For instance, how will we ever own a network or a physical community meeting place? What about *real* factories and farms that we could otherwise use current (and even ancient) technology to compete against the Capitalists NOW through efficiency of scale if we could only figure out how to cooperatively own those physical sources of production?

Fancy, new, and in many cases still imaginary technology will eventually allow individual ownership of more of SOME types of physical means of production, but if we can solve the difficulty of fractional ownership, we could start TODAY with just Land, Water, Seeds and Sun.

Does anyone else see this as an issue worth considering, or am I just missing the work that others are already doing on it?

If it IS important to others, why do we keep trying to skirt the issue by dreaming of material fabricators and desktop construction?

Notice that useful fungus, plants and animals have always ‘fabricated’ the raw materials of the best food, drugs, cloth, soap. Many of these organisms are small enough to fit on a desktop and are solar powered. Even so, there is intense hunger in the world for a much different reason.

The reason for poverty is a systemic issue based on a misunderstanding of profit. Most of those that DO currently own the physical sources of production have the odd notion that keeping price above cost is a measure of their success instead of understanding it as a plea from the consumer in need of the product of those sources.

Capitalism is the practice of keeping Capital (the means of production) away from the consumer to insure price does not meet cost, for when the consumers of apples are the owners of the trees, they may hire others and pay them wages, but profit is zero because price and cost are the same.

The forces keeping consumers from Capital is not obvious. It is not that the current owners are ‘bad’, but that they measure their success based on keeping price above cost which requires that “their” consumers not have access to the means of production. The current owners are not directly stopping us from organizing cooperative ownership for ourselves, but the problem comes in that we just find it easier to just buy the products from these Capitalists while enduring the inefficiency of profit.

And when any group of consumers does finally get tired of being overcharged, they may start another business or organization that intends to do away with that problem, but it invariably either intends to also keep price above cost (is a for-profit corp) – which requires the consumers not become co-owners, or, even if it is a ‘non-profit’, it still does nothing to help the new consumer get a foothold in the organization.

Non-profits do not do the right thing either because they are owned and operated solely by their originators instead of that ownership (and therefore control) incrementally flowing to each new user as fractional and divisible ownership of the whole when those participants pay price above cost. Instead, the profit pads the wages of the “committee members” or is spent in ways they see fit without allowing the consuming minority to split/divide/fork the organization as they could if they had REAL and divisible ownership.

Patrick Anderson
President, Personal Sovereignty Foundation