‘“Open Knowledgeâ€? can easily mean totally open knowledge, with no conditions upon it. However,
unless you want to wage violent war against those who don’t want you to open “their� knowledge,
then I suggest you start creating and releasing your own open knowledge with those non-conditions
for re-use, and working with others who are doing so. I have no interest in fighting the existing
system, through violence, unless I am forced to. I have more interest in creating new systems
that obsolete the existing system.’

I wonder who it is that proposing that we “wage voilent war?”

Certainly not me, my argument is exactly that we should voluntarily create communal value and the method I propose is exactly that we voluntarily work with others who share our goals.

It is towards those ends that I seek to understand the issues that we need to address to subsist and defend our voluntary sharing communities.

We need to think about defending our sharing communities, because a violent war is being waged against us by defenders of Propery-privilge. Check your local paper, I’m sure you will notice, or any history book.

Regards,
Dmytri.

It is unfortunate you would rather portray my intent as insisting on how ‘things should be’, which is obviously false as no such thing occurs in my writing, or that I am trying to “polarize this discussion.”

These sorts of attempts to portray me as unreasonable are in my opinion nothing other than a cop-out. A very mild, yet no-less falacious form of ad hominem. I simply attempt to explain the objective realities that are the cause of poverty and inequality. Causes known to us through the various discoveries of great thinkers, including Ricardo, Hodgskin, Proudhon, George and Gessel.

What I have tried to explain is the concrete mechanics of wealth approriation, which you can not wish away.

Every day wealth and power is concentrating, while poverty, misery, environmental catastrophe and totalitarian oppression is being spread with increasing ruthlessness and violence, all the while Sam and Michel dream blissfully of post-scarcity makebelieve candylands in the sky.

I can only assume that both are fortunate enough to have no direct experience with Poverty. They, like many academics of the Western left, can not grasp what every latin american peasant knows instinctively: Property is theft. The source of poverty is not scarcity, nor any lack of capital yield, but robbery. Robbery funded by the surplus production of working communities. The robbery will not stop until we stop funding it with our labour. Until that is grasped, I am wasting my breath explaining further.

I certainly do not have, nor have I ever claimed to have, “one blanket solution for anything,” this is yet another evasion meant to excuse not dealing with the logical arguments I have made, but rather dismissing them out of hand with dishonest characterisations. Anybody who has worked with me will attest to the fact that I am co-operative, practical, and very realistic. After all, I have no education, no property, and I have been earning my living as an independent producer in the market system for all of my life. I can not afford to be unrealistic.

In order to build a real “bottom-up” revolution, we need to discuss prescriptive answers to the real challenges of resisting top-down oppression, and we must stop being apologists for the privilge of the elite. That is the simple reality of it.

Thank you both for your comments, we agree on a great many issues and, though I have focused on our disagreements, I would like to note that many of your comments have been informative, supportive, and helpful as well — no doubt we will interact again in the future.

Regards,
Dmytri.

“To protect our bottom-up revolution, we need to be wary of those who try to define a commons in such a way that it is the “producerâ€? and not the user who’s freedom is protected and characterized as a right to control others,”

I agree with what I think you are saying here, adn I wrote about it here:

http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2006/09/14/what_you_should….html

Dytri wrote: “…or those that want to replace the commons with a false commons, containing nothing but immaterial “propertyâ€? with no reproduction costs.”

You misunderstand the value of an Open Knowledge commons. Open Knowledge is not “property”. It is Open Knowledge. Open for re-use, re-distribution. It is only property re-use and redistribution is restricted.

Thus, a knowledge commons of public domain knowledge is anything but a false commons.

“Open Knowledge” is not a “buzz word”. Any more than “venture commune” is a buzz word, anyway.

“Open Knowledge” can easily mean totally open knowledge, with no conditions upon it. However, unless you want to wage violent war against those who don’t want you to open “their” knowledge, then I suggest you start creating and releasing your own open knowledge with those non-conditions for re-use, and working with others who are doing so. I have no interest in fighting the existing system, through violence, unless I am forced to. I have more interest in creating new systems that obsolete the existing system.

However like the wealth of the information-commons, this wealth has only use-value, not exchange value, and thus the mother or primary care-giver is unable to provide for her or the child’s material subsistence as a result of this value, and certainly she can not accumulate wealth in this way.

The mother is in this way subordinated to an outside “provider,� either a husband or the State, and too-often finds herself powerless, isolated and living in poverty.

In this way, the peer-producers of free culture are indeed very similar to care-giving parents. There work creates use-value, but they can not capture any exchange value from their labour.”

This is wrong, and I am living proof of that fact. People pay me to apply the same knowledge that I also release into communities that produce open knowledge. Why would they do this? Because they cannot apply it themselves. Why would I give this knowledge away for free? Because the knowledge itself will *increase* in value when I open it up in this way, and allow others to add to it, or change it. I can then, in turn, figure out new applications that apply this expanded knowledge.

A mother could turn her joy about her child into an open commons of knowledge. Perhaps a knowledge commons of successful child raising? What if other mothers joined in and helped her co-create this knowledge commons? She could figure out ways to create applications that people might exchange tangible value (food, shelter, etc) for, just as I have.

Now, what if the mother in question is living in conditions that bar her from the basic literacies she would need to do what I write about above. In this case, then I agree that a more radical approach could be needed, depending on the actual unique conditions, to affect change that would give the mother access to the literacies and resources that she would need to do what I talk about. Or, it could be unrealistic for a mother and her family’s basic survival for the mother and family to invest the huge amounts of time to attain the literacies needed to use the resources, again, this depends on real, unique, local conditions. There is no one blanket solution for anything. If local realities prevent a mother from attainging and accessing those needed literacies and resources in time to solve the problems of basic existence, and if the only thing that the mother has to exchange is labor, then who can argue that a framework like venture communes would not benefit this mother?

I concur with Michel, and disagree with the notion that it is “either this way, or that way”, in general. Reality is rarely, if ever, so polarized. When someone tries to convince me that reality is polarized like this, I tend to view that what they are trying to do is frame and filter reality, with the intent to get me to come to their pre-determined desired conclusion. Some people have called this type of rat-maze-style communication “propaganda”.

I think that it is narrow to view Lessig and Benkler as “apologist for Capitalist Property-privilege”, and wrong to automatically conclude that they would “support the dispossession of Winstanley and his Diggers, on the grounds that land is scarce and/or it is the “rightâ€? of the landlord to decide how “hisâ€? land should be used.” or that Lessig or Benkler “deny the fact that the entire natural world is in fact a commons”.

And, it is innaccurate to label the types of commons that Michel has referred to in this discussion as a “An imaginary commons of smoke and hot air.”

Is the knowledge commons of open source software a commons an “imaginary commons of smoke and hot air.”? No, it is not.

The only real commons that exist among humans are those things, abstract or physcial, that people agree are a “commons”. Humans must actively agree to relate to a thing, real or abstract, as a “commons” in order for it to be a “commons”.

What Benkler and Lessig are doing, and what we are doing, is creating a set of literacies for both:

-Understanding how people currently relate to “property”, “cooperation” and governance of common resources.

-Understanding ways to effectively, and REALISTICALLY transition away from social norms for common resources.

Dmytri, I don’t think it’s necassary to polarize this discussion in order to try and get people to come to your desired conclusions.

I think that there are real world applications for many of the contructs inherent in venture commune theory. As I wrote in a comment elsewhere, I think that the people who would benefit most from venture communes are people who’s life conditions find them expending human labor to survive/solve their problems of existence.

Benkler and Lessig are working on a different set of problems, for a different set of life conditions. Althogh, the literacies they create are useable by anyone. But immediately useable by certain people with access to certain resources.

For people without access to the resources that Benkler and Lessig talk about, I can see that venture communes could create a sustainable way for them to solve their problems of existence. But, only if it actually resonates with those people. Only if they are willing and able to adopt and use the framework (same thing for Lessig and Benkler).