Comments on: Thoughts on Peer Production and its Implications for Solidarity Economics

By: Marty Heyman

Marty Heyman — Sat, 25 Jul 2015 10:30:53 +0000

(Also by email) Thank you for the offer. I was following the links in the article above and was working through my reaction to the “Open Co-operative” concept discussion. (more to come).

I think that I, personally and as a member of the GEO Collective, would be happy to connect with the European community. I am over once or twice a year for conferences and meetings with our team members from the EU.

By: Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens — Sat, 25 Jul 2015 07:33:55 +0000

Dear Marty, we have been working quite intensively with a network of cooperativists, though mostly from the UK and Canada, about the topic of ‘open cooperativism’ and have reports on the topic from our deep dive workshops. Amongst the mames that may be familiar are Pat Conaty, John Restakis, Margie Mendell, Annemie Naylor etc .. If you are interested, we’d love to connect you with them. Please keep us informed about these planned events in the U.S. , if you can.

Michel Bauwens

By: Marty Heyman

Marty Heyman — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 10:41:32 +0000

Thanks for the re-post. The original can be found at The GEO Newsletter's Web site. The GEO Collective has been struggling with the problem of "The Movement Critiquing Itself" and have proposed a mini-conference at an upcoming US convention to open a dialog parallel to our ongoing mini-conference series "Advancing Development of Worker Co-ops." It is likely that such an open, conversational, and candid forum of that type among the activist-theorists in this space would help us share, clarify, and coalesce thinking that is currently somewhat scattered (in my opinion).

By: Patrick S

Patrick S — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 10:21:02 +0000

… follow-up thoughts connecting the critique of Mardy’s post with the ‘transformative proposals P2P’ video Michel posted in response …

I’m not an expert on the union movement but :- it seems that part of the recipe for the Labor movements’ strength in its mid-20th C heyday was the right mix of _cultural_ solidarity with the collective mechanisms to also turn that into concentrating funds from union dues to pay professional union organisers – who both represented members but also build the conditions to re-produce the union in future etc. So individual union members didn’t all have to be utopian idealists, everyone contributed to the movement in some way somewhat automatically. I.E. ‘Solidarity’ was more than just singing the Internationale but also about the less glamorous regular collection of union dues.

I guess the way the ‘contributory accounting’, ‘commonfare’ and their connection to the open coop devt. agency is analogous (though quite different) in Michel’s video.

By: Patrick S

Patrick S — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 10:04:35 +0000

Hmmmm … while I appreciate Michel’s prefix I have to say that Marty’s post does feel quite telling – particularly his points about people only having a finite amount to contribute to the ‘gift economy’ before the pressures of housing, food, and (especially) child-raising make that very difficult.

Seeing what I’d call the ‘ephemerality’ of gift economy and civil society projects – that start with a burst of enthusiasm, but then often peter out quite quickly – can be tiring for many of us.

I guess this all fits under the general rubric of, it’s hard to really imagine and see the outlines of new nascent socio-technical arrangements while they are still very much minority strains within a dominant system. Maybe things look very different in (e.g.) Madrid right now though.