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Re: [ox-en] Re: "At Cost"



Hi Patrick!

In general I agree with Franz' reply so I won't repeat that here.

2 weeks (17 days) ago Patrick Anderson wrote:
On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de> wrote:
Last week (8 days ago) Patrick Anderson wrote:
This is my pattern for a public utility.

. The collective owning consumers are "we the people".

. Each owning-consumer pays his portion of all his real costs incurred.

. Each non-owning-consumer pays his portion of all his real costs
incurred and also pays profit which is invested for him in MORE
sources of that kind of production.

That really sounds to me like just another attempt to modify
capitalism a bit instead of overcoming it. In fact your model reminds
me very much of state socialism - may be more the Yugoslavian variant
thereof.

But this would be self-organizing groups of users, not a faceless state.

I'm certainly not an expert here but AFAIK in Yugoslavia they
organized similarly.

The real question seems to be: Where does the facelessness comes from.
IMHO it comes from the mass of people - or to be more specific: That
the mental system of humans is tuned to deal with small communities.
And unless you go back to small communities isolated from each other
you always will have that type of facelessness.

However, there are shades of grey. The facelessness of capitalism and
exchange based systems in general does not love humans - if you can
live with such a wording. I think a society based on Selbstentfaltung
would love humans and thus make the facelessness easier to stand.

The basic problem of your approach like every approach based on
abstract capitalism is that you use capitalist concepts like scarcity.

What do you mean by "use capitalist concepts like scarcity"?  I
recognize that scarcity is currently a real and troublesome issue, but
I don't want to perpetuate it like the Capitalists - I want to
incrementally minimize it (or in other words, to maximize abundance).

I'm absolutely convinced that you want that. The question is whether
the concepts you propose are able to accomplish that.

Yes, cost makes only sense under conditions of scarcity.
Why should I think about costs if I have ampleness?

What do you mean when you use the word "cost"?

I am talking about the real costs of production that occur even for a
lone islander, and that we will never be able to fully eliminate.

Thanks for the list. I agree that we will never be able to eliminate
the preconditions necessary to produce and the side effects of
production. Whether they are considered costs in the sense that they
may prevent production depends only on their ampleness - right?

Are you saying the treatment of profit has no significance?

It has - in capitalism. You are trying to use tools immanent to
capitalism. You don't leave the system if you use only immanent tools.
That's the great thing in peer production: It leaves the system by
Selbstentfalting away the capitalist mode of production. It "attacks"
capitalism at its very stronghold. That's the way to go!


						Grüße

						Stefan
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