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[ox] Re: [ox-en] goal of oekonux, theory vs. practice, the new social movements and the left



Hi FranzS!

FranzN and others already replied to this. I'm sharing most of
FranzN's answers so I'll just add some additional points.

3 days ago franz schaefer wrote:
during the discussion, whether the 3rd oekonux konference should be in
vienna or in hallein as part of the 2nd austrian social fourm, some
interesting questions have been raised. stefan mertens tried to cover these
                                                       ^

I'd really love you could at least try to spell my name right.
Unfortunately I experienced this disrespect for people so often with
leftists :-( ...

question in his mail "Theses about the relation between the Oekonux project
and the remaining world".

the problem is he only postulated answers without even asking the
fundamental questions. so i will try to do that here.


Q1: what is the goal of oekonux? is the only goal the production of theory
    or are we concerned about actual use and practice as well?

Oekonux *is* very much concerned about practice. I mentioned it
already in another mail but you may have a look at

	http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/links.html

where a lot of very practical projects are listed.

    the web page states that:

       "In Project Oekonux different people with different opinions and
       different methods study the economic and political forms of Free
       Software. An important question is, whether the principles of the
       development of Free Software may be the foundation of a new economy
       which may be the base for a new society."

Thanks you quoted this. I didn't read it for some time now and I'm
amazed how close Oekonux comes to this :-) .

     is "study" meant in a sense of "producing theory" or is the notion of
    "applied science" included here as well? is our interest in the question
    whether free software can be a model for a new society only a
    theoretical one or are we interested in building such a society? (even
    if we only vaguely know how it could look like..)

Well, as you can see from the link list there are already a lot of
people from very different areas are practicing. Oekonux is practicing
these things as well - as you may see in the extremely open structure
we are maintaining.

    is "practice" included in the range of "different methods"?

Actually it is the basis.

    of course the answer to this question can not be deduced by any theory.
    the oekonux project can have any goal it wants. it is just a matter of
    consensus amoung the people here where they want to go. it is also not a
    questin of yes/no. there is a certain bandwith. some people might be more
    interested in theory, some more in practice. the question is more:
    should the practical side be completly excluded, like stefan mertens
    implicitly suggested...

I have the impression the practice Oekonux is interested in is simply
not the kind of practice *you* find important. That is ok of course
but I don't see why the things you find important should be forced
down Oekonux' throat.

A1: my personal answer to this question: i guess most people who are
    thinking about alternatives to our current society are driven by their
    dislike for the current world and not just by some academical interest
    of "what could be possible". i implicitly assumed this would be true for
    the oekonux project as well. but from what i have heard from stefan
    mertens and others i am not so sure about it anymore.

Well, to pick one of many examples: A pretty big number of scientists
dislike how the publishing houses of "their" scientific magazines deny
to use the Internet in a way which is adequate to the scientific
community. They create pre-print servers and many more initiatives to
do something about this.

And no, they don't want to change society. This is not a topic on
their agenda.

Indeed the very strength of the fundamental change Oekonux tries to
analyze is that it comes *directly* from the needs of the people.
There need not be a *political* need to change the society. One of the
few things I picked up from Marcuse is that the new society needs to
be rooted in the *need structure* of the people. IMHO this is exactly
what we see here in practice. Seeing it this way this "movement" is
neither political nor anti-political but trans-political.

    but i think there is more to this question. even if someone is not so
    much interested in changing the world then there are the following
    things to consider: a theory (and especially one that is about a
    "different society") can not exist in a complete void. theory must be
    aplied to practice to test it, find errors, correct it, etc..

I think we are doing this all the time. Right now I'm hoping to find
some time to carefully work through the Debian Constitution - just for
instance.

    actually: without a plan of how to transform society all plans for a
    "new society" are pretty much idle. what is this "new society" good for
    if there is no path leading to it?

The *path* to a new society is the most difficult thing at all. IMHO
the transformation of a society is one of the most complex things
mankind can experience at all. I wonder how this can be predicted
seriously at all.

To prevent misunderstanding: That does not mean to be passive - just
that it is not predictable where activity is needed tomorrow. At the
moment it is needed for all the questions about software patents,
copyright and the like. If you want my opinion on where to engage -
there. If you want to have that on the ASF - go and invite someone
from the FFII and/or the FSFE.

assuming that the oekonux community decides that a certain unity of theory
and practice is indeed desired and/or that a large number of oekonuxers are
also interested in changing society then thre are some other questions that
arise from that. if this assumption is wrong then you can forget about the
following questions but then i think it would be necessary to ask if the
fork of the project wouldn't be the best thing...

Until now my impression is that you did not really understood what
Oekonux is so suggesting a fork might be a bit - ahm - bold.

Q2: where to do "practice"? are the new social movments (world social
    forum, european social forum, ...) good field for practice? what about the
    so "left"?


A2: my personal answer: during the discussion about hallein vs. vienna i
    found that there is a profund lack of knowledge about the new social
    movements among some of the people here.

Admittedly I have not really been interested in social forums yet.
They appeared in one of the two classical left news paper I have
subscribed - where Oekonux never appeared and I think won't ever
appear though I gave them pointers for the first conference. To me it
looked strongly like more of the same in a more modern shape. The few
things I read on the Web backed this impression. Sorry, but this is my
impression.

    it should
    be evident that both groups are of interest to the oekonux project if "a
    new society" is the stated goal of oekonux.

This is *not* the stated goal. ThomasB stresses this in his posting
(i'm hoping to be able to reply to soon) and I stressed this in a
posting today. You are projecting something onto oekonux which it
really is not.

As Graham said this does not mean that people on Oekonux may not have
that goal individually. I for one have it. But I find Oekonux more
valuable *for me* if my goal is *not* Oekonux' goal.

2 days ago franz schaefer wrote:
there is a "we know it all" attitude that suggest that it
makes sense to give other people an introduction to oekonux but there is no
understanding that one could learn from the other side as well. there is the
idea that oekonux is so much different from what is going on at a social
forum that these people will not be interested and could not understand what
people are talking about..

Well, I don't know how many Oekonux presentations you gave already but
my experience of several such presentations is that even if you add a
workshop to it there is *very* little which has not been on one of the
lists in one way or the other. People on the German list may remember
how excited I was about the discussion in Bremen. This was one of the
few instances I felt that there might be a substantial addition to
Oekonux - though it is yet not clarified.

However, this does not mean that people attending such events are
stupid or something. It only means that the lists are working really
good in attracting all possible issues - though Oekonux is far from
having answers to all of them.

Of course this might be different in a social forum where parallel to
the three Oekonux tracks twenty more normal ASF tracks are running.
However, I'm *very* sceptical about this.

And even then this is possible by making a workshop on Thursday. If
Graham is interested in the ASF it might be an idea that he gives an
English Oekonux presentation with a workshop there and then can bring
his learnings back to the Oekonux conference. Or if people being
attracted by the ASF having something to contribute to the Oekonux
conference in Vienna why not invite them there? This would be the sort
of creative solutions which IMHO could solve the very most of the
problems - if not all. Let's think about this instead of building up
straw men just to knock them off.


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.de/
Organisation: projekt oekonux.de



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