I think what I’m interested in – and perhaps the thing that this blog is centered on, or at least one of the things it’s centered on – is mining out sort of vernacular inclinations or anticipations of the change we’d like. Wikipedia definitely fits the bill, even if – yes – it’s not a simple model for political change in anyway. So do co-op preschools.

I look forward to reading your piece, once I get my kiddo down.

I do think that the state/anti-state binary needs some disentangling. My feeling right now is that you need to work both sides. This article seems like it’s heading in the right direction–http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2813

Not incidentally, I’m giving a talk at the end of the month about this precise issue—trying to examine the ideology of web 2.0, especially among poets. My sense right now is that the “democratizing” force of the web bears a strong resemblance to the formal freedom of liberal citizenship. And it thus demands an appropriately dialectical stance—one that’s difficult to produce, at least for me, in a comments box.

I try my best to produce that stance here: http://www.actionyes.org/issue6/bernes/bernes1.html

very very helpful as usual. Will read the document very soon…

Jasper,

Yeah, like Marx. And of course I don’t think that “shareware” threatening to capital either. And of course you’re right about the instrumentalization of these practices for exploitation (what do they call that? mob-sourcing? there’ve been a strew of articles in the FT and elsewhere recently about just that sort of thing…) But I’m not sure the fact that these forms can be exploited means that they don’t retain progressive potentiality. If the very idea of freely-given collaborative work for collaborative ends is an non-starter, I’m afraid we’re left in a fairly dark place right at the start, don’t you think?

Not that I think shareware is in the slightest bit a threat to capital. Actually, given the way that Gates got his start, and given the imbrication of work at research universities with industry, it rather seems like a good way to get people to do work for free. What’s better than a researcher who works on her/his spare time? Create little fertile zones of potlatch and then move in with your patent lawyers and your paperwork and. . . voila! free money. Which is a way of saying that it’s worse than what Jane outlines above. [I realize that this scheme runs into potential problems with regard to labor theory of value but, in the case of something like a computer program (an industry of the means of production?) it seems like you don't really need to pass through the dialectic of exploitation. Plunder works perfectly well.]

1) There was a pretty quick take-backsies; it didn’t seem like more than a hot minute before Stallman was explaining that when he said “information wants to be free,” he mean “free” as in “free speech,” “free markets,” “free trade,” “free enterprise,” “free will,” and “free elections” — not as in “free beer.” (I actually think this is an unstable distinction, but it’s telling that Stallman and Brand wanted to make and maintain it).

2) Alas, Stallman’s economic knowledge could use a bump. It’s at least partially true that, despite a “greatly reduced the amount of work that the whole society must do for its actual productivity,” it remains the case that “only a little of this has translated itself into leisure for workers.” But this has little to do with “bureaucracy and isometric struggles against competition.” As long as stuff still costs money, you need people to labor so that they can get paid enough that they can buy stuff so that money can return to the productive system, continue the cycle and pursue its fate as capital (M-C-M´ as they say). Technological in necessary labor can have no isolate effect on exploitation, and “post-scarcity” has to mean the end of wage-labor to mean anything, yeah?

” In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.

“We have already greatly reduced the amount of work that the whole society must do for its actual productivity, but only a little of this has translated itself into leisure for workers because much nonproductive activity is required to accompany productive activity. The main causes of this are bureaucracy and isometric struggles against competition. Free software will greatly reduce these drains in the area of software production. We must do this, in order for technical gains in productivity to translate into less work for us.”

It’s also interesting that if you make this claim to a lot of free software fans they’ll accuse you of trolling.