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Re: [ox-en] GPL Society Manifesto?



Hi Thomas,

On Fri, 17 Jan 2003, Thomas Uwe Gruettmueller wrote:

Hi Graham,

On Thursday 16 January 2003 22:40, Graham Seaman wrote:
It would be to bring some of the German debates to
an english speaking audience.

IMHO, your conference talk was already pretty good for this 
purpose.

:-)
Unfortunately, it was also made of more questions than answers...
And it was four different unfinished talks squashed into one.
I wouldn't be happy about publishing this, at least not without a
complete rewrite.


Which in practice means, that if the book does include
translations of German texts (assuming it isn't actually in
German) we need people from the German list to be involved
too.. and the book idea doesn't (yet) seem to have generated
any enthusiasm at all there..

For me, it is much easier to translate from English into German 
than the other way round, so that I give up pretty fast. So, it 
seems that we have to work together in one way or another.

For example, I could translate the text into an intermediate 
form, which should take less time than real English. To make 
real English out of it would be your task. Please look below for 
an example, and please tell me what you think about the idea.

I think it's an excellent idea, and I would be very happy to work
like this. I found I don't much like working with the opentheory 
translation system though - the way you have to do small bits at
a time and then wait while each bit is submitted makes it hard
to keep up a flow, so that the style becomes jerky...
But if you can mail me (or if it's possible to download from
opentheory) the whole of the meilenstein text as translated so far,
we could use it as a test case, and I'll try to process it... :-)

However, there is another problem which needs dealing with first.
The people we have with experience of publishing or connections with
the publishing industry (Alan and Johan), AFAIK don't read German.
Chris, who is also interested, doesn't read German. etc. How do we
make the initial selection of which texts are good ones to translate?
Milestones is obvious, but after that? I wondered about maybe asking the
German list to vote on especially good texts from the list, but I'm not
sure if a voting system is as good a way to arrive at a coherent book as
an editor with a personal vision of what it should be. 

Cheers
Graham
PS Lohnarbeit = 'wage labour', waren = 'commodities'

cu,
Thomas
 }:o{#

- - - - - - - -
2. init 2 Work(ing) Society at its End                           
                                                                 
(15) Preliminary remark: This passage can only cursorily     
explain very few aspects of this complex topic. A through and 
thinkworthy argument about the topic is done by the Krisis group 
[http://www.magnet.at/krisis/]. This passage however, is only 
supposed to touch on a few terms that are of extraordinary 
importance for our topic.                   
                                                                 
2.1. The Most Important Elements of the Work(ing?) Society       
                                                                 
(16) Our societies (why the plural form???) are marked by        
Lohnarbeit (work for money (the word sounds quite artificial and 
devaluating -- "paywork"?))[4]. The people's work acts here as   
an abstract size: For Lohnarbeit, the manner of its actual       
procedure is unimportant as the product or service that is the   
result of the activity. This form of activity only justifies     
itself by the fact that working labor is exchanged with money.   
This abstraction of the activity from its meanings and aims      
has {an alienation of the workers from their own action} as its  
consequence, (syntax error) which is most noticable in assembly  
line work.        
                

(17) Tightly connected with this system of abstract Lohnarbeit (w
for money), there is the principle of Waren (commercial goods)   
production for a market. Under marktwirtschaftlichen (capitalisti
market-economy-like) conditions, economic action only makes sense
if after the production, the Ware (comm. good) can be successfull
exchanged with money. Thus, here an abstraction takes place, too:
meaning and aim of economic action are not primarily a specific  
product, a specific quality, or other physical qualities, but the
gaining of exchange value[5].                                    
                                                                 
(18) In addition to both principles, there is also {the          
{principle of competition} caused by the market} which {puts the 
actors into a \(negative\) relationship towards each other, on 
the Waren (commercial goods) market as well as on the labor 
market}. On the Waren producers' side, competition leads towards 
the necessety of profit maximization. Whenever profits are made, 
Lohnarbeit is used all right, but the business administrative 
aim is to minimize the number of workers neccessary for a 
certain amount of Waren, or {the other way round} to increase of 
the amount of produced Waren utilizing the same number of 
workers.       
        
(19) Historically, these factors have led to the point that human
labor has been {increasingly effectively and on more and more    
fields} {replaced by machines and made superfluous}. It is just  
logical, that this process can only be kept running by           
permanently widening the markets. If this widening does not      
succeed, competition finally forces the Waren producers more and 
more to {entirely abolish Lohnarbeit} -- which cannot possibly 
work out all right, as making profits is unseperatably 
connected to the utilization of Lohnarbeit.                   
                                                                 
(20) It seems that today we have arrived at this historical 
point, which is to be proven next, by two comonly known          
phenomena.                                                       
                                                                 
(from Stefan Mn's Milestone text)                                
          

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