This Mutual Marketing Manifesto is an interesting read, and says many things that are congruent with the peer to peer ethos.Â

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The author states that, against the institutions that see us as a bundle of data, we must reclaim our full identities, and build the tools that allow it.

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He then offers a critrique of the market mode and argues that a transactional economy should be replaced by a relationship-based economy:

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Markets “pay no attention to the alternative means by which consumers can express preferences – namely by actually expressing them. Here I am leaning heavily on Albert Hirschman, whose work forms the bedrock of much new economic thinking, and has been imaginatively interpreted by Simon Zadek in ‘An Economics of Utopia’. This simple thought – that the best means of allocating scarce resources may be through dialogue, negotiation and loyalty, rather than blunt rejection, forms the essence of a humanistic, and hence relationship-based, rather than a transactional economy.â€?Â

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The critique of the market is accompanied by a critique of the corporate form:

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“Companies, owned by shareholders seeking short-term profit and delegating authority to self-serving managers, will never act in the interests of their customers. Legally, and morally, they cannot. The only viable buyer-centric organisational form is the mutual – the buying co-operative, directly owned by its members….â€?Â

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 The author concludes: “Take all these forces together – the seizing of control by the individual, the efficient joining together of social actors to make communal demands based on informed self-interest, and the reintroduction of individual-centric accountability as a signalling and retributive system – flowing two ways, and you have the the structural ingredients of a sustainable individual-centric sytem. The systems, the models and the processes to achieve these desirable (or certainly less wasteful) shifts in perspective, comprise the toolkit of what I have termed ‘Mutual Marketing’.â€?Â