Should a P2P devotee take money for a contribution to the commons?
A proposal for debate, by Ryan Lanham:
Let’s imagine a commons was somehow endowed…like a university.
Could it be appropriate for the commons to pay for open contributions or is the very idea of “open” simply outside the concept of getting some dosh for day’s drollery?
I say take the buck, and perhaps even spend the buck–why shouldn’t wikipedia pay a great physicist for an article? It is perfectly fine to be paid for work and there is no crisis in calling something P2P if it has a bit of the old modes attached.
One thinks of property trusts for real estate as a possible analogy. Wouldn’t it be nice in the post-life estates of certain academics or artists if they gave their portfolio of intellectual properties to an open trust as a P2P “gift?” Surely it has already happened…perhaps many times. And if it is OK to die and pass something into a commons, why not have it be OK to live and sell something to a commons? Who loses?
Imagine that quaint New England town that surrounded the common grazing grounds with houses. Would it be so wrong if they paid the fellow living next door for a little expansion turf? Of course not.
People get edgy about markets–pro and con. They get religious. P2P ought not to be of any given creed with regard to markets. What P2P ought to be is open, about responsibility and sharing, and interested in general advancement. It is about growing an open access commons for non-hierarchical interactions and uses. How it gets to these ends can be a manifold story.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:14 am
From Kevin Carson, via email:
IMO the problem is not markets. It’s artificial scarcity. The
open-source revolution is about removing artificial scarcity. If
patents and copyrights are eliminated, and artificial scarcities of
land and capital that make some people dependent on others for their
livelihoods, and it’s still possible for you to produce something of
value that others are willing to pay for because of its natural
scarcity, then more power to you.
If anything, I expect the imploding capital outlays required for
physical production, and the collapse of IP as a cause of exchange
value for physical goods, will cause the boundaries between the market
and P2P, and the boundaries between physical and conceptual
production, to blur.
Markets are a perfectly valid way of organizing economic activity, of
connecting production to exchange, when natural scarcity exists: the
need for the expenditure of effort to produce a unit of consumption is
a source of scarcity, and under those circumstances the exchange of
effort for effort is entirely legitimate. What’s illegitimate is the
kind of unequal exchange we have under capitalism, where (as Big Bill
Haywood put it, one man gets a dollar he didn’t works for and another
man works for a dollar he didn’t get).
In a non-capitalist market economy without unequal exchange or
artificial scarcity, I expect open-source to blur the lines between
market and non-market modes of disribution as a sort of natural
evolution: As costs of production implode in ever-growing sectors of
the economy (starting with the zero marginal costs of reproduction in
the conceptual realm), I expect those areas of economic activity to
become what the Austrians become “non-economic goods” (as the nuclear
power enthusiasts put it some sixty years ago, “too cheap to meter”).