[p2p-research] simpler way wiki

[Kevin Carson]

Thanks for the comments, Nathan.

On 4/19/09, Nathan Cravens <knuggy at gmail.com> wrote:

> So many proposals start out this way. I don't like the approach. Michel may
> quickly point out, with fewer words, this method fosters extrinsic rather
> than intrinsic motivation which potentially subjects  reliving the ghost of
> scarcity: even if the practice proposed is of greater material benefit than
> before. No matter how good or how much better--if it is motivated by
> guilt--this community cannot be considered abundant--even if 100% of all
> wants and needs are personally produced at 0% labor time.

I agree.  Unfortunately, most green lifestylism is oriented toward
greenwashed goods and services that are actually more expensive than
its conventional counterparts, and that only yuppie types can afford
to patronize out of liberal guilt.

The alt economy's success will come from appealing to the material
needs of people in the situation Dougald Hine described:  "Here's how
you can keep a roof over your head and keep yourself warm and fed,
comfortably and yet far more cheaply than what you're doing now, and
best of all by means under your own control--indefinitely, and
independently of the whims of a boss."

> The YMCA approach you mention is also very useful when considering living
> space for the 50% of folk living in urban areas. I disagree with the name,
> Quadruple Alliance, as these three organizations I consider community
> ventures outside the home environment. Because the home I prefer to keep in
> the personal realm, I do not consider that an official community space. This
> arbitrary separation ensures personal vs community growth. Also, I believe
> the Fab covers the construction of living environments. The fab lab title
> covers the other structural areas of concern to meet the objectives of the
> lab: materials generation or recycling (a farm, from food to aluminum),
> retrieval (using people/robots), and storage (warehousing, expected to
> dwindle over time).

I understand the home/nothome distinction you're making, and your
preference not to include the housing proposal as part of the Alliance
package.

The reason it occurred to me to call it a Quadruple Alliance was
mainly that you were fleshing out a sketch of Dougald Hine's, and
housing seemed equally relevant to the question he used to open the
whole discussion: "how do I survive now that I'm unemployed.

Housing strikes me, if not as a fourth leg of your system, at least a
coequal leg of *an* alternative economic life support system in answer
to the same questions that inspired your Triple Alliance page at
Appropedia.   The housing leg is an essential part of an overall
"resilient community" package that can weather and survive the Great
Recession in a manner analogous to the villa after the fall of Rome.
>From the perspective of the sizable fraction of the general population
that may soon be unemployed or unemployed, and consequently homeless,
access to shelter falls in the same general class of pressing
self-support needs as work in the Fab Lab and feeding oneself via the
CSA farm.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html