By Federico Guerrini for http://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2015/03/18/sharing-economy-or-just-vulture-neoliberalism-the-debate-is-on/
LONDON – Innovation it’s a bit like marriage, you know: after the initial wave of enthusiam, problems start.
Something similar is happening with the so-called “sharing” economy, popularized by the likes of Uber, AirBnb and Task Rabbit. While users still flock to these platforms, more and more people are starting to question the real benefits and the underlying motivations of the companies involved.
“I don’t even know why they call it ‘sharing economy’ at all,” the P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens recently said, “They should call it ‘selling economy’, instead, since what is being done by Uber and AirBnb, has nothing to do with mutualizing resoruces, but only with selling and renting. Actually it’s anti-sharing, because they are commodifying resources that before would have been shared for free. Like, if you had a spare room in your house you would invite some friends and now you say, why should I share it for free, if I can make some money out of that?”
Bauwens was speaking at a panel about the new forms of economies of the future, one of many threads of discussion of NESTA’s Future Fest. Other panelists included co-operative development expert Dave Boyle, and TaskRabbit’s director of marketplace operations in Europe, Uma Subramanian.
Criticism to the sharing economy is not altogether new, but the London debate was interesting because it did not discuss practical issues, like Uber’s contrasts with existing national laws or problems with AirBnb’s users task evasion.
Rather, it was a critical examination of the kind of society the ‘sharing’ economy is creating with Silicon Valley companies acting, according to both Bauwens and Boyle, as poster child of the Venture Capitalists’ neoliberal vision around the world. Parasiting existing infrastructure (roads, and people cars and houses) and building services on top of that; giving only low wages and heavy workloads as compensation.
Continue to read the full article at – http://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2015/03/18/sharing-economy-or-just-vulture-neoliberalism-the-debate-is-on/
Profit is inversely related to Property.
Profit is undefined when Product is ROI.
When the consumer of a product is the (co-)owner of the “Physical Sources” (Means of Production), and accepts the product itself as the return on investment, then the price they pay as a consumer is exactly the costs they paid as a (co-)owner, and so profit does not exist because the final transaction (buying the product) does not occur.
If a group of people own a fleet of taxis because they want taxi service, then they must pay all the costs of operation, including any wages for work they do not take upon themselves, but they cannot pay profit, for who would they pay it to?