In particular, his emphasis on “based on contributions not on exchange” seems to consider “adjusted time units” as a means of allocating productive output to be categorically different from money, is, as I understand it, actually just a type of money, his idea that employing “auctioning” to determine prices is categorically different from a “market” system, which I don’t think it is, as an “auction” requires a “market,” the market system determines prices by supply and demand, which is what an auction measures.

Siefkes, is in essence, proposing a system based on both money and markets, only disguising this fact by. For me this is not a problem, as it is not money qua money, nor markets where the problems of Capitalsm lies, but property, which Siefkes does not include in his model, making his model, in my opinion, quite agreeable.

In my opinion “the landmark book on the Peer Economy” is Kevin Carson’s “Studies in Mutualist Political Economy,” ideas in which I expect to be further developed in his current effort “Studies in the Anarchist Theory of Organizational Behavior,” I book I will buy and read the minute it is available in print.

Siefkes’ work, much of which I agree with, lacks the political and economic depth to be anything more than a introductory text. And that, however, is already a valuable contribution. I look forward to more work from Siefkes.

Cheers.

I guess it would be most useful to hold a view of a polarity between totally rival goods and totally anti-rival goods. The latter may be the most apt for pure non-reciprocal approaches, while the more you approach rivaly, the more urgent it becomes to find solutions to cost-recovery, which may take various solutions such as reciprocity-based (gift economy or ‘equality-machting’ logic as defined by Alan Page Fiske) or exchange based mechanisms (the market).

Commons that deal with less than pure anti-rival sources must take measures to regulate access, which as long as it is doesn’t require an obligatory person to person reciprocity or a market price, would still be a form of peer production, or at least communal shareholding (the latter can exist without the former if nothing is really produced). But like water that is boiling to eventually become ‘vapour, at some point the increasing conditionality may boil over in something which is no longer peer production at all, but a gift economy or market.

Indeed my definition has 3 parts: free contributions as input, a participatory process, and universal availability”. I actually accept that this universal availability is subject to certain conditions, as most physical common pool resources in fact are. What is important is not that these are totally unconditional, but that the members of the ‘group’ have all access to it, and do not have to pay for it.

Well, obviously I misunderstood your reference to “free contributions, free availability”. Concerning your definition, we’re in full agreement 🙂