Related: diary
Mar-28-2011: ConsciousCapitalism.org, BillStArnaud.BlogSpot.com
Mar-28-2011: GlobalGuerrillas.TypePad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/11/completely-new-economies-as-a-software-service.html, GlobalGuerrillas.TypePad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/11/eaas-economy-as-a-service.html
Mar-25-2011: Alternative currency attacked by the government
Suresh Fernando wrote:
> So you seem to agree that someone should own 'our nation'
Hmm... Well, I see what you mean, we don't
want pwnership - that's what we are trying
to solve.
But we need each a certain amount of control
over a limited subset of the whole, else we
won't even be allowed basic personal privacy.
We must build a system that can both resist
overaccumulation that modern feudalists seek,
while retaining the ability to organize for
more efficient production when sharing costs.
Property ownership has some valuable attributes
that, if handled carefully, can be used to our
advantage as a species instead of being used
as a tool of domination as it often has been
by those who have organized before us.
Similar to how the GNU GPL uses Copyright to
create Copyleft for the purpose of protecting
a non-governmental commons,
We can write a Terms-of-Operation that we can
then apply to Property Rights ... a sort of
Property Left if you will, that will allow us
to use regular ownership as the basis of a new
approach to protecting physical assets that we
might more efficiently hold in common.
I think of it as a "simulated commons" that is
constructed somewhat artificially - in that we
do not wait for a government or corporation to
finally do the "right thing", but instead make
that action ourselves, in a collective manner.
Part of the difficulty comes in discovering
what 'rules' or 'laws' must be included in the
Terms-of-Operation.
I believe I have found 2 of those rules:
1.) Consumers are the investors who are the
*real* co-owners of those Means of Production
and the 'return' is the product itself which
they *already own* as a side-effect of their
owning the Sources of those products. This
creates a truly use-value endeavor.
2.) Profit is treated as Payer Investment.
This means late-comers pay Price above cost,
but that overpayment is invested *for them*
in even more Means of Production - so that
each Users incrementally gains the property
they need to protect them from paying profit
in the future. It is a negative-feedback loop.
Mar-25-2011: The growth of municipal broadband networks
Suresh wrote:
> Crowdsource
Yes, and Crowd-Owned so Price and Cost are identical.
This is better than City-Owned for at least two reasons:
1.) By avoiding the appearance of a government entity, corporations will not be able to claim you are skewing competition or generally attempting to be 'socialist' (with negative connotations).
2.) Government initiatives are not truly owned by the users, and so the users lose fine-grained control over what is allowed, and also pay Prices far above true Costs - with that extra revenue used by well-intentioned 'officials' to fund other pet projects.
Mar-25-2011: Reading parts of Usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/full_papers
Mar-24-2011: Alternative currency attacked by the government
> The Fed creates money and then gives it
> to banks, corporations and governments
This is not quite what I understand.
The system is so complicated that
I am not sure whether the following
is perfectly correct...
I believe the structure is more like:
The Fed is a sort of 'front' for bankers
from all around the world (sometimes
called "International Bankers").
These International Bankers issue the
currency used by almost every nation.
In the United States, these are "Federal
Reserve Notes".
These bankers then *BUY* whatever they
want with this phoney money.
One of the most terrifying commodities
they buy is BONDS.
The reason this is such a problem is
that many of those BONDS are backed
by land such as National Forests and
other Federal properties.
Because of this, we are losing ownership
of our nations to shysters who *BUY* it
from us using money they created without
taking any risk whatever.
Mar-19-2011: Open Source Microfactory
Marcin at http://OpenFarmTech.org/weblog/2011/03/open-source-micro-factory
wrote:
> Imagine if you could build cars, industrial robots,
> engines, and other things in your own back yard.
If everyone can access the Means of Production,
how will we keep wages above a bare minimum?
Mar-19-2011: As Barriers to Entry are Lowered, Wages will be Destroyed
As the overhead to participate is reduced,
the number of potential workers is increased.
As capital-outlay approaches zero, all peers
will have the chance to reverse-bid for any
job for which they have skills.
This will cause wages to fall to the minimum
since there will then be nothing to stop
consumers from hiring the lowest bidder.
Is this an expected result?
What can we do to solve this dilemma?
Mar-18-2011: Worker Ownership, Scale of Production and Use Value
Joe Rinehart wrote:
> you are mistaking the "product of labor"
> for the "means of production."
Yes, I see what you mean. I've made some
mistakes here, and I'll be more careful.
But there are examples that show the point,
and I think the Olive tree still holds.
> the worker who picks the olives should
> certainly own some/many of the olives.
We could pay them with part of the "Product
of Labor" if that is what they want.
But that is a separate question from whether
they need ownership in the Means of Production.
I am asking if the worker should gain ownership
in a tree when he works on it, even when that
tree is co-owned by a few neighbors that will
be using the product without selling any of it.
> theories would say that an individual should
> not own 100 olive trees.
Just to be clear: I am not suggesting a single
individual should own 100 olive trees. I am
talking about co-ownership of 100 olive trees,
with the amount of owners determined by how
much product they predict they will actually
use for themselves. 100 trees might be owned
by 150 people, for example, if those people
don't eat much of that kind of product, or 100
trees might be owned by only 75 people when
those users intend to use alot of that kind
of product.
The idea is to help users to gain exactly as
much of the Means of Production required to
produce the amount of product they intend to
consume within the next round-of-production.
Actually, I think it would be even better to
help them co-own just slightly more than they
predict they will need, so variance in output
will not leave them in the position where they
will need to buy the product from somewhere
else - thereby suffering the payment of profit.
In cases where the output is more than that
owner can use directly, they should be able to
do whatever they want with that extra product,
even including *selling* it to users who do
not yet have enough ownership.
> It is a fallacy to suggest that something
> that works on a small scale (private
> ownership of capital for personal use) will
> work on a large scale.
Maybe it is a fallacy to suggest the opposite.
Some things can scale, while others can't.
Making the solution scalable is fundamental
to it being a real alternative.
Capitalism scales to some degree, but then
begins to deteriorate quickly because of the
concentration of wealth caused by treating
profit as a reward for the current owners.
Treating profit as an investment from the
payer will allows the organization to grow
while auto-distributing ownership to the
agents who paid for it.
Mar-15-2011: Worker Ownership, Scale of Production and Use Value
Kevin Carson wrote:
> All the situations you describe involve self-employed artisans
> of one kind or another doing one-off jobs for customers, and
> using their own tools to perform the service.
Hmm... I see. But I think this oversight on my part
does not invalidate the question in general.
For example, what if I owned the tools to perform the
service, but hired someone to do the work?
Let's say I own the cable-splicer and whatever else
equipment a network technician would need, and he
used that equipment to network my house.
Should he then become part owner of those tools?
What if I owned all the wrenches and other things
needed to fix my car, or install plumbing but hired
someone else to do the work?
Should he then become part owner of those tools?
If he owned his own tools (the same as the ones I
was offering), notice he would not be able to stop
other potential Workers for reverse-bidding for that
job - even when those other workers did not own
tools themselves, because I would allow those non-
owning worker to access my tools "at cost". His
ownership would not help him except in cases where
he was vying for a job from a customer that did NOT
own those tools.
I would be 'protected' through my ownership in the
Means of Production from being forced to pay more
than lowest wage any worker would offer.
This seems to indicate that competition between
workers is maximized when consumers own the Means
of Production.
This minimizes Wages and causes Profit to be undefined.
Mar-15-2011: Worker Ownership, Scale of Production and Use Value
Worker Ownership is a very widely accepted as
being the obvious answer to wage slavery.
It is said that Workers must have at least *some*
Ownership in the Means of Production lest they
otherwise be exploited by those owners.
But when the situation is on a very small scale,
the idea seems to break-down and become almost
absurd - for would you have a network technician
become part owner of your home network because
you hire him to install some wires and configure
your router?
Let's try "stepping through" the logic of this - the way
a programmer might "step through" a program as he
is trying to debug what, *exactly* is wrong, and so
what *exactly* must change.
We will do this by reducing the scale to just one
owner, and then slowly increasing the scale...
Imagine you own a single Olive tree.
You pick the fruit yourself and turn some of them
into oil - all for your own, personal use.
You use all of the outputs of that tree and you do
all of the work.
One day you slip and hurt your back. You can no
longer pick the Olives, but the work must be done.
If you hire someone to work for you, should that
worker have some ownership in your personal tree?
If yes, then should the mechanic that fixes your
car become also co-owner of that vehicle?
What about a plumber that fixes your pipes?
Should he become part owner of your home?
What if you hire someone to fix your laptop?
Should he become a stakeholder of that device?
Why do these questions seem illogical?
What if the Olive tree is co-owned by you and your
neighbor? What if an orchard is co-owned by 10
people? What if by 100? And 1,000? 1,000,000?
The same of the other questions.
What if the car is co-owned by 2 people? 3 people?
4, 5, 6, 7, etc...
What if the house has more than one owner? What
if it is an apartment complex?
What if the laptop is a massive datacenter?
When does the answer to the question of "Should
the worker have ownership in the Means of Production"
switch from "Obviously NO" to "Obviously YES"?
But maybe this is simply the wrong question.
What am I missing here? Why should the end-user
retain full ownership in some cases, and under
what circumstances should the workers become
shareholders?
I suspect it has something to do with whether the
owners are using the product directly as compared
to them selling it to other agents.
When the product is used directly, it seems we do
not have a problem with the users retaining ownership
of their trees, cars, houses, etc.
But if those owners intend to *sell* some of the
product, then I think we feel the workers then
deserve part of the Profit that will likely be
collected from those buyers.
So when Production is Imputed - where the owners
of the Means of Production use all of the outputs
of that production and nothing is sold - it seems
under that condition, that Workers do not need
ownership ... since I guess it would do them no
good anyway.
When the owners do not sell the product, there is no
Profit to divide-up.
Also, when all user-owners have sufficient ownership in
the Means of Production, the usual tactic of stopping
other Workers from accessing those Means (to increase
wages) cannot be achieved by Workers gaining ownership
for themselves, for when the users have sufficient
ownership, they can allow any worker to reverse-bid
for that job.
Mar-15-2011: Co-Owning the Physical Layer
Isaac Wilder wrote:
> Now we are speaking not of a means of production, but of a means of
> reproduction. The economics of the electron are radically different
> from those of the atom.
What would you say is more expensive for the planet:
1.) Copying and storing a strawberry by allowing another plant to grow
and then drying that product in the sun and storing the results in a
cellar.
2.) Copying a byte of data using equipment that was created in
factories that poisons the atmosphere - and all the physical sources,
recursively, required to mine those things from the Earth and
transport them into place and all of that activity as it is being
constructed, transported, installed and continually operated,
including all of the coal, petroleum and nuclear reactors needed to
power that activity continually, and also the dangerous and sometimes
lethal results of dealing with the discarded hardware which fills our
water supplies and air with dangerous concentrations of a wide variety
of chemicals.
> Humanity constitutes the means of production when it comes to
> intellectual capital,
We are a small part of that equation.
What about the computers and wires and electricity and space needed to
*host* that intellectual capital?
Why pretend the physical layer does not exist? What good will that do?
> and there's no reason why it shouldn't set about
> the distribution of its own product. Look at Wikipedia - a resource
> that belongs to the whole of humanity.
The physical sources required to *host* Wikipedia do not belong to the
whole of humanity.
> Now we are talking about
> something besides olive trees or houses or whatever other physical
> thing - we are talking about patterns, numbers, encodings, bits.
Olive trees are also patterns (genetics) applied to minerals.
The same can be said of houses. The are composed of plans applied to
the physical materials needed to *host* that pattern.
> We are talking about building a system that transmutes and replicates
> this commodity at no marginal cost.
BALONEY!
There are massive environmental and even just simple monetary costs.
If the costs are so marginal, then why don't we just replace ComCast,
Facebook, Google, Amazon Web Services, etc. immediately? We can laugh
at their massive warehouses of servers and expensive fiber and cable
as we host and transmit all of that data at no marginal cost...
In 2010 Wikipedia asked for $16 Million USD to cover operating
expenses ( http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/11/14/2010-contribution
)
> It is only natural that humanity should own such a system,
> as it is the entity which generates knowledge.
Unfortunately we do not own the Physical Layer, and so are at the
whims of those who do.
> So then, it should be owned by whoever is willing to have a hand in
> its construction and maintenance, and the essential thing here is
> getting each individual to assent to the construction of such a system.
So the Workers should be the Owners?
What about just a single cable between two neighbors?
If I hire someone to install that medium, are you saying
that Worker should own that wire?
Mar-15-2011: Co-Owning the Physical Layer
> the producers of value, the workers, should be
> the primary 'owners', 'possesors' or beneficiaries
> of that value
This approach is a very heartfelt and widely accepted
as being the obvious answer to wage slavery.
But let's "step through" the logic of this by
reducing the scale to just one owner, and then slowly
increasing the size of the operation...
Imagine you own a single Olive tree.
You pick the fruit yourself and turn some of them
into oil - all for your own, personal use.
You use all of the outputs of that tree and you do
all of the work.
One day you slip and hurt your back. You can no
longer pick the Olives, but the work must be done.
If you hire someone to work for you, should that
worker have some ownership in your personal tree?
If yes, then should the mechanic that fixes your
car become also co-owner of that vehicle?
What about a plumber that fixes your pipes?
Should he become part owner of your home?
What if you hire someone to fix your laptop?
Should he become a stakeholder of that device?
Why do these questions seem illogical?
What if the Olive tree is co-owned by you and your
neighbor? What if an orchard is co-owned by 10
people? What if by 100? And 1,000? 1,000,000?
The same of the other questions.
What if the car is co-owned by 2 people? 3 people?
4, 5, 6, 7, etc...
What if the house has more than one owner? What
if it is an apartment complex?
What if the laptop is a massive datacenter?
When does the question of "Should the worker have
ownership in the Means of Production" switch from
"Obviously NO" to "Obviously YES"?
Mar-14-2011: Co-Owning the Physical Layer
Hi Michel,
I write to you in private because I want to avoid
"calling you out" on the list, but value your input
on this important topic.
Sepp seems to be saying the workers will be fine
without the need for ownership beyond that of use.
I wonder if you could respond to this?
I know you are not alone; millions of people feel
worker ownership is vital to protecting those agents
from exploitation.
But I think there is a chance the reasoning may not
be very well thought-out.
It is difficult to get people to talk about things
when they think the answers are so 'obvious' that
they need no consideration.
Please try to tell us exactly why the workers would
want ownership in the context of the scenario of a
user-owned network.
Whenever I become confused about how to reason
through some part of the question, I find it useful
to bring the scale of the organization down to
smaller and smaller sizes - with the number of
owners at '1' being the 'identity' value.
In other words, if you hired someone to fix the
network in your home, would you say that worker
should receive part ownership in your network?
Thanks for your time,
Patrick
Mar-14-2011: Co-Owning the Physical Layer
Sepp Hasslberger wrote:
> I do not think that outsiders (like a
> technician who is not a user of the
> particular network he maintains) should
> be required to be owners. A clean
> professional relationship would be just
> fine.
Mar-14-2011: Co-Owning the Physical Layer
Sepp Hasslberger wrote:
> The end result will be a user-owned and
> user-maintained network
I'm curious about this particular statement.
Are you saying the only agents allowed to
work on a network must be within that
specific subnet?
If not, and if groups are allowed to hire
anyone to work on the equipment, then should
we require those workers buy ownership in
that subnet before beginning work to protect
them from exploitation?
Mar-12-2011: Co-Owning the Physical Layer
Suresh Fernando wrote:
>
> what you are saying is that most exchanges
> of goods and services are not sales
The goods are not sold, AND they are not exchanged.
This is easy to see for a single owner, and probably
nobody will dispute the idea that the owner of an
Avocado tree - even if he pays another to harvest
that fruit, does not *buy* those Objects because he
owns them already - as a side-effect of his owning
the Sources (the tree, land and water rights).
This Mode of Production applies to all industries.
We, the people, can co-own the internet as clusters
of peers who invest for the purpose of receiving
that connectivity without paying more than cost.
----
Imagine you have several computers within your
home that you want to have connected together.
You are not connecting to anything outside of your
house, but are just creating an internal network.
You buy the wires and routers and maybe hire
someone to install and configure that equipment.
You must also pay any other costs such as the
electricity and any sort of upkeep those Sources
require to keep them operational.
Obviously you do not send yourself a bill in the mail
every month and then pay that bill back to yourself.
This is so obvious it may be too boring to consider.
But bear with me for a few more seconds, as it
becomes very interesting as we scale this network
to more and more users.
----
Now imagine you talk to your neighbor about your
new internal network and you both decide it would
be fun to run a wire between your houses to share
files and be connected for other reasons.
You both pitch-in to buy the wires and probably the
neighbor pays for the router that will sit in his house.
You must pay all of these initial costs, and continue
to pay the costs of electricity (until you finally build
or buy a photo-voltaic array...).
Now, there is no reason for each of you to *buy* that
connectivity from your collective self. You just pay
the costs and that is it.
----
Now comes the part that for some reason is confusing
to most people.
Imagine your neighbor also connects to *his* neighbor
and you to another, and those to more, until there are
hundreds and then thousands and even possibly
millions and billions of people connected.
*That* intranet/internet would be owned buy the users
of that service.
They must pay all the real costs of being connected,
but cannot pay Profit, since they are not buying that
service from anyone - but own it already as a side-
effect of their owning the Sources of those Objectives.
> How, in the transition to this model are portions
> in the Sources (of production I assume) allocated?
Simply according to the % of ownership.
Mar-10-2011: Imputed Production
Michel Bauwens wrote:
> profit maximising company legally obliged to favour its shareholders
Hmm...
What if we built a crowd-funded corporation where the only
shareholders were the very consumers of that product?
Their ROI for taking risk would be to avoid paying profit - since the
owner of an Apple tree does not *buy* the Apples from himself, but
owns those Objectives already, as a side-effect of his owning the
Sources.
There would no longer be "Vendor/Customer" relations to worry about
since the Vendor and the Customer would be one and the same!
I wonder what disadvantages such an alignment might cause...
Suresh wrote:
> This, in the purest sense, is what a co-op aims to be, is it not?
In the model I propose, the product is not sold back to each
investor-consumer-owner, but it is already their property according to
the amount they invested - whether with money or with labor.
The owner of a milk cow does not buy the milk from himself, but owns
it already as a result of his owning the cow.
A cooperative SELLS the product back to the consumer-owners - thereby
collecting !profit! and coming under the scrutiny of government
restrictions (for example it is illegal to sell raw milk in some part
of the US).
There are more differences, but I will cover those later if anyone has
interest in this "Imputed Production" business model (I hope so, as it
has fascinating implications, and DOES protect the worker - but from
the side of consumption instead of from the side of production).
----
(*)In cases where an agent has invested more than he can use directly,
he can sell that product to agents who do not yet have sufficient
ownership, but under the strict condition (enforced by a Terms of
Operation over that organization) that any profit collected during
that sale be treated as an investment from that payer - so the
organization can grow in size while avoiding the troubles of
centralization and overaccumulation that plague nearly every other
endeavor that even begins to succeed.
On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 7:07 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004@gmail.com> wrote:
> there are different kinds of coops, and Patrick's vision is 'consumers'
> only, which in a way makes the producers in the coop 'owned' by the
> consumers ... I find this problematic and prefer multiple stakeholder models
There is no reason to worry about the workers - for that is who I am
protecting, but am protecting their ability to consume instead of
trying to prop-up wages and avoid automation.
Wishing the machines would just stop (as John Henry) will become less
and less of an option as the robots are coming to take the work away -
and we can be *happy* about that if we are working on the right side
of the equation!
Furthermore, even without robots, wages and profit will approach zero
as the Means of Production become cheaper, since there will be no way
to stop willing workers from accessing those tools and thereby
providing the solutions consumers seek.
Michel Bauwens wrote:
> I remain unconvinced of a consumers-only ownership modality, again, all
> stakeholders should have a stake, all peers, not just consuming peers
Workers can invest more than they are able to consume, but it won't do
them any good when the consumers already have sufficient ownership
needed to protect themselves from workers who try to stop other peers
from doing that work by blocking access to the Sources of Production.
Workers cannot protect wages through ownership if other consumers
already have sufficient ownership because propping wages requires
the worker be able to STOP other potential workers from accessing
the Sources of Production, and why would a group stop a peer from
bidding to do a job - in some cases even for free (gratis).
Like I said, I don't care if Workers invest and co-own more of the Apple
orchard than they are able to consume, but how will that help them
prop up wages when the other co-owners will always have the option
to do the work for themselves or to hire the lowest bidder?
When the consumers around those workers have sufficient ownership,
they will not be buying the product from anyone, but will own it already
as a side-effect of their owning the Sources of those Objectives.
> if this type of consumer coop
This is absolutely NOT a Consumer Cooperative.
1,) Consumer Cooperatives *sell* the product back to the co-owners and
collect a profit during that transaction that a committee then doles
out in a Tyranny of the Majority fashion.
1a.) Imputed Production only sells product to non-owners, and only
when there is surplus, and treats that profit as an investment from
that payer - causing ownership and control to be automatically
distributed at the point of sale back to the actor who was willing to
pay for it. This system minimizes and nearly eliminates the trading
of goods since the owner of Sources does not buy the Objective, but
owns it already as a result of his owning the Sources. The trading of
goods will tend toward zero but does not reach stasis because of
newcomers into the system (even just babies being born), and because
people's interests change across time.
2.) Consumer Cooperatives are "Democratically Controlled" with
one-member/one-vote.
2a.) Imputed Production is far more autarchic- where any member can
'fork' his portion of the Sources and secede from the union or sell
those shares if a split is attempted that is finer than reasonable
divisibility (you can't both feed a single milk-cow grain and NOT feed
that cow grain, but can divide a herd).
2b.) Each member has exactly as much vote power as he has ownership.
If you own 11% of a roto-tiller and your neighbor owns 22%, then you
have only half as much vote power in decisions such as "how often
should we change the oil".
3.) Every Consumer Cooperative I know of is only concerned with buying
products that were made by Capitalists.
3a.) Imputed Production is primarily about ownership and control of
the entire tree of production - recursively, and works toward a
Vertically Integrated Commons where we, the people, own the farms and
factories and land and water rights and all the other Sources and
supporting Sources required to reproduce those things.
There are other differences I don't remember right now, but please do
not call my proposal a Consumer Cooperative, because the
organizational forms are vastly different both in structure and in
results.
> turns out to be successfull, more people would
> choose it (of course, this can only happen in a truly free society, so this
> is quite hypothetical, and political transformations will be needed before
> such type of free experimentation can occur)
We don't need to transform politicians, and do not have enough money
to buy such changes anyway.
All we need to do is start businesses that are funded and owned by
Consumers and that treat Profit as payer investment.
Aaron Huslage wrote:
> I would love to understand this more fully but it may not be germane to the
> topic of this list. Do you have links to more info or could you provide more
> detail off-list?
This very much applies to this list if we intend to collectively own
and control part of the physical layer.
We, the users, can invest to co-own wires, cables, satellites, etc.
needed to provide internet connectivity.
We *ALREADY* pay for all the costs of those material Means of Production.
And we *ALSO* pay profit (price above cost).
So it is trivial to see that we could collectively afford to do so,
for we already pay for everything anyway, but simply do it a bit late,
and without being organized for our own purposes.
Some of my thought on this are at http://P2PFoundation.net/User_Owned
- though I need some help polishing those ideas.
Mar-03-2011:
I just noticed:
http://AnDevUni.org
''
The Android Developers Union
We, the members and supporters of the Android Developers Union,
are fed up with the conditions of the Android Market. We are tired of
being treated like sharecroppers on Google's digital plantation! We
have compiled a list of seven demands which Google can implement to
improve the Market. Implementing these demands will absolutely improve
the working conditions for Android developers, thereby improving the
Android ecosystem and giving a better experience to our customers.
''
Notice their approach is the same as traditional unions: To create
artificial scarcity of some skill.
This approach is destined to fail as the Means of Production continues
to become cheaper.
Wages and Profits approach zero as Barriers to Entry are reduced.
This applies also to the "3D Printing" and "Tabletop Manufacturing"
phenomenon - since, when *anyone* can manufacture some thing, there is
no longer any way to prop Wages, and the difference between Price and
Cost will be meaningless (Profit is undefined when Consumers own the
Means of Production).
The only viable approach I can see is to begin protecting the "other
side of the equation" -> meaning, we must protect the Worker's ability
to Consume by helping them organize to have ownership in the Means of
Production from which they need the Outputs instead of trying to own
the Means of Production for which they happen to have skills in
operating.
So, instead of Workers trying to own the factory where they work, they
instead direct-invest* in things like Milk Dairies, Chicken Farms,
Avocado Orchards, etc. because those are the Sources of the things
they actually need, and let the potential Consumers of what they
produce own that factory.
(*) By 'direct-invest' I mean the Consumers would invest to co-own the
Fields, Farms etc. and be 'paid' (their ROI) in Product instead of
Profit - for the Product would never be sold since it would already be
the property of those who intend to actually use it.
Mar-02-2011:
On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Patrick
> we can set up cooperatives :)
If they are very carefully defined, then we might be able to simply call them 'Cooperatives'.
But most Cooperatives I know of *sell* the product back to the collective Owners and therefore collect Profit from them!
This causes control to concentrate into the hands of a few - usually a "democratically elected" committee and causes many other subtle problems.
What I describe is a "short circuit" across the typical market.
Where the consumers do not buy the finished goods, but own them already - even before they are completed - as a side-effect of their ownership in the Physical Sources of those goods.
If you own an Apple tree, you do not *buy* the apples from yourself.
If you and your neighbor co-own an Apple, you need not *buy* the apples from your collective 'self'.
If you 999 other people co-own an Apple orchard, you need not *buy* the apples from your collective 'self'.
This has other benefits such as:
1.) Since the product is not sold, there is no chance for the government to collect sales tax.
2.) Since the product is not sold, there is no chance for the government to disallow that production (buying raw milk is illegal in many parts of the US).
> or gather consumers for bulk buying, such as food banks.
Those organizations are not OWNED by the Consumers, but are instead the property of some well-intentioned person or group that dominates all decisions.
> do you have access to such forms of organization around you ?
Nothing that is truly Consumer-Owned.
> do you want to set one up ?
Yes. I have saved up some money now, but have not yet begun because I cannot get a single human on Earth to actually consider the difference I describe - and so nobody understands how what I propose will be any different from what has already been attempted.
Mar-02-2011:
Dante-Gabryell Monson wrote:
> "a free market is god damn expensive to the customers"
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9olxQqxyxaE&feature=player_detailpage#t=342s
Mar-02-2011: [OK] Crowdfunding, open collaboration and positive social change... an invitation
Mar-02-2011: Users: Who will be using it? And what for?
Suresh Fernando wrote:
> Why is there a funding gap for social innovators?
Because traditional funding models attract investors
who expect to be paid Profit.
Profit is the difference between the Price a consumer
pays for a finshed good or service, and the real Costs
incurred during production.
Isaac Wilder wrote:
> Philosophically and practically, we should be designing a
> system whose cost to each individual is the price of the
> hardware and the cost of supplying power to that hardware.
The customers *already* pay all the Costs of production.
We, the consumers, foot the entire bill.
And we *also* pay Profit because we choose to pay late.
But if we could organize to pay early - to collectively
purchase the Physical Sources of products and services
we need - then, we would still need to pay all costs.
But since we would own the objective as a side-effect
of our owning the Sources, we would no be 'buying'
from ourselves, and so COULD NOT pay Profit, for that
final transaction would not even occur!
Profit is UNDEFINED when the Customers are the Owners
of the Means of Production.
Why are we so disorganized and/or terrified of ownership
that we leave it up to those that intend to subjugate
and dominate us?
And instead of taking a stance through property ownership,
we beg and plead with the current owners to "please do
the right thing" - even though the current owners have
NO POSSIBLE CHANCE of "doing the right thing" for they
owe investors who expect Price be kept above Cost.
And Price can only be kept above Cost during Scarcity.
So we see the drive for Scarcity is caused by choosing
investors who expect Profit as a return.
The drive for Scarcity can be eliminated by choosing
investors who expect Product as a return.
But only Customers can use Product as a return.
So the answer is to attract Customers to pre-pay for
Product - while using those pre-payments as actual
investments which are then property co-owned by those
Customers who benefit from the use-value of that
production, and never need strive for Scarcity, for
the product will usually never be sold.
In the case where a Customer-Owner has too much product:
the solution is to sell that product to non-owners, and
even to charge Price above Cost (Profit) against those
late comers *BUT* - here is the trick - the Profit
received must be treated as though that Customer had
just made an investment toward even more Physical Sources.
Treating Profit as that payer's investment will allow
the collective to include others while simultaneously
avoiding the typical problems of overaccumulation
and excessive concentration of control that cause
even the most well-intentioned organizations to finally
fail to meet the needs of those they were initially
formed to serve (the customers of course!).