[p2p-research] labour, capital and p2p

[Christian Siefkes]

Ryan,

Ryan Lanham wrote:
> Regardless, my judgment, such as it is, comes from the millions I have
> witnessed debased and marginalized under systems created in Marx's name.

So you probably reject democracy and freedom because George W. Bush used
these terms? Or you still like democracy and fredom, but only because you
also like George W. Bush? Marx was an analyzer and critic of capitalism,
*not* a designer of alternative economic systems; and what little he wrote
about "communism" makes clear that he something in mind that was *very*
different from what the Soviet-style "socialists" made of it ("an
association in which the free development of each is the condition for the
free development of all" -- doesn't sound like the Soviet Union? Indeed it
doesn't!)

The problem with Soviet "socialists" is that they, like you, didn't care
very much about what Marx had really said and meant. Don't blame *him* for that.

> Capitalism (which is a silly term for the modern circumstance) is all but
> non-existent unless you frame it as private ownership, markets and the
> rights to realize personal gains from economic efforts.  Pretty tepid
> concepts that have been going on since the Stone Age, at least.  But history
> is as messy as the present, and discussing it seems to me a waste of time
> when plenty of crises go wanting for thinkers.

It's always easy to imagine that the past was roughly like the present, or
that the future will be roughly like the present. These things, in so far as
they existed, took very different shapes throughout the ages and played very
different roles in different societies--markets, for example, played only
minor supplementary roles in most pre-capitalist societies, and the modern
concept of private property (where almost anything can become property, and
where the owner has exclusive rights regarding almost all possible uses)
exists as an officially recognized concept since about the times of the
French Revolution. Reading some (economic) history books might broaden your
mind--if you're interested in that.

Capital, BTW, is money that is used in order to make more money, and
capitalism is a mode of production where "making money" (i.e. turning money
into more) is the primary goal of most economic activity. In pre-capitalist
societies, most economic activity took place in order to satisfy some
specific needs (not necessarily the needs of those who had to do the work),
while production for the sake of production (making money in order to make
more money in order to make more money...) emerged only about 400 years
(give or take a century or two) ago.

But maybe in the area you're living in, companies don't want to make money,
and they don't employ people (labor) in order to do so. Should that be the
case, you've arrived indeed in some post-capitalist state and might
rightfully declare that "capitalism no longer matters to me."

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 --
As for creation, it would be silly to think that music, a cultural form
without which no human society has existed, will cease to be in our world
because we shall abandon the industrial form it took for the blink of a
historical eye that was the twentieth century.
        -- Yochai Benkler, Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the
           Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production

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