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Re: [ox-en] Alternative currencies and Oekonux (was: Re: Autonomy)



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I agree that double free software, or what I call peer production, is a system of non-reciprocal exchange.
  
  I also agree that it is embedded, in complicated ways, with the  existing political economy, and that both are dependent on each other.  Peer production has both immanent and transcendent aspects, see  http://p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Peer_Production_-_Immanence_vs._Transcendence
  
  However, peer production does not exist alone. But rather than be  exclusively dependent on a capitalist economy that is destroying the  biosphere and increasing inequalities.
  
  It could be embedded in: 1) non-capitalist  markets which  recognize both external costs of nature, and the cost of dignified  social reproduction (the latter can be achieved through peer arbitrage  of markets); 2) a field of more reciprocal exchange, inspired by gift  economy principles as they still exist in the South and with LETS in  the West.
  
  Money is the protocol of our current system, based on scarcity, and itself engineering inequality. It makes sense to reform it.
  
  This is why money reform and gift economy experiments should be  debatable in an overall strategy for social change, because free  software does not exist in a vacuum and will not survive a collapse of  the biosphere.
  
  To see free software as an objective law, that we just have to wait  until the GPL society falls in our lap, while all the indicators are  going negative, is to make the old Marxist mistake of the inevitability  of socialism.
  
  Michel

magius <gmagius gmail.com> wrote:  On 2006/4/4, Stefan Merten  wrote:


A fundamental insight is that Free Software doesn't work on the basis of
 exchange - at least Doubly Free Software. Again there is no room for  alternative > currencies because all currencies are only an  expression of an alienated form of > exchange facilitation.

Also me, I agree Free Software is not exchange. But there's a sort of
"sliding doors" system between Free Software and Capitalist exchange.
Free Software without Capitalism will not survive. Let me explain
better, through an example. How a Free Software coder will have an
income to live? Not from Free Software development itself (because
there's no exchange). But a good code released under GNU/GPL would
"give" work in the capitalistic system to this coder. A boss will hire
this coder because he's a good developer and the code released under
GNU/GPL (or a code under copyright, it's the same) it's the verifiable
example of his work. Free software code is a way to have work in
Capitalism, this an uncontestable truth.

Imho the correct way to put community currencies (as part of a new
economic system, different from Capitalism) in the Oekonux context, is
to think how to replace, in the "sliding doors" system before
described,  capitalistic exchange with a more just e solidal exchange.
And community currencies are a way to facilitate this change.

m
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de


		
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_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



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