Dmytri Kleiner

So, to try to explain what “venture communism” is, which is my own project, predating the term “peer production”, but very relevant to it. I think we’re talking about the same thing, even if I was using different terms. As a technologist, I was also inspired by the functioning of peer networks and the organization of free software projects. These were also the inspiration for venture communism. I wanted to create something like a protocol for the formation and allocation of physical goods, the same way we have TCP/IP and so forth, as a way to allocate immaterial goods. The Internet gives us a very efficient platform on which we can share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.

Henry George

Venture communism seeks to tackle the issue of how we can do the same thing with material wealth. I drew on lots of sources in the creation of this model, not exclusively anarchist-communist sources. One was the Georgist idea of using rent, economic rent, as a fundamental mutualizing source of wealth. Mutualizing unearned income is essentially what that means in layman’s terms. The idea is that people earn income not only by producing things, but by owning the means of production, owning productive assets, and our society is unequal because the distribution of productive assets is unequal.

Even within the cooperative movement, which I’ve always admired and held up as an example, it’s clear that the distribution of productive assets is also unequal. The same with other kinds of production; for example, if you look at the social power of IT workers versus agricultural workers, it becomes very clear that the social power of a collective of IT workers is much stronger than the social power of a collective agricultural workers. There is inequality in human and capital available for these cooperatives. This protocol would seek to normalize that, but in a way that doesn’t require administration. The typical statist communist reaction to the cooperative movement is saying that cooperatives can exclude and exploit one another, and that solution is either creating giant cooperatives like Mondragon, or socialist states.

Silvio Gessel

But then, as we’ve seen in history, there’s something that develops called an administrative class, which governs over the collective of cooperatives or the socialist state, and can become just as counterproductive and often exploitive as capitalist class. So, how do we create cooperation among cooperatives, and distribution of wealth among cooperatives, without creating this administrative class? This is why I borrowed from the work of Henry George and Silvio Gesell in created this idea of rent sharing.

The idea is that the cooperatives are still very much independent just as cooperatives are now. The producers are independent, but instead of owning their productive assets themselves, each member of the cooperative owns these together with each member of every other cooperative in the Federation, and the cooperatives rent the property from the commune collectively. This is not done administratively, this is simply done as a protocol. The idea is that if a cooperative wants an asset, like, an example is if one of the communes would like to have a tractor, then essentially the central commune is like a bond market. They float a bond, they say I want a tractor, I am willing to pay $200 a month for this tractor in rent, and other members of the cooperative can say, hey, yeah, that’s a good idea,we think that’s a really good allocation of these productive assets, so we are going to buy these bonds. The bond sale clears, the person gets the tractor, the money from the rent of the tractor goes back to clear the bonds, and after that, whatever further money is collected through the rent on this tractor – and I don’t only mean tractors, same would be applied to buildings, to land, to any other productive assets – all this rent that’s collected is then distributed equally among all of the workers.

So, the unearned income, the portion of income derived from ownership of productive assets is evenly distributed among all the cooperatives and all the stakeholders among those cooperatives, and that’s the basic protocol of venture communism.

Whatever productive assets you consume, you pay rent for, and that rent is divided equally among all members of the commune. Not the individual cooperatives, but the commune itself. This means that if you use your exact per capita share of property, no more no less than what you pay in rent and what you received in social dividend, will be equal. So if you are a regular person, then you are kind of moving evenly, right? But if you’re not working at that time, because you’re old, or otherwise unemployed, then obviously the the productive assets that you will be using will be much less than the mean and the median, so what you’ll receive as dividend will be much more than what you pay in rent, essentially providing a basic income. And conversely, if you’re a super motivated producer, and you’re greatly expanding your productive capacity, then what you pay for productive assets will be much higher than what you get in dividend, presumably, because you’re also earning income from the application of that property to production. So, venture communism doesn’t seek to control the product of the cooperatives. The product of the cooperatives is fully theirs to dispose of as they like. It doesn’t seek to limit, control, or even tell them how they should distribute it, or under what means; what they produce is entirely theirs, it’s only the collective management of the commons of productive assets.

Photo by T a k

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This is a collection of writings by Marcus Brancaglione. Brancaglione is President of ReCivitas (Institute for the Revitalization of Citizenship); Bruna Augusto, who edited the collection, is CEO. Among the activities of ReCivitas listed on its website are “structuring intellectual property licenses,” “creating new products for social investment,” and “governance platforms architecture”; as best I can gather from Google Translate’s unsatisfactory Portuguese-to-English rendering, ReCivitas is partly a sort of phyle or platform in roughly the same ballpark as Las Indias, and partly engaged in the same sort of commons-based municipalism as activists in Barcelona.

Brancaglione co-managed a crowd-funded Unconditional Basic Income pilot project in . The project paid 30 reals a month to around a hundred members of the community for five years.

He argues that Basic Income is not primarily a redistribution of income, but more importantly “it is an instrument that restitutes natural rights and the fundamental freedom protection against the exploitation of alienated labor,” and “above all, an instrument of liberation from governmental dependency and political servitude and thus, of political-economic empowerment, especially for the more unprivileged and marginalized individuals.”

Although it’s always been the case that poverty is a political rather than a merely socioeconomic issue, that fact has become more apparent than ever today. Poverty is “not merely a state of relative lack of economic conditions, but it is indeed, much deeper and more comprehensive than that, it is the deprivation of fundamental freedom of all sorts: political, economic and cultural.”

Brancaglione rejects the neoliberal framing of poverty as an individual rather than a structural issue, along with its lionization of a “freedom of choice” relegated to consumer decisions within the structural parameters left by monopoly capital and the state.

He comes from a left free-market tradition that sees capitalism as a set of coercive structural features enabled by the state for the sake of rentier classes. Capitalism and state socialism are both variants of the same system of domination by the few over the many — both of which he distinguishes from the “free market.”

He distinguishes — perhaps reflecting some Georgist influence — between legitimate wealth and private properties, and nature which is a property common to all. Some forms of property like land and natural resources are rightfully common to all, and cannot legitimately be privately appropriated; others, like the fruits of individual labor, are rightfully private property and should not be violated by force. Genuine liberty cannot exist if the equal right of authority over common assets is violated. A free market — defined by voluntary relationships negotiated by parties equal in power — cannot exist when the revenues from common properties, which should be distributed as a social dividend to enable individual independence, are privately appropriated and the propertyless are forced into economic dependency on employment by the appropriators of social property.

Brancaglione sees the provision of basic income as a duty of goverments — “the duty of those who have control over the territory and its inhabitants and the commonwealth.” But when they default on this duty, and available resources for state funding have been privately appropriated, “nobody can prevent people to assume, voluntarily and mutually, the responsibility to supply the basic income.” He obviously doesn’t mean this voluntary assumption to be understood as a mere charitable contribution out of the incomes of the poor — rather, he strongly implies, one of the things government has no right to “prevent” is the expropriation of privately enclosed natural commons by society at large to fund a basic income when the state will not undertake that duty on its own. The people have a “natural right to common properties alienated as possessions of [nation-states] and private corporations.”

The Georgist influence comes through in his distinction between “goverments” and “states” and his treatment of states and landlords as different versions of the same phenomenon. The latter is illustrated (along with panarchistic tendencies) in the following passage:

The libertarian republics of the future are going to be societies without states or, more precisely, societies free from the national and private corporate monopolies over common and private natural properties. The governments of the future will coexist peacefully in the same territory as competitive and cooperative management societies, acting in a negotiated manner not only in the same space, but at the same time.

Brancaglione proposes a very anarchist-sounding agenda of federated local communities bypassing the state to create a counter-economy and appropriate illegitimately enclosed resources to fund a basic income.

Roughly speaking, my proposal is the constitution of small communities, completely horizontal, open and connected so as to form a network of social security without borders and which are directly financed by funds created by association of citizens, not being restricted to a venue, but by social investors from all over the world. Investors who can invest directly in the real economy of these communities, villas, cities with an enormous human capital and potential of development, instead of investing on bankrupt governments and rotten banks. Present poor and unprivileged communities… which, in the long run, could not only pay their own basic income, but also become investors or providers of basic income in other places in the world. People and societies which, in the face of the old and unsustainable violent and monopolizing possession systems would finally be able to conquer back what effectively is theirs; recover the control of their land and territories and consequently, their political sovereignty as a people with overall direct self-determination rights.

This idea of radicalized and horizontally federated communities supplanting the state and corporation is reminiscent of Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism and Harvey’s rebel cities.

The Quatinga Velho experiment reaffirmed a common theme among Basic Income advocates: that, far from disincentivizing effort and initiative, the economic security of a Basic Income actually increases them. “…[T]he opportunities, especially when one has the means to take advantage of them, increase the free initiative and the entrepreneurial ability, whereas the deprivations tend not only to reduce, but also to paralyze them.”

This is a writer who combines a lot of congenial threads of left-libertarian thought in new and interesting ways. Definitely worth checking out.

Photo by scottsantens

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“What if I told you there was a solution which transcends political divisions? Which is consistent with the ideals of our Founding Fathers? Which can be implemented anywhere on the local, state, or federal level? Which can increase our overall prosperity, reduce inequality, promote peace, and improve the environment all at the same time? Which can do all this without any major restructuring of our institutions?

The LVT has been experimented with in many times and places, and it has always succeeded to the extent that it was tried. It holds the potential for uniting principled minds of every persuasion, if only we can break free of ignorance espoused by the talking heads who tell us that the only remedies available are painful and complex.”

Here are some examples of successful implementations:

“* The “Four Tigers”, 1940s.

Apologists for state planning and state partnership with big business point enthusiastically to Pacific Rim Asia but overlook the fact that all these success stories began on a firm footing of land reform. The city-state Singapore, founded on Georgist tax principles, reached a tax rate on land of 16%. Hong Kong existed only on crown land, funding 4/5 of their budget with 2/5 of site Rent (Yu-Hung Hong, Landlines, 1999 March, Lincoln Inst., Cambridge, MA). The city uses land rent, not subsidy, to fund their new metro and in its suburbs grows much of its own food. Hong Kong enjoys low taxes, low prices, high investment, and often the highest per capita salaries. The city is often voted the world’s best city for business and the freest for residents.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur, an admirer of Henry George, forced the Japanese provisional government to write land reform into their new democratic constitution that limited Rent paid by tenants to owners. South Korea adopted a similar Rent reform. Gen. Chiang Kai-shek likewise forced land reform on Taiwan (below). A 1980’s World Bank study credited land reform with creating the basis for their economic miracles. Secure farmers can afford to consume manufactured goods. Soon successful industries can trade with other developed nations. Another World Bank report, in 1998 by Roy Prosterman and Tiom Hanstad, Chapter 10, “Land Taxation” by Jennifer Duncan: “Land tax is an important vehicle for transferring some of the benefits of land privatization to the public sector. Revenues from land tax can fund significant and increasing portions of infrastructure and social services, fostering public and local government support for privatization.” Today, to try to control their skyrocketing location values, both Japan and Korea have tried to tax land, tho’ still minusculely.

* Taiwan, 1940s.

Old Formosa was mired in poverty and fast breeding. Hunger afflicted the majority of people who were landless peasants. Less than 20 families monopolized the entire island. Then the Nationalist Army, led by Chiang Kai-shek, retreated to Taiwan. General Chiang figured he lost mainland China in part by not reforming land-holding. Chiang did not want to risk losing his last refuge – east of that isle lay nothing but open ocean.

A follower of Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China and an adherent of Henry George, Chiang knew of the Single Tax. Borrowing a page from George via Sun, the new Nationalist Government of Taiwan instituted its “land to the tiller program” which taxed farmland according to its value. Soon the large plantation owners found themselves paying out about as much in taxes as they were getting back as Rent. Being a middleman was no longer worth the bother, so they sold off their excess to farmers at prices the peasants could afford.

Working their own land with newly marketed fertilizers, new owners worked harder. They produced more, and after years of paying taxes to cover the onerous public debt, at last kept more and lived better. From 1950 to 1970 population growth dropped 40%, and hunger was ended. (Altho’ Taiwan did receive a billion dollars from the US, it was mostly military aid, spread out over eight years.) Taiwan began to set world records with growth rates of 10% per annum in their GDP and 20% in their industry. (Fred Harrison, Power in the Land, 1983)

* Denmark

Denmark, 1950s. The Danes built on their land tax heritage. In 1957, the tiny Georgist Justice Party won a few seats and a role in the ruling coalition. Anticipating a higher rate on land, investors switched from real estate to real enterprise. One year later, inflation had gone from 5% to under 1%; bank interest dropped from 6.25% to 5%. By 1960, 100,000 unemployed in a country of just five million had found jobs and at higher wages, the highest widespread pay raise ever in Danish history. (The New York Times editorial, “Big Lesson From A Small Nation”, 1960 October 2)

Tho’ many people were better off, next election landowners spent enough money to convince people otherwise. The Justice Party lost its seats, the land rate lost its boost, and investors again became land speculators. Quickly inflation climbed back up to 5% and by 1964 reached 8%. Land prices began to sky-rocket, from 1960 to 1981 increasing 19-fold while prices of goods and services went up merely fourfold. (Knud Tholstrup, Dansk MP, A Third Way, 1986)

Denmark, 1960s. Before 1970, the annual income tax fell upon the previous year’s income; in 1969, the government taxed 1968 income. Then parliament decided to tax income in the same year it’s earned; in 1970, they taxed 1970 income. Earners realized that 1969 income would not be taxed. Their response, from 1968 to 1969, was to double the increase in production (4% to 8%), halve the inflation rate (8% to 3.5%), quadruple investment increases (5% to 20.5%), raise savings by a quarter (from 2.9 million kroner to 3.8), and employ nearly all workers. (Knud Tholstrup, A Third Way)

* Estonia, 1990s.

After the break up of the Soviet Union, each newly separate republic had to find its own way of raising revenue. Estonia, across the gulf from Finland, found the tax for farmland. Because neither land nor its value can be hidden, it was the most feasible way for the new government to raise funds. Collecting from farmowners was vastly more successful than trying to collect from others, succeeding over 95% of the time. The low rate of 2%, which even governmental owners of public land had to pay, was still enough to spur efficient use of land. (The Economist, 1998 Feb 28)”

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