[iDC] Introducing: Real Costs & Oil Standard

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Julian,

Repression and awareness are not the same thing, and in fact are the
opposite. So, I think it is first of all important to increase our awareness
of the impact of our actions, on other people, on the environment, and
choose our own ways of how we want to minimize the damage. But negative
approaches only bring us so far (critical environmental education actually
discourages students, but engagement with nature empowered them, showed one
study I saw once), much better than a negative approach, is to replace our
material priorities with immaterial ones. Search for happiness in the
intellectuality, spirituality, culture, relationality, and build our life
around the passionate production of such value.

With post-capitalist strategies, let me be very short here not to repeat my
core argument, we need to support the emergence of peer production,
governance and property into all domains of social life; (because they are
respectively more economically, politically, and distributionally
productive), and strengthen both the sharing economies of individual
expression, and the commons-oriented forms of production. This is predicated
on both abundance (immaterial field) and distribution (slicing up, in the
material field), so that the central strategy then becomes, 'the
distribution of everything', and the direct social production, everywhere we
can, of social value: distributed means of production (computers, desktop
manufacturing), of finance (p2p lending, but more importantly the direct
social production of money), of energy (distributed solar). Finding the
right relationship between the commons and the for-profit ecology around it
(see sam rose's contribution here at
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/open-business-models-business-and-open-source/2007/05/08,
which expands on that topic); finding cooperative models for such
interaction (austrian os alliance, indian open source cooperative in pune
(see http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Source_Cooperative); strengthen these
types of social production and human relationships within or against the
sphere of commodity, until "we" are strong enough, to tackle meta-system
change.

Michel

On 5/12/07, Julian Kücklich <julian at kuecklich.de> wrote:
>
> Hi Michel,
>
> > But we are all part of that system, so that any approach that blames
> > capital, and does not want to change its own behaviour, is going to be
> > unproductive.
>
> I agree, it's counterproductive to think of oneself as somehow outside
> of capital, or outside of "the environment", for that matter. My point
> was, however, that the current ethics of repression works through
> moralising everyday behaviour, so now I have to feel bad every time I
> consume one of the commodities of climate change (energy, water, meat,
> etc.), and the ff plugin introduced through this list is an agent of
> this new ethics of repression.
>
> But as everyone who has ever read a novel from the Victorian era knows,
> repression doesn't make unwanted behaviour go away - it just hides it.
> Emission certificates are a brilliant example of how one can destroy the
> environment and still have a clean environmental conscience. I am just
> waiting for the next plugin, which enables me to counter-balance my
> ecological sins by purchasing indulgences every time I book a flight,
> order a book, or leave my computer running overnight.
>
> > Now the key question is how you change the meta-system, giving the
> > record of
> > failure in this regard, and the obsoleteness of industrial era leftism?
> My
> > suggestion would be to tone down the useless anti-capitalist rhetoric,
> and
> > to tune up the post-capitalist practices.
>
> Indeed. But what are these post-capitalist practices? Surely you are not
> suggesting that by minimising our ecological footprints we will somehow
> "change the system"?
>
> - Julian.
>
>
> --
> julian raul kücklich, ma
>
> http://www.playability.de
>



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