Michel Bauwens wrote:
I think there is a very strong tendency towards localization in the current movement, NOT always linked to a renewed sense of bottom-up globalization but couched in catastrophist or survivalist language. I don’t think it is a straw man, though I’m not sure how big it is.
Michel, you get around much more than I do so I can’t argue with your experience. It baffles me though because I haven’t seen any local isolationism among those I interact with. Even in the “Off-the-grid” groups I follow online there is a universal commitment to global networking and knowledge sharing that I have just come to take for granted, I guess. The sole catastrophist that I know is my mother who is a fundamentalist xtian (but we seldom talk about that).
I guess there are still many wrinkles on the material side of peer-production where a local bias may often make good thermodynamic sense. Shortened design-to-production times may make revenue happen earlier; and open/crowd sourcing of the intellectual resources could potentially mean more subtle and sophisticated designs that encompass more of the product life cycle, such as materials economization, designed-in manufacturing efficiencies, and planned reclamation/recycling rather than planned obsolescence.
I’m still concerned about how to compensate labor (especially open/crowd sourced labor)when peer-production is a business and not just a labor of love, but that’s where corporate, NGO, and state partners may come in, I suppose. (I think I hear the giant sucking sound already…)
PR
]]>The idea that production gets cheaper and more efficient at ever lower scales(?) of capital investment seems to assume that there will be no need for intensive labor and knowledge (in manufacturing) around quality control, iterative improvement of design as it’s flaws are revealed in real-world settings over time, creating and maintaining supporting systems (such as accounting, storage management, production planning, etc). It also assumes that some cheap abundant raw physical materials are the default, which is not always the case (sometimes only rare materials can work, as in computer chips). This is assuming that “ever lower scales of capital investment” means actual less funds invested.
I can see many real-world cases where the quality of designs, processes, and finished products could suffer immensely if the focus is primarily on cheapness and efficiency in production. We are a long way from automated design, and we’re nowhere near universal modular building blocks for production. So, it is labor intensive to create or adapt designs and approaches to various real-world scenarios. No matter what the problem you look at, you are generally going to be confronted with the need for a significant amount of resources. Even at smaller scales, there is an equal need for resources. These resources have to come from somewhere, and this writing from Las Indias doesn’t really address this universal and persistent problem of who will suffer extraction for the gain of others. Although, to be fair, the suggestion that “confederalist governance” is a way to cooperate around responsible use of resources is good.
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The thesis of las indias is simple: we can now produce most cheaply and efficiently at ever lower scales of capital investment, BUT, at lower profit rates, and hence it is uninteresting for capital. This can be clearly seen currently, none of the ‘free money’ made available to the banks by the ECB and through QE is going to actual lending to SME’s, but rather it is used for investement in speculative asset bubbles .. again and again, it is really systemic and indeed, one of the roots of the debt crisis.
]]>I find that very unlikely in any general sense, because p2p production is rooted in commons and and confederalism philosophy and practice from its origins in free/open software projects and file sharing.
“The progressive reduction of the optimal scale of production, which is the origin of the crisis…”
Which crisis? I wholly fail to understand this point.
“…generates an inevitable conceptual tension between the universal nature of the commons and the local character of a growing part of production physical and distribution.”
I think this “tension” is a straw man. These remarks remind me of the “tragedy of the commons” mythology in which the commoners are assumed to be stupid, short-sighted thugs instead of pragmatic people who pursue enlightened self interest by managing the commons in sustainable ways. IMHO the latter has been the rule rather than the exception.
Poor Richard
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