Comments on: Should a P2P devotee take money for a contribution to the commons? https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/should-a-p2p-devotee-take-money-for-a-contribution-to-the-commons/ Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:14:51 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.16 By: Michel Bauwens https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/should-a-p2p-devotee-take-money-for-a-contribution-to-the-commons/comment-page-1/#comment-414982 Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:14:51 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=3363#comment-414982 From Kevin Carson, via email:

IMO the problem is not markets. It’s artificial scarcity. The
open-source revolution is about removing artificial scarcity. If
patents and copyrights are eliminated, and artificial scarcities of
land and capital that make some people dependent on others for their
livelihoods, and it’s still possible for you to produce something of
value that others are willing to pay for because of its natural
scarcity, then more power to you.

If anything, I expect the imploding capital outlays required for
physical production, and the collapse of IP as a cause of exchange
value for physical goods, will cause the boundaries between the market
and P2P, and the boundaries between physical and conceptual
production, to blur.

Markets are a perfectly valid way of organizing economic activity, of
connecting production to exchange, when natural scarcity exists: the
need for the expenditure of effort to produce a unit of consumption is
a source of scarcity, and under those circumstances the exchange of
effort for effort is entirely legitimate. What’s illegitimate is the
kind of unequal exchange we have under capitalism, where (as Big Bill
Haywood put it, one man gets a dollar he didn’t works for and another
man works for a dollar he didn’t get).

In a non-capitalist market economy without unequal exchange or
artificial scarcity, I expect open-source to blur the lines between
market and non-market modes of disribution as a sort of natural
evolution: As costs of production implode in ever-growing sectors of
the economy (starting with the zero marginal costs of reproduction in
the conceptual realm), I expect those areas of economic activity to
become what the Austrians become “non-economic goods” (as the nuclear
power enthusiasts put it some sixty years ago, “too cheap to meter”).

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