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in title, tags, annotations or urlOpenspritzer - Open-Labware.net - 0 views
open-labware.net/...openspritzer
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 29 Oct 20
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Lab Equipment possible collaborator production revenue OSH catalog open hardware open science
Smart Contract-Based Product Traceability System in the Supply Chain Scenario - 1 views
JuakaliSmart - 0 views
Sensorica - 0 views
Dependability in peer production - 1 views
measures that p2p networks undertake to increase dependability in material peer production activities.
IoPA economic level ecosystem level legal level tech level social level standard level undecided levelundecided level
Open Insulin - 3 views
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OS operates as both a legal entity (non-profit) and a philosophical paradigm for facilitating widespread access Primary focus is to research and develop the first open source protocols to produce insulin and insulin production hardware simply and economically.
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Quote: We are looking to the precedents of the "Defensive Patent License" and the "Peer Production License", and the "Humanitarian Technology and Intellectual Property License Agreement."
Start - Interfacer EU Project - 2 views
Helpful - 2 views
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Global open-source PLATFORM and COMMUNITY organizing talent, resources and production capabilities to address systemic challenges using a "Volunteer agreement" found here: https://helpfulengineering.org/volunteer-agreement/ HELPFUL fosters rigorous and sustainable engineering-driven solutions Licensing agreement found here: https://helpfulengineering.org/licensing-guide/
Allied Grounds · BG°2023 Project - The means of production have become the means of climate production, so how can we - all kinds of exploited workers around the world - seize these very means and address both the eco-social and decolonial question of the - 4 views
projekte.berlinergazette.de/allied-grounds
shared by mayssamd on 19 Jan 23
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IoPA P2P Manufacturing P2P Found Wiki organization undecided level
Real Vegan Cheese - 2 views
Sensat creates digital twins for public infrastructure to improve productivity, raises $20M | VentureBeat - 1 views
Open Collaboration - The Next Economic Paradigm - 0 views
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The old economic paradigm was a service economy built on the digital communications revolution that began in the early 1970′s.
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This will be a profoundly social economy, built on unprecedented capabilities to self-organize people and resources in the crowd.
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Those who can leverage the wisdom of crowds for market research, product development, and efficient resource allocation will be more adept and agile in the face of rapid change.
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Those who build walls around themselves will fail to tap into the flow of knowledge and resources running rampant in the crowd
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The era of “user generated content” and “prosumption” — where consumers of goods and services co-create what they will consume — is now a decade along in its evolution. We will increasingly see collaborative design and production of consumables across society.
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In the education arena, we will see more curricula as shareware and an increased emphasis on multi-perspective teamwork as the necessary skills for engaging in collaborative projects.
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Expert/amateur boundaries have already blurred to the point where individuals can acquire graduate-level knowledge through self-directed learning on the internet.
The Social Organization of Production: Cooperatives and Peer Production - 1 views
Crisis of Value Theory - P2P Foundation - 0 views
p2pfoundation.net/Crisis_of_Value_Theory
shared by Kurt Laitner on 11 Jul 12
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Michel Bauwens Kevin Carson capitalism alternative economy paper
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In terms of knowledge creation, a vast new information commons is being created, which is increasingly out of the control of cognitive capitalism.
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The emergence of the peer model of production, based on the non-rivalrous nature and virtually non-existent marginal cost of reproduction of digital information, and coupled with the increasing unenforceability of “intellectual property” laws, means that capital is incapable of realizing returns on ownership in the cognitive realm.
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capital is becoming an a posteriori intervention in the realization of innovation, rather than a condition for its occurrence
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What this announces is a crisis of value, most such value is ‘beyond measure’, but also essentially a crisis of accumulation of capital.
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“the core logic of the emerging experience economy, operating as it does in the world of non-rival exchange, is unlikely to have capitalism as its core logic.”
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This takes the form both of “intellectual property” law, as well as direct subsidies from the taxpayer to the corporate economy
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crisis of realization under state capitalism to capital’s growing dependence on the state to capture value from social production and redistribute it to private corporate owners
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The state capitalist system will reach a point at which, thanks to the collapse of the portion of value comprised of rents on artificial property, the base of taxable value is imploding at the very time big business most needs subsidies to stay afloat.
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We live in a political economy that has it exactly backwards. We believe that our natural world is infinite, and therefore that we can have an economic system based on infinite growth. But since the material world is finite, it is based on pseudo-abundance. And then we believe that we should introduce artificial scarcities in the world of immaterial production, impeding the free flow of culture and social innovation, which is based on free cooperation, by creating the obstacle of permissions and intellectual property rents protected by the state. What we need instead is a political economy based on a true notion of scarcity in the material realm, and a realization of abundance in the immaterial realm.
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Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to organize production.
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The household and informal economies have been allowed to function to the extent that they bear reproduction costs that would otherwise have to be internalized in wages; but they have been suppressed (as in the Enclosures) when they threaten to increase in size and importance to the point of offering a basis for independence from wage labor. “
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one of intensive development, to grow in the immaterial field, and this is basically what the experience economy means
If not Global Captalism - then What? - 0 views
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I posit an optimistic view of the potential for Society from the emergence of a new and “Open” form of Capitalism.
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‘Enterprise’ is defined as ‘any entity within which two or more individuals create, accumulate or exchange Value”.
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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”.
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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,
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It, too, may then be defined in a subject/object pairing through the concept of “intellectual property”.
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“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
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The monetary process is a dynamic one involving the creation and recording of obligations as between individuals and the later fulfilment of these obligations
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Static Value – which only becomes “Money”/ Dynamic Value when exchanged in the transitory Monetary process.
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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.
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"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.
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an “Object” circulating but rather a dynamic process of Value creation and exchange by reference to a “Value Unit”.
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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
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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
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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
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over the next 150 years the Limited Liability Corporate evolved into the Public Limited Liability Corporate
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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.
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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.
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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.
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xchange of Economic Value in a Closed Corporate is made difficult and true sharing of Risk and Reward is simply not possible
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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.
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The ease of use and total flexibility enables the UK LLP to be utilised in a way never intended – as an ‘Open’ Corporate partnership.
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it is now possible for any stakeholder to become a Member of a UK LLP simply through signing a suitably drafted Member Agreement
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may instead become true Partners in the Enterprise with their interests aligned with other stakeholders.
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no profit or loss in an Open Corporate Partnership, merely Value creation and exchange between members in conformance with the Member Agreement.
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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.
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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.
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A Co-operative is not an enterprise structure: it is a set of Principles that may be applied to different types of enterprise structure.
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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.
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they favour the interests of other stakeholders, are relatively restricted in accessing investment; are arguably deficient in incentivising innovation.
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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’
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However, the ability to configure the LLP as an “Open” Corporate permits a new and superior form of Enterprise.
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it is possible to re-organise any existing enterprise as either a partnership or as a partnership of partnerships.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Whether its assets are protected within a corporate entity with limited liability or not, it will always operate co-operatively – for mutual profit.
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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”
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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.
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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.
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‘Commercial’ enterprises of all kinds aimed at co-operatively working together to maximise value for the Members.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Owning Together Is the New Sharing by Nathan Schneider - YES! Magazine - 0 views
www.yesmagazine.org/...ng-together-is-the-new-sharing
shared by Kurt Laitner on 05 Jan 15
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ouishare sensorica loomio enspiral cobudget ethereum sovolve swarm ownership sharing paper
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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
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The notion that sharing would do away with the need for owning has been one of the mantras of sharing economy promoters. We could share cars, houses, and labor, trusting in the platforms to provide. But it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.
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Léonard and his collaborators are part of a widespread effort to make new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between. Plans are being made for a driver-owned Lyft, a cooperative version of eBay, and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are scheming to build a crowdsourcing platform they can run themselves. Each idea has its prospects and shortcomings, but together they aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.
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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
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once the VC-backed sharing companies clear away regulatory hurdles, local co-ops will be poised to swoop in and spread the wealth
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“We’re moving into a new economic age,” says Marjorie Kelly, who spent two decades at the helm of Business Ethics magazine and now advises social entrepreneurs. “It needs to be sustainable. It needs to be inclusive. And the foundation of what defines an economic age is its form of ownership.”
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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.
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From the start Loomio was part of Enspiral, an “open value network“ of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.
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The team members recently had to come to terms with the fact that, for the time being, only some of them could be paid for full-time work They called the process “participatory downsizing.”
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And they can take many forms. Loomio and other tech companies, for instance, are aspiring toward the model of a multi-stakeholder cooperative—one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once.
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Loconomics is a San Francisco-based startup designed, like TaskRabbit, to manage short-term freelance jobs
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“People who have been without for a long time,” she says, “often operate with a mindset that they can’t share what they have, because they don’t know when that resource will come along again.”
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As Loconomics prepares to begin operations this winter, it’s running out of the pocket of the founder, Josh Danielson
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The ambition of a cooperative Facebook or Uber—competitive, widespread, and owned by its community—still seems out of reach for enterprises not willing to sell large parts of themselves to investors. Organizations like
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His fellow OuiShare founder Benjamin Tincq is concerned that too much fixation on a particular model will make it hard for well-meaning ventures to be successful. “I like the idea that we don’t need to have a specific legal status,” he says. “It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”
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Fenton’s new undertaking, Sovolve, proposes to “create innovative solutions to accelerate social change,” much as CouchSurfing did, but it’s doing the innovating cautiously. All work is done by worker-owners located around the world. Sovolve uses an internal platform—soon to become a product in its own right—through which contributors decide how much they want to be paid in cash and how much in equity. They can see how much others are earning. Their virtual workplace is gamified, with everyone working to nudge their first product, WonderApp, into virality
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Loomio’s members use a similar system, which they call Loomio Points. But Sovolve is no cooperative; contributors are not in charge.
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Open-source software and share-alike licenses have revived the ancient idea of the commons for an Internet age. But the “ commons-based peer production“ that Sensorica seeks to practice doesn’t arise overnight. Just as today’s business culture rests on generations of accumulated law, habit, and training, learning to manage a commons successfully takes time
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It makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, which exist entirely on a shared network
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The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum, has raised more than $15 million in crowdfunding on the promise of creating such a network.
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all with technology that makes collective ownership a lot easier than a conventional legal structure
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A project called Eris is developing a collective decision-making tool designed to govern DAOs on Ethereum, though the platform may still be months from release.
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For now, the burden of reinventing every wheel at once makes it hard for companies like Sensorica and Loomio to compete
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For instance, Cutting Edge Capital specializes in helping companies raise money through a long-standing mechanism called the direct public investment, or DPO, which allows for small, non-accredited investors.
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Venture funding may be in competition with Dietz’s cryptoequity vision, but it provides a fearsome head start
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Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits, so they’re a possible remedy for worsening economic inequality
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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
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A less consensual strategy was employed to fund the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain; over the course of a few years, one activist borrowed around $600,000 from Spanish banks without paying any of it back.
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In Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor in 2013 on a platform of fostering worker-owned cooperatives, although much of the momentum was lost when Lumumba died just a few months later.
Co-Creating as Disruption to the Dominant Cultural Framework » Wirearchy - 0 views
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Barcamps, Wordcamps, Govcamps, Foo Camps, Unconferences, high-end celebrity-and-marketing-and venture-capital ‘experience’ markets, new cultural and artistic festivals with technology-and-culture-making themes
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appearance, development and evolution of social tools, web services, massive storage, and the ongoing development of computer-and-smart-devices development
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People are searching for ways to find others with similar interests and motivations so that they can engage in activities that help them learn, find work, grow capabilities and skills, and tackle vexing social and economic problems
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rules about self-management, operate democratically, and produce results grounded in ownership and the responsibilities that have been agreed upon by the ‘community’
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The relationships and flows of information can be transferred to online spaces and often benefit from wider connectivity.
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What’s coming along next ? “Smart” devices and Internet everywhere in our lives ? Deep(er) changes to the way things are conceived, carried out, managed and used ? New mental models ? Or, will we discover real societal limits to what can be done given the current framework of laws, institutions and established practices with which people are familiar and comfortable ?
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It is clear evidence that the developmental and learning dynamics generated by continuous or regular feedback loops are becoming the norm in areas of activity in which change and short cycles of product development are constants.
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clothes, homes, cars, buildings, roads, and a wide range of other objects that have a place in peoples’ daily life activities
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experiencing major growth, equally in terms of hardware, software and with respect to the way the capabilities are configured and used
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that key opportunities associated with widespread uptake of the IoT are derived from the impact upon peoples’ activities and lives
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Clearly these early (and now not-so-weak) signals and patterns tell us that the core assumptions and principles that have underpinned organized human activities for most of the past century
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are being changed by the combinations and permutations of new, powerful, inexpensive and widely accessible information-processing technologies
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The short description of each scenario reinforces the perception that we are both individually and collectively in transition from a linear, specialized, efficiency-driven paradigm towards a paradigm based on continuous feedback loops and principles of participation, both large and small in scope.
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a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
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the role of social media and smart mobile devices in the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East
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The roots of organizational development (OD) are in humanistic psychology and sociology action and ethnographic and cybernetic/ socio-technical systems theory. It’s a domain that emerged essentially as a counter-balance to the mechanistic and machine-metaphor-based core assumptions about the organized activities in our society.
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Organizational development principles are built upon some basic assumptions about human motivations, engagement and activities.
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in recent years created models that help clarify how to evaluate and respond to the continuous turbulence and ambiguity generated by participating in interconnected flows of information.
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contexts characterized by either Simple, Complicated or Chaotic dynamics (from complexity theory fundamentals). Increasingly, Complexity is emerging as a key definer of the issues, problems and opportunities faced by our societies.
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Co-creating in a wide range of forms, processes and purpose may become an effective and important antidote to the spreading enclosure of human creative activity.
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But .. the dominant models of governance, commercial ownership and the use and re-use of that which is co-created by people are going to have to undergo much more deep change in order to disrupt the existing paradigm of proprietary commercial creation and the model of socio-economic power that this paradigm enables and carries today.
Towards a Material Commons | Guerrilla Translation! - 0 views
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the modes of communication we use are very tightly coupled with the modes of production that finance them
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production
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then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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?
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.
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One was the Georgist idea of using rent, economic rent, as a fundamental mutualizing source of wealth
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So, the unearned income, the portion of income derived from ownership of productive assets is evenly distributed
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typical statist communist reaction to the cooperative movement is saying that cooperatives can exclude and exploit one another
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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
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So, how do we create cooperation among cooperatives, and distribution of wealth among cooperatives, without creating this administrative class?
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This is why I borrowed from the work of Henry George and Silvio Gesell in created this idea of rent sharing.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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do we express our activism through the state, or do we try to achieve our goals by creating the alternative society outside
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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
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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
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To create the space for prefiguring presupposes engagement with the state, and struggle within parliaments, and struggle within the public social forum
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Instead, we should think that no, we must engage in the state in order to protect our ability to have alternative societies
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We can only get rid of the state in these areas once we have alternative, distributed, cooperative means to provide those same functions
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We can only eliminate the state from these areas once they actually exist, which means we actually have to build them
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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
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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
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they did things the organized left hasn’t been able to do, which is takeover industrial means of production
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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?
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more ironic once you understand that the source of investment that Milken and his colleagues were working with were largely workers pension funds
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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
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much more lean and accountable because they are accountable to boards of directors that represent the interests of the members
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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
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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
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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
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I think what we’re potentially talking about here is to make the social economy hyper-productive, hyper-competitive, hyper-cooperative
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The paradox is that capital already knows this. Capital is investing in these peer production projects
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Part of the proposal of the FLOK society project in Ecuador will be to get that strategic reorganization to make the social economy strategic