computer-controlled) machines for processing wood and metals; their aim is to facilitate “personal fabrication.
  • You cannot create things from designs and blueprints alone – physical resources and means of production are needed as well. Technological advancements have made various production processes less expensive and more accessible.
  • It makes more sense for productive infrastructures to be community-based, i.e., jointly organized by the inhabitants of a village or neighborhood. There are already examples of this.
  • Community-organized production places are emerging as well.
  • Fab Labs are modern open workshops whose goal is to produce “almost anything.” That’s not yet realistic, but they can already produce furniture, clothing, computer equipment (including circuit boards), and other useful things.
  • Their goal is the creation of an entirely commons-based production infrastructure, a network of free and open facilities that utilize only free software and open hardware.
  • But can peer production really get that far in the physical world? Won’t it be stopped by the fact that natural resources and the Earth’s carrying capacity are limited?
  • Digital, Internet-based peer production has produced astonishing amounts of software and contents – a digital plenty that benefits us all. In the physical world, a similar plenty for everyone must seem impossible if one equates plenty with lavishness and wastefulness. But plenty also has another meaning: “getting what I need, when I need it.
  • Commons-based peer production brings such a needs-driven conception of plenty for everyone into reach.
  • Physical production is impossible without natural resources. Therefore, peer production won’t be able to realize its full potential unless access to resources is managed according to its principles. Digital peer production treats knowledge and software as a commons. Likewise, physical peer production needs to manage resources and means of production as commons, utilizing them in a fair and sustainable way and preserving or improving their current state.
  • The challenge is huge
  • For the future of commons-based peer production it will be very important to bring together the perspectives and experiences of commoners from all areas – whether “digital,” “ecological,” or “traditional.”
Tero Toivanen

Commons: Alternatives to market and state | STIR - 0 views

stirtoaction.com/?p=2351

commons

shared by Tero Toivanen on 21 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • the key moment of class struggle is the struggle over property rights.  Those who want an economy that works should focus on property rights.
  •  The agenda is to use debt to privatise more of the economy so education, health care, water provision are owned by distant owners and swopped around to make profit.  A commons based economy puts these and other resources into the hands of local people to manage not for short term greed and the whims of bond markets but for long term need.  Politics is essentially about property rights and the often invisible battles must be made visible and won
  • There is an intellectual task to show that commons, perhaps termed communism, or democratic ownership of society by communities, works
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • For Marx the rational creative society is a self-owned one based on democratic control i.e the recreation of the commons.  The working class can through revolutionary action transcend capitalism and create a communist society.  Its about commons for Marx not top down bureaucracy
Jukka Peltokoski

Solidarity with the Pirate Bay and the future of the Internet | School of Commoning - 0 views

www.schoolofcommoning.com/...pirate-bay-and-future-internet

commons peter sunde meretz pirate bay tekijänoikeudet internet avaaz

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 10 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • The following letter is a message we received via email from Stefan Meretz who expresses great concern both regarding Peter Sunde's (The Pirate Bay spokesperson) imprisonment and the way Avaaz is handling the petition to pardon him. Stefan calls for our solidarity as commoners.
  • Dear Commoners,Peter Sunde has to go to prison. As you may know, Peter was thespokesperson for The Pirate Bay (TPB). He was convicted for someridiculous charges, because a copyright infringement did not happenwith the Pirate Bay (they shared torrent files, not copyrightedmaterial). But the copyright industry was and is very angry aboutthat. There are strong actions going on against TPB. The strategy isthe same as with Wikileaks: They pick out some single persons and tryto make an example.Now, Peter wrote a plea for pardon. Rick Falkvinge (founder of theswedish pirate party) translated the plea to english, worth reading:http://falkvinge.net/2012/07/06/aftermath-of-the-pirate-bay-trial-peter-sundes-plea-in-his-own-words/Peter: http://blog.brokep.com/2012/07/10/wow-update-on-all-the-support/http://blog.brokep.com/2012/07/13/sweden-is-a-small-pond-with-a-few-big-fish/A supporter of Peter Sunde launched a community petition on Avaaz:http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Grant_Peter_Sundes_of_The_Pirate_Bay_plea_for_pardonCommunity petitions are made bottom-up, not from Avaaz itself. Aftergetting support from The Pirate Bay (they put it on the frontpage:http://thepiratebay.se/) over 100.000 signers have been reached withinthree days.However, there are weird things going on behind the scenes, becauseAvaaz asked their network, whether the petition should be removed,since Avaaz "will only support petitions that our community agrees arenot offensive, inflammatory or otherwise objectionable". Huh? Belowthe articlehttp://www.s-info.se/region/show_news.asp?id=120&news=16919 there is avoting, but the votes are handled completely intransparent. Avaaz isfiltering out all incoming signatures for Peter from their communitypetition start page: http://www.avaaz.org/en/
Jukka Peltokoski

Sao Paulo and Istanbul: a visitor's guide to the coming social mobilization - 0 views

english.lasindias.com/the-coming-social-mobilization

lasindias uusi liike istanbul Sao Paolo Las Indias

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 19 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Today, the Turkish press opened with the news of the final clearing of Gezi park, after a night of pitched urban battles. The world comments while the mobilizations in Sao Paulo grow in intensity.
  • But, what’s new? These are urban mobilizations, both of which are about resistance to municipal decisions, which, never the less, quickly involved the State and became part of the news agenda because they are a concrete example of a specific and understandable demand: rejection of global state politics.
  • It’s no coincidence that they are happening in the heart of two “emerging” states that try to follow alternative models and social discourse, and try to combine a strong internal nationalism with a policy of regional hegemony.
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  • This is about remarking on the battleground itself: big cities, not nations, as the symbolic and political space for the network society.
  • But the leaders — and beneficiaries — of this growth, a precarious first generation of a new middle class, lives a hard, intense life, between low-paying jobs and constant training.
  • they don’t see themselves reflected or recognized in the social discourse, which is now outdated. The struggles for public space in Istanbul or for access to transportation in Sao Paulo are a lot more than mere municipal policies
  • In SP, and especially in Istanbul, the mobilizations have had a clear discourse on the development of state authoritarianism
  • This authoritarian drift, paired with a reactionary discourse on intellectual property that criminalizes a generation which has made P2P culture a mark of daily identity, seems to be the only way the nation-state knows how to react technological change, trying to exclude, both in the present and in the future, those who somehow feel they could share as they build.
  • movements on the digital, social and even geographic periphery, have created their own centrality and their own logic, which we can summarize in three points as we look to the future:
  • The starting point and point of conflict with power is in the closest urban policies.
  • The demands are concrete and clear, and could, in fact, be satisfied by a local administration, but they summarize a much broader social situation
  • the debate
  • turns toward the authoritarian development of the nation-state
  • Istanbul and Sao Paulo are a step into a new phase of distributed social movements
Jukka Peltokoski

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

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 08 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Usury is little discussed today but it is crucial in policy terms.
  • 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”)
  • 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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  • in Brazil today. CoopHab is a major housing federation of co-operative savings societies.
  • 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.
  • Sweden
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Swiss WiR
  • President Lincoln
  • free Greenback dollars
  • Lincoln
  • 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.
  • the privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity.
  • National Farmers Alliance and Co-operative Union, led by Charles Macune, developed the Sub-Treasury Plan.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • A.C. Townley launched the Non-partisan League (NPL)
  • Bank of North Dakota
  • Henry Ford and Thomas Edison suggested a novel solution.
  • proposed that new money be created by issuing interest-free government bonds
  • Frederick Soddy
  • made the first case for an ecological economics free of debt
  • “100% money.”
  • 100% reserve requirement.
  • Clifford H Douglas
  • He argued that a clear-cut and labour-saving solution would be for Government to create new money, interest-free as “Social Credit.”
  • First all citizens would receive a National Dividend.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Jukka Peltokoski

Spain's Crisis is Europe's Opportunity by Yanis Varoufakis - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...ty-by-yanis-varoufakis-2017-10

Katalonia municipalism munisipalismi Espanja jukkap2p Varoufakis talouskriisi eurooppa kaupunki EU kuntapolitiikka

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 28 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The Catalonia crisis is a strong hint from history that Europe needs to develop a new type of sovereignty, one that strengthens cities and regions, dissolves national particularism, and upholds democratic norms.
  • Spanish state may be just what the doctor ordered. A constitutional crisis in a major European Union member state creates a golden opportunity to reconfigure the democratic governance of regional, national, and European institutions, thereby delivering a defensible, and thus sustainable, EU
  • Barcelona, Catalonia’s exquisite capital, is a rich city running a budget surplus. Yet many of its citizens recently faced eviction by Spanish banks that had been bailed out by their taxes. The result was the formation of a civic movement that in June 2015 succeeded in electing Ada Colau as Barcelona’s mayor.
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  • Among Colau’s commitments to the people of Barcelona was a local tax cut for small businesses and households, assistance to the poor, and the construction of housing for 15,000 refugees
  • All of this could be achieved while keeping the city’s books in the black, simply by reducing the municipal budget surplus.
  • Spain’s central government, citing the state’s obligations to the EU’s austerity directives, had enacted legislation effectively banning any municipality from reducing its surplus.
  • At the same time, the central government barred entry to the 15,000 refugees for whom Colau had built excellent housing facilities.
  • To this day, the budget surplus prevails, the services and local tax cuts promised have not been delivered, and the social housing for refugees remains empty. The path from this sorry state of affairs to the reinvigoration of Catalan separatism could not be clearer.
  • In any systemic crisis, the combination of austerity for the many, socialism for bankers, and strangulation of local democracy creates the hopelessness and discontent that are nationalism’s oxygen
  • Progressive, anti-nationalist Catalans, like Colau, find themselves squeezed from both sides: the state’s authoritarian establishment, which uses the EU’s directives as a cover for its behavior, and a renaissance of radical parochialism, isolationism, and atavistic nativism. Both reflect the failure to fulfill the promise of shared, pan-European prosperity.3
  • The duty of progressive Europeans is to reject both: the deep establishment at the EU level and the competing nationalisms ravaging solidarity and common sense in member states like Spain.
  • The EU treaties could be amended to enshrine the right of regional governments and city councils, like Catalonia’s and Barcelona’s, to fiscal autonomy and even to their own fiscal money
  • They could also be allowed to implement their own policies on refugees and migration.
  • EU could invoke a code of conduct for secession
  • As for the new state, it should be obligated to maintain at least the same level of fiscal transfers as before.
  • the new state should be prohibited from erecting new borders and be compelled to guarantee its residents the right to triple citizenship (new state, old state, and European).
  • Europe needs to develop a new type of sovereignty
Jukka Peltokoski

Is cooperation what's missing? - 0 views

english.lasindias.com/is-cooperation-whats-missing

lasindias cooperation competition cultural change

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 19 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • We’re often amazed when someone tells us that “we need more cooperation and less competition,” and all the more when they present the market as the antithesis of cooperation.
  • “But it’s obviously just the opposite!!” we say.
  • The car, any car, symbol of the decentralized world, is a radical example of cooperation. And if you open up a monitor, a computer, a telephone, or a simple appliance and analyze the components that are placed on the motherboard, you’ll see another example
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  • what’s dominant is cooperation, not competition, among other things, because the market for automotive parts is not a true market, but rather a oligopsony (there are only a few buyers at the end of the chain).
  • Competition requires that where one wins, another loses
  • But are we talking about the same thing? Certainly not.
  • the zero sum shows up in a large part of exchanges between humans.
  • Cooperation among big businesses should worry us, not make us happy.
  • However, a certain degree of cooperation is required, at least on the part of those who are on each side
  • every exchange that is a zero-sum game is a bad exchange, something that shouldn’t be done because either you lose, or it’s no good at all (when both sides remain the same), or, worse still, if you win at the cost of the other in the exchange, you mine the trust of the other, and you sow an impending, inevitable, and painful betrayal. So, does it really materialize in “a large part of exchanges between humans?”
  • If we read the paragraph, we realize that the setting Julen is talking about is a well-defined institutional environment: labor scales and classical teaching organizations. We’re far from schools of the commons or cooperation based on the deliberation of a phyle.
  • The question is whether or not we think that salaried relationships will continue to be the basis of what we call a business, which organizes a good part of the co-opetition between people to reach the market.
  • Values take hold in different ways, according to the social structures in which we try to develop them. For example, if we put ourselves in the P2P mode of production, the issue is not whether one produces for the commons or for the market, because one will produce with and for both, creating competition and cooperation at the same time, as in the “coming capitalism,” or in every alternative model based on the dissipation of rents.
  • does it really make sense to propose rule changes in those environments? Is it possible to hack them? Obviously, if we didn’t think so, we wouldn’t be selling consultancy on the market, but if we thought that was enough, we wouldn’t be committed to building alternatives for ourselves and inviting others to make their own.
  • Because cooperation in that mold creates that whole gamut that Sennet and Julen talk about, and generally, apart from an arduous and conscious battle like ner is fighting,
  • debate on deeeper cultural values
  • send salaried work, even if only little by little, to the memory trunk from an inglorious time, and once and for all
Tero Toivanen

Bitcoin and the dangerous fantasy of 'apolitical' money | Yanis Varoufakis - 0 views

yanisvaroufakis.eu/...us-fantasy-of-apolitical-money

bitcoin

shared by Tero Toivanen on 22 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • What is, however, genuinely novel and unique about bitcoin is that no ‘one’ institution or company is safeguarding the so-called Ledger: the record of transactions that ensures that, when you have spent one unit of currency, there is one less unit of currency in your (digital) wallet.
  • The great challenge of creating a non-physical, wholly digital, currency is the pressing question: If a currency unit is a string of zeros and ones on my hard disk, who can stop me from taking that string, copying and pasting it as often as I want and become infinitely ‘moneyed’
  • Bitcoin was born the day in 2008 some anonymous computer geek, using an unlikely Japanese pseudonym (aka Nakamoto), posted an algorithm (on some obscure listserve website) that made something remarkable possible: It could generate a string of zeros and ones that was unique, ensuring that, before it could be transferred from one computer or device to another, a minimum number of other users had to trace its transfer and verify that it left the device of the seller (of some good or service) before moving to the device of the buyer.
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  • bitcoin users must make available computing power to the bitcoin users’ community so that everyone can ‘see’ the Ledger, in order to ensure perfect community ownership of the transactions’ record, as opposed to trusting some government agency (e.g. the Fed) or some private corporation that may have its own agenda.
  • Lastly, to cap the supply of bitcoins, and thus safeguard their value, the algorithm guaranteed that the maximum number of these strings, or bitcoins, could only grow (given the algorithm’s structure) to 21 million units by the year 2040. Once it reached that quantity, its ‘production’ would cease and the users of bitcoins would have to do with these 21 million units.
  • the new currency on the basis of faith in the crudest version of the ‘monetarist’ Quantity Theory of Money (i.e. the idea that the value of money depended solely on the quantity of money supplied to the public) and, thus, aimed at creating the digital equivalent to… gold.
  • ust like gold, there are two ways in which bitcoins can be acquired: One is to buy them using dollars, chickens, silk, honey, whatever… The other is to ‘dig’ for them like 19th century gold diggers dug for gold. To that intent, Mr ‘Nakamoto’ designed his brilliant algorithm in a manner that allowed for ‘bitcoin digging’.
  • Moreover, the algorithm was written in such a way as to guarantee a steady ‘production’ of these strings, or bitcoins, over time and in response to the computing power devoted by users in order to help track transfers and, thus, in order collectively to maintain The Ledger.
  • here are two insurmountable flaws that make bitcoin a highly problematic currency: First, the bitcoin social economy is bound to be typified by chronic deflation. Secondly, we have already seen the rise of a bitcoin aristocracy
  • First, deflation is unavoidable in the bitcoin community because the maximum supply of bitcoins is fixed to 21 million bitcoins and approximately half of them have already been ‘minted’ at a time when very, very few goods and services transactions are denominated in bitcoins.
  • Can these two flaws be corrected? Would it be possible to calibrate the long-term supply of bitcoins in such a way as to ameliorate for the deflationary effects described above while tilting the balance from speculative to transactions demand for bitcoins? To do so we would need a Bitcoin Central Bank, which will of course defeat the very purpose of having a fully decentralised digital currency like bitcoin.
  • Secondly, two major faultlines are developing, quite inevitably, within the bitcoin economy. The first faultline has already been mentioned. It is the one that divides the ‘bitcoin aristocracy’ from the ‘bitcoin poor’, i.e. from the latecomers who must buy into bitcoin at increasing dollar and euro prices. The second faultline separates the speculators from the users
  • ; i.e. those who see bitcoin as a means of exchange from those who see in it as a stock of value.
  • in the case of bitcoin speculative demand outstrips transactions demand by a mile.
  • the available quantity of bitcoins per each unit of goods and services will be falling causing deflation.
  • The Crash of 2008 has infused our societies with enormous scepticism on the role of the authorities, both government and Central Banks. It is quite natural that many dream of a currency that politicians, bankers and central bankers cannot manipulate; a currency of the people by the people for the people. Bitcoin has emerged as the great white hope of something of the sort. Alas, the hope it brings to many people’s hearts and minds is false. And the reason is simple: While it is true that local communities have, in the past, generated successful communitarian currencies (that enabled them to improve welfare in their midst, especially at a time of acute economic crises), there can be no de-politicised currency capable of ‘powering’ an advanced, industrial society.
  • The 1920s thus demonstrates the impossibility of an apolitical money supply. Even though the monetary authorities were insisting on a stable correspondence between the quantity of paper money and gold, the financial sector was boosting the money supply inexorably. Should the authorities stop them from so doing? If they had, the Edisons and the Fords would have never flourished, and capitalism would have failed to produce all the goodies that it did
  • To the extent that bitcoin attempts to emulate the Gold Standard, if a large portion of economic activity is denominated in bitcoin, the dilemmas of the 1920s will return to plague the bitcoin economy.
  • The reason that money is and can only be political is that the only way of steering a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of dangerous ponzi growth and stagnation is to exercise a degree of rational, collective control over the supply of money.
  • And since this control is bound to be political, in the sense that different monetary policies will affect different groups of people differently, the only decent manner in which such control can be exercised is through a democratic, collective agency.
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