very good post, sorry to have discovered it only now. By reading it, I feel you may be interested in these
Thoughts on P2P production and deployment of physical objects

Are you saying that we cannot organize to co-own a large factory or farm?

“What are you doing to organize the means of production to a smaller organizational scale of production owners? … I know my answer. Fab labs. Open repository of digital design.”

I think the reason for the excessive interest in magical fabbers and “desktop manufacturing” is an attempt at avoiding the difficult issue of co-ownership.

People want the advantage of owning the Physical Sources of production so they can have control, but want to avoid the sticky issue of partial ownership.

Individual ownership of Personal Computers (PCs) is a big part of the success in the P2P paradigm and of Free Software and ‘online’ Free Culture. These Physical Sources are cheap enough that many people can afford one in their own home and ISP charges are just quietly disregarded.

Collective ownership of Physical Sources is difficult, but obviously is “worth it” for many kinds of production – for that is the role that Capitalist corporations currently fill.

For instance, a person could choose to individually own a milk cow so they could get “at cost” milk, but they couldn’t afford the better tools like a fancy milking machine, so would likely have to the work themselves since hiring someone to come for that little bit of time would hardly be worth it unless you overpaid them. And it probably wouldn’t be worth it to grow their own alfalfa, or to purchase expensive medical/vet tools, so would be paying “price above cost” to feed and provide medical care for the animal, and so on, recursively for the entire chain (actually tree) of production. There is great savings in eventually owning the physical sources for every step required for that production, and that is one of the savings in the “efficiency of scale”.

Most people do not INDIVIDUALLY own a milk cow even though there are great advantages of controlling exactly what the cow is fed and whether or not it is injected with artificial hormones, and is treated humanely, etc. because it is just not realistic to INDIVIDUALLY own – it is too much trouble.

But it WOULD be “worth it” for 10 or 100 or 1000 neighbors to COLLECTIVELY own a small dairy. Each consumer would have as much vote control as they have percentage of ownership, and when the majority wanted to do something that caused a division, the minority should be able to ‘fork’ from the rest of the group to avoid the excessive granularity of typical ‘democracy’.

So the problem I am working on is in describing how to make collective ownership self perpetuating.

The primary secret I have discovered that has been purposefully hidden or accidentally lost is that profit (price above cost) is a measure of a consumer’s dependence on the current owners of the physical sources, and is ‘balanced’ by treating that payment as an investment from the consumer that paid it.

Your thought on ‘users owning the means of production’ is ancient wisdom yet far ahead of its time. I foresee that advanced appropriate technology will make your proposition come true in the near future.

What are you doing to organize the means of production to a smaller organizational scale of production owners? That’s the practical call coming from your theory. Is there a way that you can help to organize ‘production on a smaller scale’? That’s the essence of our work. Let’s consider seriously how that can be done, here and today.

I know my answer. Fab labs. Open repository of digital design. Then virtually all manufacturing and agriculatural operations are in localized hands. Then, it remains only to master the provision of feedstocks and materials: minerals, rubber, metals, semiconductors, plastics, etc.

The latter can be absolutely localized as well, but that may require further technological advancement. At the same time, there is nothing foreign about producing biofuels, bioplastics, compressed earth blocks, lumber, paper, fiber – all locally. It is a little farther stretch to talk of aluminum or pure silicon. Yet, these are both found abundantly in clay and sand. So even the advanced materials can be localized – that is not a far cry if we have ample energy in the form or solar concentrator electric power, for example.

Talk to me on this.

Marcin

The way I view this is to understand that everyone is the Consumer of something, even if just bread and water. The only reason we need to protect worker at all is not so they can work, but so that they can Consume.

Because of this, Consumer ownership can be dangerous unless *every* human has their ability to Consume protected through Ownership in the Sources of that which they desire. After that, workers don’t need extra protection for the opportunity to work – for it is not working we need to protect, it is only Consumption that must be guaranteed.

I once learned from a physics professor that pushing questions to ridiculous extremes helps to expose the validity of attempted solutions, so let’s try that here.

Imagine a business that makes ‘pins’ (as described in “The Wealth of Nations”) that employs 1000 workers. Now imagine a discover is made by a worker there that automates production to such a degree that it eliminates the need for 90% of the workforce.

1. If that business is owned by a few original investors (as is common today), then most of the employees would suddenly be out of a job but the Consumer Price would remain approximately the same (dropping just below the competition) if the discovery is kept secret or is patented to render it unusable by other Source owners. The difference would go into the owners pockets as profit.

2. If that business is collectively owned by all of the workers in proportion to … there are different ways to divide the ownership, but maybe we could assume for now that every employee has an equal percentage no matter what job they do and no matter how long they have worked there. In that case, I’m not sure what would happen, but there would either be a lot of guys standing around pretending to work, or maybe there would be some kind of ‘rotation’ – where everyone stays employed, or maybe some of the workers would choose to receive a big bonus and then be able to retire (very different from being laid off). No matter the course taken, the outcome for the Consumer would look approximately the same as #1 – in that the Price would stay about the same.

3. If the business is owned by the Consumers (Users) of those pins, then the workers would be laid off as in #1, but the Price would fall drastically because Price==Cost and Profit has no meaning when Consumers are the Owners.

This still does not look convincing, but maybe it makes sense? I will keep trying to figure out another way of displaying this. Please post here if you have a better analogy.

About the email trouble: my hosting provider had big hardware problems recently and is still recovering, so hopefully that is the only reason.

I have sent a number of emails, some of which have come back because of a full mailbox ,so I hope this gets to you. I find your work very important and fascinating for its insights. I have one major issue: if users become the owners, does that not create a dictatorship of another kind of market? Is it not better to find governance modes which honour both the autonomy of the real producers (the workers) and the users-consumers, rather than the latter alone. Your thoughts on that would be most appreciated.

The costs to maintain any physical Source (whether a tractor or a computer) are usually much smaller than the initial investment while the costs to operate those Sources might be quite high – as they include wages for the Worker (to drive the tractor or program the computer) and energy (diesel or electricity).

It is the difficulty in organizing large collective investments that keeps Users (Consumers) from owning the physical Sources of Production that would allow us to then have “at cost” access and full control of the Objects of that production.

If a group of Users (Consumers) were to incorporate and purchase some physical Sources that they voluntarily put under a contract that required all profit at each transaction be targeted as an investment for that very user in more physical Sources, then that collective ownership would grow according to the interest of the participants until it would soon outperform large holders – whether they be Google or ConAgra.

I wonder how we could prove it is the Users (Consumers) who must OWN for optimum economic efficiency, and who will otherwise continue to beg and wonder why those that do OWN withhold access for the purposes of profit (usury).

I’ve thought to make an MMORPG that modeled a simple but realistic society centered around bread production which would include private property and the requirement to eat (say one loaf) each day.

Thanks for your comment. I hope my response can be taken with the sincerity I attempt to deliver it in.

Your peer,
Patrick Anderson

While any digital information can be quickly and almost effortlessly copied from one physical medium to another, the costs to store and express it are not even close to zero. One of the largest costs is the computer itself.

Eh?

The incremental cost of data is near zero, it can be extraordinarily costly to produce.

Similarly, the incremental cost of storage and expression is nearly zero, whatever the initial cost of the computer and storage is.