the modes of communication we use are very tightly coupled with the modes of production that finance them
LED Mosquito in visible - Main doc - Google Drive - 0 views
Multi Channel LED Light - Google Docs - 1 views
Noduino - Control Arduino with Node.js, WebSockets and HTML5 - 0 views
-
A simple and flexible JavaScript and Node.js Framework for accessing basic Arduino controls from Web Applications using HTML5, Socket.IO and Node.js. Initialize your Arduino board, define registered pins and send commands. Use digital and analog read or write to control buttons or switch connected LEDs.
Food Security Information Network (FSIN) - 1 views
-
FSIN is a technical platform for exchanging expertise and best practices on food security and nutrition analysis. It promotes independent and consensus-based information and highlights critical data gaps. The result of a consultative process between government institutions and development partners interested in a new vision for country-led food security information systems, FSIN continues providing support at country and regional level. Demand-driven and flexible, it remains adaptable to changing contexts and evolving needs. Today, FSIN's work spans the effort of 16 global and regional partners committed to improving availability and quality of food security and nutrition analysis for better decision-making. It also facilitates the Global Network Against Food Crises's first pillar which is centered on better understanding global food crises.
Towards a Material Commons | Guerrilla Translation! - 0 views
-
I’m focused on the policy formation around this transition to a new, open knowledge and commons-based economy, and that’s the research work I’m doing here
- ...88 more annotations...
-
We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right
-
A lot of co-ops have been neo-liberalizing, as it were, have become competitive enterprises competing against other companies but also against other co-ops, and they don’t share their knowledge
-
instead of having a totally open commons, which allows multinationals to use our commons and reinforce the system of capital, the idea is to keep the accumulation within the sphere of the commons.
-
The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production
-
then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops
-
But it hasn’t had much of a direct connection to this emerging commons movement, which shares so many of the values and principles of the traditional cooperative movement.
-
There’s also a lot of peer-to-peer work going on, but it’s not very well versed around issues like cooperative organization, formal or legal forms of ownership, which are based on reciprocity and cooperation, and how to interpret the commons vision with a structure, an organizational structure and a legal structure that actually gives it economic power, market influence, and a means of connecting it to organizational forms that have durability over the long-term.
-
The young people, the developers in open source or free software, the people who are in co-working centers, hacker spaces, maker spaces. When they are thinking of making a living, they think startups
-
They have a kind of generic reaction, “oh, let’s do a startup”, and then they look for venture funds. But this is a very dangerous path to take
-
Typically, the venture capital will ask for a controlling stake, they have the right to close down your start up whenever they feel like it, when they feel that they’re not going to make enough money
-
Don’t forget that with venture capital, only 1 out of 10 companies will actually make it, and they may be very rich, but it’s a winner-take-all system
-
I would like John to talk about the solidarity co-ops, and how that integrates the notion of the commons or the common good in the very structure of the co-op
-
They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge
-
Cooperatives, which are basically a democratic and collective form of enterprise where members have control rights and democratically direct the operations of the co-op, have been the primary stakeholders in any given co-op – whether it’s a consumer co-op, or a credit union, or a worker co-op.
-
What was really fascinating about the social co-ops was that, although they had members, their mission was not only to serve the members but also to provide service to the broader community
-
In the city of Bologna, for example, over 87% of the social services provided in that city are provided through contract with social co-ops
-
The difference, however, is that the structure of social co-ops is still very much around control rights, in other words, members have rights of control and decision-making within how that organization operates
-
And it is an incorporated legal structure that has formal recognition by the legislation of government of the state, and it has the power, through this incorporated power, to negotiate with and contract with government for the provision of these public services
-
So, the social economy, meaning organizations that have a mutual aim in their purpose, based on the principles of reciprocity, collective benefit, social benefit, is emerging as an important player for the design and delivery of public services
-
This, too, is in reaction to the failure of the public market for provision of services like affordable housing or health care or education services
-
This is a crisis in the role of the state as a provider of public services. So the question has emerged: what happens when the state fails to provide or fulfill its mandate as a provider or steward of public goods and services, and what’s the role of civil society and the social economy in response?
-
we have commonses of knowledge, code and design. They’re more easily created, because as a knowledge worker, if you have access to the network and some means, however meager, of subsistence, through effort and connection you can actually create knowledge. However, this is not the case if you move to direct physical production, like the open hardware movement
-
I originally encountered Michel after seeing some talks by Benkler and Lessig at the Wizard of OS 4, in 2006, and I wrote an essay criticizing that from a materialist perspective, it was called “The creative anti-commons and the poverty of networks”, playing on the terms that both those people used.
-
Some people have called the open hardware community a “candy” economy, because if you’re not part of these open hardware startups, you’re basically not getting anything for your efforts
-
They conceive of peer production, especially Benkler, as being something inherently immaterial, a form of production that can only exist in the production of immaterial wealth
-
From my materialist point of view, that’s not a mode of production, because a mode of production must, in the first place, reproduce its productive inputs, its capital, its labor, and whatever natural wealth it consumes
-
From a materialist point of view, it becomes obvious that the entire exchange value produced in these immaterial forms would be captured by the same old owners of materialist wealth
-
I wanted to create something like a protocol for the formation and allocation of physical goods, the same way we have TCP/IP and so forth, as a way to allocate immaterial goods
-
share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.
-
One was the Georgist idea of using rent, economic rent, as a fundamental mutualizing source of wealth
-
So, the unearned income, the portion of income derived from ownership of productive assets is evenly distributed
-
typical statist communist reaction to the cooperative movement is saying that cooperatives can exclude and exploit one another
-
But then, as we’ve seen in history, there’s something that develops called an administrative class, which governs over the collective of cooperatives or the socialist state, and can become just as counterproductive and often exploitive as capitalist class
-
So, how do we create cooperation among cooperatives, and distribution of wealth among cooperatives, without creating this administrative class?
-
This is why I borrowed from the work of Henry George and Silvio Gesell in created this idea of rent sharing.
-
The idea is that if a cooperative wants an asset, like, an example is if one of the communes would like to have a tractor, then essentially the central commune is like a bond market. They float a bond, they say I want a tractor, I am willing to pay $200 a month for this tractor in rent, and other members of the cooperative can say, hey, yeah, that’s a good idea,we think that’s a really good allocation of these productive assets, so we are going to buy these bonds. The bond sale clears, the person gets the tractor, the money from the rent of the tractor goes back to clear the bonds, and after that, whatever further money is collected through the rent on this tractor – and I don’t only mean tractors, same would be applied to buildings, to land, to any other productive assets – all this rent that’s collected is then distributed equally among all of the workers.
-
The idea is that people earn income not only by producing things, but by owning the means of production, owning productive assets, and our society is unequal because the distribution of productive assets is unequal
-
This means that if you use your exact per capita share of property, no more no less than what you pay in rent and what you received in social dividend, will be equal
-
But if you’re not working at that time, because you’re old, or otherwise unemployed, then obviously the the productive assets that you will be using will be much less than the mean and the median, so what you’ll receive as dividend will be much more than what you pay in rent, essentially providing a basic income
-
It doesn’t seek to limit, control, or even tell them how they should distribute it, or under what means; what they produce is entirely theirs, it’s only the collective management of the commons of productive assets
-
On paper this would seem to work, but the problem is that this assumes that we have capital to allocate in this way, and that is not the case for most of the world workers
-
do we express our activism through the state, or do we try to achieve our goals by creating the alternative society outside
-
My materialist background tells me that when you sell your labor on the market, you have nothing more than your subsistence costs at the end of it, so where is this wealth meant to come from
-
I believe that the only reason that we have any extra wealth beyond subsistence is because of organized social political struggle; because we have organized in labor movements, in the co-op movement, and in other social forms
-
To create the space for prefiguring presupposes engagement with the state, and struggle within parliaments, and struggle within the public social forum
-
Instead, we should think that no, we must engage in the state in order to protect our ability to have alternative societies
-
We can only get rid of the state in these areas once we have alternative, distributed, cooperative means to provide those same functions
-
We can only eliminate the state from these areas once they actually exist, which means we actually have to build them
-
What I mean by insurrectionary finance is that we have to acknowledge that it’s not only forming capital and distributing capital, it’s also important how intensively we use capital
-
I’m not proposing that the cooperative movement needs to engage in the kind of derivative speculative madness that led to the financial crisis, but at the same time we can’t… it can’t be earn a dollar, spend a dollar
-
they did things the organized left hasn’t been able to do, which is takeover industrial means of production
-
if they can take over these industrial facilities, just in order to shut them down and asset strip them, why can’t we take them over and mutualize them?
-
more ironic once you understand that the source of investment that Milken and his colleagues were working with were largely workers pension funds
-
in Québec, there is a particular form of co-op that’s been developed that allows small or medium producers to pool their capital to purchase machinery and to use it jointly
-
much more lean and accountable because they are accountable to boards of directors that represent the interests of the members
-
I’ve run into this repeatedly among social change activists who immediately recoil at the notion of thinking about markets and capital, as part of their change agenda
-
I had thought previously, like so many, that economics is basically a bought discipline, and that it serves the interests of existing elites. I really had a kind of reaction against that
-
advocating for a vision of social change that isn’t just about politics, and isn’t just about protest, it has to be around how do we reimagine and reclaim economics
-
I think what we’re potentially talking about here is to make the social economy hyper-productive, hyper-competitive, hyper-cooperative
-
The paradox is that capital already knows this. Capital is investing in these peer production projects
-
Part of the proposal of the FLOK society project in Ecuador will be to get that strategic reorganization to make the social economy strategic
If not Global Captalism - then What? - 0 views
-
I posit an optimistic view of the potential for Society from the emergence of a new and “Open” form of Capitalism.
- ...162 more annotations...
-
‘Enterprise’ is defined as ‘any entity within which two or more individuals create, accumulate or exchange Value”.
-
Pirsig’s approach Capital may be viewed as “Static” Value and Money as “Dynamic” Value. “Transactions” are the “events” at which individuals (Subjects) interact with each other or with Capital (both as Objects) to create forms of Value and at which “Value judgments” are made based upon a “Value Unit”.
-
The result of these Value Events /Transactions is to create subject/object pairings in the form of data ie Who “owns” or has rights of use in What,
-
It, too, may then be defined in a subject/object pairing through the concept of “intellectual property”.
-
“The purpose of money is to facilitate barter by splitting the transaction into two parts, the acceptor of money reserving the power to requisition value from any trader at any time
-
The monetary process is a dynamic one involving the creation and recording of obligations as between individuals and the later fulfilment of these obligations
-
Static Value – which only becomes “Money”/ Dynamic Value when exchanged in the transitory Monetary process.
-
the practice of Lending involves an incomplete exchange in terms of risk and reward: a Lender, as opposed to an Investor, has no interest in the outcome of the Loan, and requires the repayment of Principal no matter the ability of the Borrower to repay.
-
-
"The Lender has no interest in the outcome of the loan", i.e doesn't care what happens in the end. The Lender ins not interested in the economical outcome of the Lender-Loner relation. So in fact there is no real risk sharing. the only risk for the Lender is when the Loner doesn't pay back, which is not really a risk... In fact it is a risk for the small bank, who has to buy money from the central bank, but not for the central bank.
-
-
an “Object” circulating but rather a dynamic process of Value creation and exchange by reference to a “Value Unit”.
-
in relation to Productive Capital relates to the extent of “property rights” which may be held over it thereby allowing individuals to assert “absolute” permanent and exclusive ownership - in particular in relation to Land
-
need for institutions which outlived the lives of the Members led to the development of the Corporate body with a legal existence independent of its Members
-
The key development in the history of Capitalism was the creation of the ‘Joint Stock’ Corporate with liability limited by shares of a ‘Nominal’ or ‘Par’ value
-
over the next 150 years the Limited Liability Corporate evolved into the Public Limited Liability Corporate
-
Such “Closed” Shares of “fixed” value constitute an absolute and permanent claim over the assets and revenues of the Enterprise to the exclusion of all other “stakeholders” such as Suppliers, Customers, Staff, and Debt Financiers.
-
It has the characteristics of what biologists call a ‘semi-permeable membrane’ in the way that it allows Economic Value to be extracted from other stakeholders but not to pass the other way.
-
-
Capital most certainly is and always has been - through the discontinuity (see diagram) between:‘Fixed’ Capital in the form of shares ie Equity; and ‘Working’ Capital in the form of debt finance, credit from suppliers, pre-payments by customers and obligations to staff and management.
-
xchange of Economic Value in a Closed Corporate is made difficult and true sharing of Risk and Reward is simply not possible
-
All that is needed is a simple ‘Member Agreement’ – a legal protocol which sets out the Aims, Objectives. Principles of Governance, Revenue Sharing, Dispute Resolution, Transparency and any other matters that Members agree should be included. Amazingly enough, this Agreement need not even be in writing, since in the absence of a written agreement Partnership Law is applied by way of default.
-
The ease of use and total flexibility enables the UK LLP to be utilised in a way never intended – as an ‘Open’ Corporate partnership.
-
it is now possible for any stakeholder to become a Member of a UK LLP simply through signing a suitably drafted Member Agreement
-
may instead become true Partners in the Enterprise with their interests aligned with other stakeholders.
-
-
no profit or loss in an Open Corporate Partnership, merely Value creation and exchange between members in conformance with the Member Agreement.
-
in an Enterprise constitute an infinitely divisible, flexible and scaleable form of Capital capable of distributing or accumulating Value organically as the Enterprise itself grows in Value or chooses to distribute it.
-
Within the OCP Capital and Revenue are continuous: to the extent that an Investee pays Rental in advance of the due date he becomes an Investor.
-
A Co-operative is not an enterprise structure: it is a set of Principles that may be applied to different types of enterprise structure.
-
the crippling factors in practical terms have been, inter alia: the liability to which Member partners are exposed from the actions of their co-partners on their behalf; limited ability to raise capital.
-
they favour the interests of other stakeholders, are relatively restricted in accessing investment; are arguably deficient in incentivising innovation.
-
The ‘new’ LLP was expressly created to solve the former problem by limiting the liability of Member partners to those assets which they choose to place within its protective ‘semi-permeable membrane’
-
However, the ability to configure the LLP as an “Open” Corporate permits a new and superior form of Enterprise.
-
it is possible to re-organise any existing enterprise as either a partnership or as a partnership of partnerships.
-
would be divided among Members in accordance with the LLP Agreement. This means that all Members share a common interest in collaborating/co-operating to maximise the Value generated by the LLP collectively as opposed to competing with other stakeholders to maximise their individual share at the other stakeholders’ expense.
-
he ‘Commercial’ Enterprise LLP – where the object is for a closed group of individuals to maximise the value generated in their partnership. There are already over 7,000 of these.
-
-
the Profit generated in a competitive economy based upon shareholder value and unsustainable growth results from a transfer of risks outwards, and the transfer of reward inwards, leading to a one way transfer of Economic Value.
-
Whether its assets are protected within a corporate entity with limited liability or not, it will always operate co-operatively – for mutual profit.
-
continuity between Capital as Static Value and Money as Dynamic Value which has never before been possible due to the dichotomy between the absolute/infinite and the absolute/finite durations of the competing claims over assets – “Equity” and “Debt”
-
Open Capital Partnership gives rise to a new form of Financial Capital of indeterminate duration. It enables the Capitalisation of assets and the monetisation of revenue streams in an entirely new way.
-
It is possible to envisage a Society within which individuals are members of a portfolio of Enterprises constituted as partnerships, whether limited in liability or otherwise.
-
‘Commercial’ enterprises of all kinds aimed at co-operatively working together to maximise value for the Members.
-
It can only be replaced by another ‘emergent’ phenomenon, which is adopted ‘virally’ because any Enterprise which does not utilise it will be at a disadvantage to an Enterprise which does.
-
The ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership is: capable of linking any individuals anywhere in respect of collective ownership of assets anywhere; extremely cheap and simple to operate; and because one LLP may be a Member of another it is organically flexible and ‘scaleable’. The phenomenon of “Open Capital” – which is already visible in the form of significant commercial transactions - enables an extremely simple and continuous relationship between those who wish to participate indefinitely in an Enterprise and those who wish to participate for a defined period of time.
-
Moreover, the infinitely divisible proportionate “shares” which constitute ‘Open’ Capital allow stakeholder interests to grow flexibly and organically with the growth in Value of the Enterprise. In legal terms, the LLP agreement is essentially consensual and ‘pre-distributive’: it is demonstrably superior to prescriptive complex contractual relationships negotiated adversarially and subject to subsequent re-distributive legal action. Above all, the ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership is a Co-operative phenomenon which is capable, the author believes, of unleashing the “Co-operative Advantage” based upon the absence of a requirement to pay returns to “rentier” Capitalists.
‹ Previous
21 - 28 of 28