Re: [ox-en] Labor contradictions
- From: Michael Bauwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com>
- Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2007 06:11:50 -0800 (PST)
Hi Raoul,
thanks for the clear point you are making.
Given that you are right, how would you find the right language to create alliances.
I see some structural differences between:
1) the significantly non-proletarian nature of contempary knowledge workers who are peer producers
but this is tempered by
2) peer production as new life practice being an aspect of all kinds of differently situated people
However, I think it is fairly easy to see how the 'peer production' of political activity can be a potent weapon in the hand of social movements, thereby opening their consciousness to the advantages of peer production generally,
Michel
----- Original Message ----
From: Raoul <raoulv club-internet.fr>
To: list-en oekonux.org
Sent: Monday, December 3, 2007 6:40:03 PM
Subject: Re: [ox-en] Labor contradictions
Hi Stefan (Mz),
On Dec, 1 2007 - 15:13 Stefan Meretz wrote:
On 2007-12-01 05:18, Michael Bauwens wrote:
how can peer producers connect with the older social movements, and
vice versa?
I don't see much options. Traditional social movements like
unions
are
not only workers movements, but also hard-core
working-movements.
They
base on wage labour and can't accept any step away from commercial
processes, because M-C-M' (making more money from money) pays their
wages.
We dealt with that question some months ago (see the thread "Free
Software and social movements in Latin America", March 18th-June
9th).
I
am always surprised by the fact that you, as Stefan (Mn) and Michel,
have a tendency to identify "traditional social movements", or
"workers
movements" ONLY with "unions".
The essential function of unions is indeed the bargaining of the price
of labor force. As such, since long, they have become part of the
capitalist institutions. In the economic field, they contribute to
regulate the labor-market. In the political field, they are a powerful
means to encapsulate, to confine any workers fight within the
capitalistic logic, within the "commercial process", as you say.
On this basis, it is clear that one can hardly imagine a way to
connect
peer-Free Software spirit with unionist spirit. As Stefan Merten put
it
in the past discussion: "The goals of Free Software movement, however,
can not be expressed in terms of money. Maybe this is the fundamental
difference." (30.04.2007)
But do you really think that workers movements, in the past and in the
future, can only be movements for bargaining the price of the
labor-force? That they can never "accept any step away from commercial
processes"?
Would you say that the workers movements in Germany, for example,
which
stopped the first world war in 1918 and were bloody repressed
in
January
1919 did not went "a step away from commercial processes"? Would
you
say
the same for the workers movements at the end of the 1960s and during
the 1970s, most of the time started against the unions machines, like
May 68 in France, 1969 in Italy, etc.?
At a smaller scale, but in a more recent scope, (May 2007, would
you
say
the same for the fight of the Buenos Aires subway workers who, as a
reaction against the accord signed by the union and the concessionary
company, allowed passengers to travel free, without paying?
It is true that it is very difficult for workers fights to escape the
capitalistic logic and legality. Not only because of the
coercion/repression system which makes "illegal" any step outside that
framework, (the Buenos-Aires-subway corporation has immediately
lodged
a
penal complaint against the workers who animated the free travel
action), but also, and I would say mainly, because it is not easy
to
see
the possibility of an alternative framework.
Don't you think that it is at this level - the possibility
of
developing
a non-capitalist logic - that a connection between "peer
production"
and
the workers fights can develop? Even if, for the moment, things
are
only
at a germ level?
Don't you think that this link is a key element to achieve the
"triple-free peer production", defined by Tere Vaden (23.11.2007) as
including "the ownership [not the best term] of the means of
production
down to the level of electricity, the physical infra, etc."?
Raoul
Ciao,
Stefan
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