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

Mon Mar 16 07:06:53 CET 2009

see inline

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 10:05 PM, Christian Siefkes
<christian at siefkes.net>wrote:

> 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?

Because while they can tackle the construction of counter-institutions and a
counter-economy, they're operating within another logic, and do not by
themselves tackle the issue of political and economic power ... All of them
separately can more easily be re-used, re-integrated by and in the interest
of the dominant logic, but with a lot more difficulty when they're
integrated and part of a social movement

>
>
> > 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?

when your community is disintegrating because of the meltdown, you'll know
why this is important, and affinity is unrelated to money

if we both are interested in peer to peer, having affinity, but need money
to survive, as I'm assuming we do, how does that diminish our affinity?

>
>
> 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.

it's what we have now, what many people want, and needs to be respected in a
free society, there is a very big difference between fair trade, and
globalized exploitation, ask any community that practices it, it often means
the difference between life and death, between dignity and slavery

>
>
> > 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.

yes of course, that is the whole challenge, more or less satisfactorily
solved by many free software projects

>
>
> > 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.

many expert people, including Keynes, and not so expert people like myself,
think otherwise; you are blind to protocollary power and the effects of
invisible architectures ...

>
>
> > 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).

all money, in coins or virtual, would be affected by the new rules and
structures

Michel

>
>
> 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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