[p2p-research] Fwd: Launch of Abundance: The Journal of Post-Scarcity Studies, preliminary plans

[Christian Siefkes]

Hi Michel and all,

Michel Bauwens wrote:
> Just to make my position clear: I am convinced that no simple work on
> p2p infrastructures, by themselves, are enough to induce complete
> change, i.e. internet infrastructures, smart grids, p2p money systems
> are insufficient by themselves, but make sense in an integrated strategy.

Why do you think they're insufficient?

> Peer to peer money is of interest as it takes control in the hands of
> the communities, protects local and virtual affinity communities from
> leakage, and creates more equitable trading relationships; it can also

I don't see why local connections should be generally better than global
connections; and for affinity communities: how much "affinity" is there, if
they still need money in their internal relationships?

As for "equitable trading": I already tried to explain why trading/exchange
itself is the problem, regardless of whether or not it's equitable (reposted
here:
http://www.keimform.de/2009/03/07/marx-theory-of-value-and-why-exchange-can-be-equal-and-still-bad/
). "Equitable trading" is like a "light case of cholera": it's better than a
"serious case of cholera," but it's *much better* to avoid/get rid off
altogether.

> fund the other aspects of p2p infrastructures

Funding is a serious concern, but it will usually require "real" money,
accepted in the outside world--"affinity group" money will hardly satisfy
your providers. There are ways to get funding for external costs without
violating the internal logic of cooperation: donations (cf. Wikipedia),
membership fees (cf. hacker spaces such as the c-base, which are also open
to non-members), grants from foundations and the state.... I agree that
funding is a difficult issue, but I would clearly separate the need to get
money to cover external costs from the internal logic of peer production.

> While I agree with you on the underlying logic of exploitation by
> capital, many other aspects of the superstructure have their own
> influence; for example, it matters whether we have a social-democratic
> welfare state, strong unions, different monetary systems; I think you
> are probably not familiar with the convincing literature which shows how
> instrumental the design of money is, to steer certain logics; for
> example, the linkage between interest and infinite growth, and demurrage
> and long-term planning ...

"Infinite growth" follows from the way capitalism works: a company buys
means of production and labor force; it throws them together and sells the
resulting commodities--if everything goes well--with a profit (because of
exploitation, as explained). Infinite growth follows from the tendency to
re-invest part of the profit, and continue the process at a higher level.

Similarly, "interest" is not an effect of money per se that could be changed
by modifying the nature of money--as I already mentioned, send money to the
moon to find whether it can indeed grow interest by itself.

Instead, in capitalism, interest is an phenomenon derived from profit:
*every* sane company will borrow money in order to expand production and
will split the resulting additional profit between the company owners (who
thus get a higher profit rate for their own invested money) and the money
lenders (would wouldn't lend the money if they didn't get something out of
it). So if a company with a profit rate of 10% borrows the same amount of
money as it already owns and uses the additional money to double their
production capacity, they will also double the total profit they make
(provided, of course, that they manage to sell the additional produce). How
they divide the additional profit is a matter of negotation power between
the investors who own the company and the money lenders (two different
capital fractions). Assuming they divide it evenly, the profit rate of the
the investors has increased to 15% (compared to their invested capital), and
the money lenders now have 5% more money than they had before. The
transaction was beneficial for *both parties.*

That's true even if there is no inflation or demurrage which reduces the
value of money-as-money over time. *With* inflation or demurrage (they're
basically the same thing), the effect becomes even stronger.
Inflation/demurrage hardly affects capital in the productive process, since
it largely exists in non-monetary form (in bought means of production, in
the labor power of paid laborers, in produced commodities waiting to be
sold). So, when left at home, the money would maybe only preserve 95% of
it's original value (with 5% inflation/demurrage), while when lend for the
productive process, it will have grown to 105% of it's value; and when
directly invested in a company, it will have grown to 115% (but probably
with a higher risk of loss--that's the trade-off which money owners always
have to make).

(The profit-splitting logic of productive lending determines all interest
rates in capitalism: interest rates for money lend to consumers are derived
from it--though consumers will usually have to pay higher interest rates as
the lender will typically assess the risk that they can't pay back the money
as higher.)

So it's wrong to think that by changing the properties of money-as-money,
you could somehow eliminate interest or infinite growth--these are
properties of capitalism itself, not of the money it uses.

> This is exactly what demurrage based systems aim to solve, as there is
> no incentive for accumulation, but rather a counter-incentive.

Only a very small amount of accumulated money exists as money, almost all of
it (aside from the part that is consumed or converted into luxury goods)
takes the form of productive investments of some form or other (whether
direct; through shares or investment funds; investments geared at generating
a rent, e.g. in apartment buildings or mines; or loans to companies,
consumers, or the state). Indeed, capital *must* take such a non-monetary
form to be not only *accumulated,* but also *accumulating*--otherwise,
accumulation would already have come to an end (even without
inflation/demurrage, money-as-money will only keep its value, but not multiply).

Best regards
	Christian

-- 
|-------- Dr. Christian Siefkes --------- christian at siefkes.net ---------
|   Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/   |   Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
|   Better Bayesian Analysis:           |   Peer Production Everywhere:
|   http://bart-project.com/            |   http://peerconomy.org/wiki/
|------------------------------------------ OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 --
During the past decade I was surprised to learn that the writing of
programs for TeX and for METAFONT proved to be much more difficult than
all the other things I had done (like proving theorems or writing
books). The creation of good software demands a significantly higher
standard of accuracy than those other things do, and it requires a longer
attention span than other intellectual tasks.
        -- Donald E. Knuth


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