Before the Corona outbreak, and with the help of Jose Ramos, the lead editor of an upcoming book about cosmo-local production, I had been reviewing the literature on historical rhythms and cycles to set the stage for the current ‘chaotic transition’ and ‘what comes next’. 

In short, I have come to two important conclusions: 

1. society moves from relative stable stages, through chaotic transitions, which are real mutations both in human consciousness and in socio-economic structures 
2. this change is non-linear and moves through internal or external shocks. 

Clearly, Corona is such a shock, partly exo-genous, i.e. a unpredictable outside factor, but also partly endo-genous (internal factor), since our devastating ecological practices are an important part of pandemic generation. It’s a double whammy which both endangers human life and creates a double shock to the economic system (both demand and supply driven, this is quite unprecedented, as economic crisis usually alternate between one and the other). Corona is not going to be sufficient for a full transition, but it will be a Great Accelerator, which has already changed so much in such a short time. I am not predicting that the results will be uniformly positive (accelerating the green/p2p/commons transition), or negative (Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine). Think about what happened after the fall of Rome to see a mixture of radical changes.

Nevertheless, here are some preliminary conclusions: 

1) The market plays almost no role in finding solutions in such crisis moments, and 90% of big and small companies would go bankrupt without state support (right now, big banks are pressing big pharma to price-gouge even more the vital medicines in the US!). Of course, this is not to belittle the many SME’s which are rooted in their communities and doing their best to somehow contribute to them, but the proper ‘capitalist’ multinational and financial entities would have created a situation in which the poor would have been condemned to die for lack of affordable testing and medicines, thereby endangering the population as a whole.

2) The nation-states are weak and the leaders have made mistakes, but they have turned out to be to be an absolutely indispensable institution to avoid chaotic reactions from a fragmented social field, and to discipline the market so that everyone is not put in even graver danger.

3) The current multilateral regime has been useful, (WHO), but also rather weak and ineffectual, at least insufficient to the task. Many people have died because of the weakness of factors 2 and 3, but paradoxically, an enormously larger amount would have died without them; all in all, they are playing a vital role and after initial delays and mistakes, most of them adapted to relatively sensible policies. We should not entertain any illusions that the abolishing of state forms would be anything else than a grave disaster in this context.

4) We have seen an extraordinary civic spirit and collaborative mobilisation of civil society which has been vital in the adaptation to the crisis, and to mitigate market and state failures; countless local and trans-local groups have been set in motion to create technical and scientific commons capable to rapidly produce medical devices that the market had not in stock and the state failed to order in time. Without valves and ventilators, the sick die; without masks, medical personnel gets infected and citizens continue to infect each other at too rapid rates; without mass testing we cannot move from mitigation to suppression; in all these efforts, civil society groups have taken the lead.

5) What has been emerging through p2p/commons/open source efforts are the seeds of new institutions for trans-local, trans-national responses, which can at this stage, not replace, but greatly strengthen the nation-state/multilateral regime, insufficient to the task as they may be (we will need a much stronger trans-national, not inter-national, multilateral institutions in the future, which can guarantee that the human economy works within planetary boundaries and acceptable social equity parameters, as ecological and social justice are strongly dependent on each other).

This regime, which is now still dominant and necessary, can order around market players, as they are now doing through new legislation that both saves and coerces/mobilizes market players. But most of all, it needs to work with, and help mobilize, the collective intelligence of trans-local and trans-national expertise, the latter of which strongly needs to become effective. This process towards ‘partner state’ practices and public-commons protocols will not be automatic, and will be an alternative to a coercive and authoritarian state-centric model, which could be one of the negative outcomes of this crisis.

So what is the role of the commons movement ?

1) One is to show and demonstrate what we can do, as we have already done through the multitude of open source efforts to market and state failures as well as mutual aid self-organizing.

2) Use the opportunity of this pedagogical catastrophe to strive for structural adaptations and reforms. In other words, we can’t just be local and tribal, we must be trans-local, and work at every level of institutional life, in order to transform institutions and proposes commons-centric reforms and transformative policies.

Corona is a serious crisis, but the climate is a much more serious one. In a paradoxical way, the global mobilization against Corona, despite the weakness and mistakes, has shown what can be done, and how fast institutions can adapt and change their choices once our life, and thus their legitimacy, is at stake. This bodes well for climate change adaption and ecological transformation. But make no mistake, this is just one of the crises we will need. The deep transformation that we need for this bifurcation, requires a ‘mutation of consciousness’ on a par with the ones we had in the 11th and 16th century in Europe. Though this time it will need to be global and fairly ‘simultaneous’. We are not there yet, but we’re definitely seeing strong premises for it, and for which this crisis acted as a revealer. This is just the first of the pedagogical catastrophes that will force the necessary transformations to a new stable system that lives within the confines of nature and realizes its interdependence with all other life forms. It will need to escape the historical cycle of pulsation between extractive regimes leading to ecological crisis, and the regenerative responses that human societies have always brought. Instead, we will need to move to a steady-state economic and social regime that can last many centuries and millennia.

More Information

If you like our analysis, please read our draft:

• The temporal context for the cosmo-local transition can be found here

If you want to learn more about the role of the commons in transitions, and our commons-centric approach, see:

• What You Should Read To Understand the Commons

Originally published in Liminal News

Origami image by Dany_Sternfeld 

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Market anarchists favor replacing the state with a fully free market, i.e., one with no restrictions on voluntary production and exchange; all functions of the state are either to be abolished (when they are inherently invasive of people’s right to live their lives peacefully) or turned over to free competition (when they are not). Many market anarchists – especially, though not exclusively, those associated with market anarchism’s “right” wing – tend to envision a fully free market as one in which all resources are privately owned. The essays in this book offer a different perspective: that a stateless free-market society can and should include, alongside private property, a robust role for public property – not, of course, in the sense of governmental property, but rather in the sense of property that is owned by the general community rather than by specific individuals or formally organized groups.The delineation of the theory of common property under market anarchism is a work in progress. Think of the present volume as a conversation-starter, not a conversation-ender.

Order the book at C4SS.org

The post Book of the Day: The Anatomy of Escape: A Defense of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

David Ronfeldt: How and why four cardinal forms of organization — tribes, hierarchical institutions, markets, and networks (TIMN) — explain social evolution. How and why space-time-action cognitions (STA:C) explain people’s mindsets.

For a theoretical framework to be worthy of a political manifesto, it must offer something new and better than alternative frameworks. TIMN can do that, by proclaiming quadriformism.

I suppose a manifesto should also mention those alternatives — but not at length. Yet, a good comparative analysis should exist somewhere for back-up purposes. This note starts to serve as that back-up analysis.

For indeed, TIMN is not the only theoretical framework about past, present, and future societal evolution that is built atop four cardinal elements, with the fourth anticipating the emergence of a new sector in the decades ahead. Three others are vying for attention (actually, it’s TIMN trying to vie, for the others are already rather well-known). They’re from:

• Kate Raworth, a British “renegade economist” based at Oxford — her analysis is based on four “means of provisioning”.

• Michel Bauwens, a Belgium-born social activist-theorist who heads the P2P Foundation, lives mostly in Thailand and Belgium — his theory sits atop four “relational modalities”.

• Kojin Karatani, a Japanese Marxist philosopher and literary theorist who has taught at various Japanese and American universities — his framework depends on four “modes of exchange”.

What’s striking is that, working separately, we have all come up with similar frameworks, and we’ve done so at different times without knowing about each other’s frameworks at the time (though Raworth had some knowledge of Bauwens’ views). My first publication on TIMN was in 1996, Bauwens’ on P2P in 2005, Karatani’s on “modes of exchange” in 2014, and Raworth’s on “doughnut economics” in 2017. The similarities begin with the fact that all our frameworks rest on four fundamental forms of organization and/or interaction. The four that each of us identify, though differently conceived, match up impressively. Moreover, we all argue that our four are always present, always necessary, in any society, and that societies vary according to how the four forms are combined and which one dominates at the time.

Furthermore, the three of us most interested in social evolution across the ages — Bauwens, Karatani, and myself — all argue that our respective sets of forms have existed since ancient times, and that each form has grown most powerful in a particular era, thus coming to define the nature of societies in that era. Indeed, the evolutionary progressions each of us identifies correlate very well, despite some disparities. Moreover, in looking ahead, three of us — Bauwens, Raworth, and more qualifiedly, myself — explicitly foresee that a commons sector will arise alongside the established public and private sectors, vastly transforming the design of societies. Karatani is less explicit about the emergence of a commons sector, but his vision of future transformations implies something similar.

Another parallel to notice: The four-form frameworks that Bauwens, Karatani, and I advance may seem simple at first, perhaps too simple — but actually they enable plenty of complexity. To varying degrees, we each recognize that our respective forms (or modes) are both material and ideational in nature. That each embodies different standards about how people should behave and society should function. That each enables people to do something — to address some problem — better than they could by using another form. And that each form has bright and dark sides, making each useful for doing ill as well as good. Furthermore, we all recognize that the forms co-exist, interact, and vary in strength over time, making for great variations in how the forms may be combined and emphasized in particular societies. All of which amounts to plenty of complexity; these are not simplistic frameworks. Which is why I groaned inwardly when, years ago, a friendly contact who was genuinely interested in TIMN and its potential, nonetheless quipped, “Of course, you can’t sum all of human history in four letters.” More about these matters later.

In the next posts, I will review Raworth’s, Bauwens’, and Karatani’s frameworks — in that order because it proceeds from the least sweeping and abstract of the three, to the most. Then I turn to pointing out TIMN’s comparative advantages for theory and practice.

One advantage I’d mention right now: TIMN is not based on or committed to any ideology. It leaves room for the endurance of conservative as well as progressive positions along a new quadriformist spectrum. The other three frameworks all belong, to varying degrees, on the Left, even aspiring to a final future triumph of the Left over the Right. So far, to my disappointment, I’ve found no theorists on the Right who are pondering the future within anything like a quadriform framework.

SOURCES:

David Ronfeldt, Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks — A Framework About Societal Evolution, RAND, P-7967, 1996.

Michel Bauwens, P2P and Human Evolution: Peer to peer as the premise of a new mode of civilization, draft book manuscript, 2005.

Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, Duke University Press, 2014

Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017.

TO BE CONTINUED: THIS IS THE FIRST OF FIVE POSTS ON THE TOPIC

Reposted from the author’s blog

Photo by TonZ

The post Materials for Two Theories: TIMN and STA:C appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Outline

• What are the commons?
• Is there an example of a commons business model?
• In what areas are commons active?
• Is commons a new idea or are there examples from the past?
• How do privatization and enclosure affect the commons?
• What is the importance of digital commons?
• What role can commons play in the actual economic and institutional crisis?
• What are briefly the differences between commons and markets?
• Further reading

What are the commons?

Commons should be understood as a dynamic, living social system — any resource that can be used by many could inspire people to organize as a commons. The key questions are whether a particular community is motivated to manage a resource as a commons, and if it can come up with the rules, norms, and sanctions to make the system work.

Photo by 4nitsirk

The post A Shareable Explainer: What are the Commons? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In order to rescue the following story in this series, we will travel with Henri Pirenne to the times of the birth of the merchant class and the rise of the arts between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. Pirenne was one of the great historians of the Middle Ages, and although his work focused on what would later become Belgium, the story we are interested in affects all Western Europe, because:

The “brotherhoods,” “charities” and commercial “companies” of the Romance-language countries are exactly analogous to the hanses and guilds of the Germanic regions. There is even a similar organization in Dalmatia. What has dominated economic organization are in no way “national genius,” but social needs. Primitive trade institutions were as cosmopolitan as the feudal ones.

So let’s go to the 10th century. The first merchants don’t have the glamor of their Renaissance descendants:

The sources allow us to get an accurate idea of trade groupings that, from the tenth century onwards, are becoming more numerous in Western Europe. You have to imagine them as armed gangs whose members, armed with weapons and swords, surround the horses and carts loaded with sacks, bales, and barrels.

They are armed because their life is nomadic and risky, constantly subjected to the dangers of the trips of those times.

In the same way that the navigation of Venice and Amalfi, and later, that of Pisa and Genoa, make far-reaching voyages from the start, mainland merchants spend their lives wandering through vast areas. It was the only way for them to obtain significant profits. In order to be able to sell at high prices, they had to travel far to the areas where products were in abundance, in order to then be able to resell them profitably in places where they were scarce, and therefore more valuable. The farther the merchant’s trip was, the more advantageous it was for them. And this is easy to understand assuming that the profit motive was powerful enough to counteract the fatigue, the risks, and the dangers of a wandering life, exposed to all hazards.

It is this continuous and dramatic risk that strengthens the social cohesion of the group. Neither can survive without the other. They themselves are considered a phratry, a group of “brothers”:

The standard-bearer marches at the head of the caravan. A boss, the Hansgraf or Dean, assumes command of the company, which consists of “brothers” united by an oath of fidelity. A strong spirit of solidarity encourages the whole group. Goods are apparently bought and sold in common, and profits distributed in proportion to the contribution made by each to the association.

This new kind of real community collides with the prevailing values at the time due to its nomadism and meritocratic ethos.

Other than in winter, the merchant of the Middle Ages is permanently on the road. Interestingly, the English texts of the twelfth century called them “dusty feet” (pedes pulverosi). These wandering beings, these vagrants of commerce, must have amazed the agricultural society with whose customs it clashed, and where there was no place reserved for them, due to their extraordinary lifestyle. It represented mobility among a people with strong bonds to the land. It introduced, in a world faithful to tradition and respectful of a hierarchy that determined the role and range of each class, a calculating and rationalist mentality for which fortune, instead of being measured by the condition of man, only depended on his intelligence and energy. We cannot be surprised, then, if it caused scandal. The nobility had nothing but contempt for those foreigners, whose origin was unknown and whose insolent fortune was unbearable. It was enraged for seeing them in possession of larger amounts of money than them; it felt humiliated by having to rely, in difficult times, on the help of these new rich.

Nor will the Church approve of them:

As to the clergy, their attitude to traders was even more unfavorable. For the Church, commercial life endangered the salvation of the soul. The trader, says a text attributed to St. Jerome, can hardly please God.

Freedom as identity

Because the merchant is a freedman who breaks the social scale, an upstart son of servants who “improves without improving his blood”:

The legal status of traders eventually provided them, in this society for which they were original for so many reasons, a totally unique place. Due to the wandering life they led, they were foreigners everywhere. No one knew the origin of these eternal travelers. Most came from non-free parents, whom they abandoned very young in order to live a life of adventure. But servitude is not pre-judged, it must be proved. The law establishes that a man that cannot be assigned to a master is necessarily free.

It so happened that it was necessary to consider traders, most of whom were undoubtedly sons of servants, as if they had always enjoyed freedom. In fact, they became free by loosing their attachment to their native soil. Amid a social organization in which the people were tied to the land and each member depended on a lord, they presented the unusual spectacle of going about without being claimed by anyone. They don’t demand freedom: it was given to them as a result of the impossibility of showing them that they did not enjoy it. In a way, they acquired it by use and by prescription. In short, just like the agrarian civilization had made the peasant a man whose habitual state was slavery, commerce allowed the merchant to become a man whose habitual state was freedom.

Gradually, fairs and markets become stable, and with them, the presence of merchants-artisans:

For these newcomers, association was the surrogate, or even the substitute of family organization. Thanks to it, a new, more artificial and at the same time simpler social grouping emerged among the urban population, together with the patriarchal institutions that had prevailed until then.

The artisans/traders didn’t recognize children of a marriage of a slave and a freedman man as subject to bondage. Moreover, if a servant came to town and was accepted as an apprentice, he was freed, for all practical purposes, and protected by the community. The law allowed the Lords to claim the children of mixed marriages or urbanized servants, but,

For the trader, the mere idea of such interference must have seemed monstrous and intolerable.

The arts and equality

Enter the arts. Their aim is to consolidate, through economic equality, that which originally had been a close cooperation between different “bands” of merchants/artisans to ensure survival. Within each art, competition was regulated to the point of making revenues and way of life equal for all members.

Among these men of equal profession, equal fortune and equal longings, close ties of friendship were created or, to use the expression that appears in contemporary documents, of fraternity. A charity was organized in each trade: brotherhood, charité, etc. The brothers helped each other, took care of the livelihood of widows and orphans of their comrades, jointly attended the funerals of the members of their group, participating side by side in the same religious ceremonies and in the same celebrations. The unity of feelings corresponded with economic equality. It constituted their spiritual guarantee, while reflecting the harmony between industrial legislation and the aspirations of those it was applied to.

The Arts were real communities, groups of artisans/merchants who knew each other and reproduced and developed in their organization a specialized expertise of their own. But their weight in cities is such that their lifestyle becomes the spirit of the city itself:

Rural organization was patriarchal. The idea of paternal power gave way to the concept of brotherhood. The members of the guilds and the charités already called each other brothers, and the word passed from these associations to the entire population, “Unus subveniat alteri tanquam fratri suo,” says the “keure of Aire”: “one shall help the other as a brother.”

Taking fraternity to city government

And that’s when the fraternity that characterizes the arts inwardly starts to become a project and a political myth, together with the demand for freedom associated with the end of the “right of womb” and their practice of internal egalitarianism. Their way of materializing this was simply hacking the feudal order by occupying public services, taking them for themselves:

They were no longer content with their corporate competencies. They dared to assume public functions and, facing no opposition from the authorities, usurped their place. Each year in Saint-Omer, the guild allocated its surplus revenues to the common good, that is, to road maintenance and construction of gates and walls in the city. Other texts suggest that something similar happened, from very ancient times, in Arras, Lille, and Tournai. In fact, during the 13th century, the urban economy in these two cities was controlled, in the first, by the charité Saint-Christophe, and in the second, by the count of the Hansa.

Officially, it had no right to act the way it did; its intervention is explained by the cohesion that was reached by its members and the power they had as a group

And by then the committees mercatorum of Carolingian times has already become Count of the Hansa, a title that did not come from royal or feudal merit, but from a tradition that was based on the very organization of the original caravans of merchants.

The contradictions between the first urban patricians and the arts will not take too long to arise. The latter would eventually end up openly fighting for the representation and the the power to organize the cities. In Liege, they will earn it intermittently beginning in 1253, and definitively as of 1384, and in Ghent, intermittently during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries until the fifteenth.

This brings about a novel form of political legitimacy: the judges of the boroughs exercise power on behalf of the communitas (community), or the universitas civium (all citizens), and not on that of the civil Prince or the Church, but neither on that of the fraternity or brotherhood that binds together the artisans and builds the obligation to belong to a trade to exercise full citizenship (as in the Florence ruled by the arts). The community, however, was not defined in a trivial way. On the contrary, it required an identity and strong material relationships of each to the whole.

In the cities where there were courts, as well as in those lacking them, citizens were a body, a community whose members were all in solidarity with each other. Nobody was a bourgeois without paying the municipal oath, which linked him closely with the rest of the bourgeois. His person and property belonged to the city, and both could be, at any time, required if need be. You could not conceive the bourgeois in isolation, nor was it possible, in primitive times, to conceive of man individually. At the time of the barbarians, one was considered a person thanks to the family community to which one belonged, and one was a bourgeois, in the Middle Ages, thanks to the urban community that one was part of.

Fraternity, which was born as the characteristic relationship among caravan traders, had grown to define the foundation of the body politic. The result in Liege — according to Pirenne, “the most democratic system that ever existed in the Netherlands” — required that

All major issues should be submitted to the deliberation of the thirty-two guilds, and settled on each of them by recess or “sieultes” (verbal process through which the discussions of the diets are deposited.)

Urban communitas is actually a confederation of arts in which, although the commitment of each is made towards the whole city, deliberation and decision remained in the space where relationships did not require mediation or representation.

Conclusions

Brotherhood as a political myth is born of mutual aid among medieval merchants and artisans. It meant bringing the open and strongly cohesive logic of the arts to the government of the bourgeois city. This is why it would become the longing of the urban popular classes, but as we shall see, with the dilution of the rigid organizational framework of the art, the original idea of fraternity is transformed and becomes confused. It will no longer be the product of a series of interactions among peers that scale only through the guild confederation.

In the next installment, we will go back to the Greek classics to understand why “fraternity,” even if it remains one of the founding values of European political thought, became so difficult to define.

Translated by Alan Furth from the original in Spanish.

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During 2007 and 2008, giant financial institutions were obliterated, the net worth of most Americans collapsed, and most of the world’s economies were brought to their knees.

At the same time, this has been an era of radical economic inequality, at levels not seen since 1929. Over the last three decades, an unprecedented consolidation and concentration of earning power and wealth has made the top 1 percent of Americans immensely richer while middle class Americans have been increasingly impoverished.

To most Americans and certainly most economists and policymakers, these two phenomena seem unrelated. In fact, traditional economic theory and contemporary American economic policy does not seem to admit the possibility that they are connected in any way.

And yet they are—deeply. We aim to show that a modern understanding of economies as complex, adaptive, interconnected systems forces us to conclude that radical inequality and radical economic dislocation are causally linked: one brings and amplifies the other.

If we want a high-growth society with broadly shared prosperity, and if we want to avoid dislocations like the one we have just gone through, we need to change our theory of action foundationally. We need to stop thinking about the economy as a perfect, self-correcting machine and start thinking of it as a garden.

Traditional economic theory is rooted in a 19th- and 20th-century understanding of science and mathematics. At the simplest level, traditional theory assumes economies are linear systems filled with rational actors who seek to optimize their situation. Outputs reflect a sum of inputs, the system is closed, and if big change comes it comes as an external shock. The system’s default state is equilibrium. The prevailing metaphor is a machine.

But this is not how economies are. It never has been. As anyone can see and feel today, economies behave in ways that are non-linear and irrational, and often violently so. These often-violent changes are not external shocks but emergent properties—the inevitable result—of the way economies behave.

The traditional approach, in short, completely misunderstands human behavior and natural economic forces. The problem is that the traditional model is not an academic curiosity; it is the basis for an ideological story about the economy and government’s role—and that story has fueled policymaking and morphed into a selfishness-justifying conventional wisdom.

Even today, the debate between free marketeers and Keynesians unfolds on the terms of the market fundamentalists: government stimulus efforts are usually justified as a way to restore equilibrium, and defended as regrettable deviations from government’s naturally minimalist role.

Fortunately, as we’ve described above, it is now possible to understand and describe economic systems as complex systems like gardens. And it is now reasonable to assert that economic systems are not merely similar to ecosystems; they are ecosystems, driven by the same types of evolutionary forces as ecosystems. Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth is the most lucid survey available of this new complexity economics.

The story Beinhocker tells is simple, and not unlike the story Darwin tells. In an economy, as in any ecosystem, innovation is the result of evolutionary and competitive pressures. Within any given competitive environment—or what’s called a “fitness landscape”—individuals and groups cooperate to compete, to find solutions to problems and strategies for cooperation spread and multiply. Throughout, minor initial advantages get amplified and locked in— as do disadvantages. Whether you are predator or prey, spore or seed, the opportunity to thrive compounds and then concentrates. It bunches. It never stays evenly spread.

Like a garden, the economy consists of an environment and interdependent elements—sun, soil, seed, water. But far more than a garden, the economy also contains the expectations and interpretations all the agents have about what all the other agents want and expect. And that invisible web of human expectations becomes, in an everamplifying spiral, both cause and effect of external circumstances. Thus the housing-led financial crisis. Complexity scientists describe it in terms of “feedback loops.” Financier George Soros has described it as “reflexivity.” What I think you think about what I want creates storms of behavior that change what is.

Traditional economics holds that the economy is an equilibrium system; that things tend, over time, to even out and return to “normal.” Complexity economics shows that the economy, like a garden, is never in perfect balance or stasis and is always both growing and shrinking. And like an untended garden, an economy left entirely to itself tends toward unhealthy imbalances. This is a very different starting point, and it leads to very different conclusions about what the government should do about the economy.

Einstein said, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not too simple.” The problem with traditional economics is that it has made things too simple and then compounded the error by treating the oversimplification as gospel. The bedrock assumption of traditional economic theory and conventional economic wisdom is that markets are perfectly efficient and therefore self-correcting. This “efficient market hypothesis,” born of the machineage obsession with the physics of perfect mechanisms, is hard to square with intuition and reality—harder for laypeople than for economic experts. And yet, like a dead hand on the wheel, the efficient market hypothesis still drives everything in economic policymaking.

Consider that if markets are perfectly efficient then it must be true that:

–The market is always right.
–Markets distribute goods, services, and benefits rationally and efficiently.
–Market outcomes are inherently moral because they perfectly reflect talent and merit and so the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor.
–Any attempt to control market outcomes is inefficient and thus immoral.
–Any non-market activity is inherently suboptimal.
–If you can make money doing something not illegal, you should do it.
–As long as there is a willing buyer and seller, every transaction is moral.
–Any government solution, absent a total market failure, is a bad solution.

But, of course, markets properly understood are not actually efficient. So-called balances between supply and demand, while representing a fair approximation, do not in fact really exist. And because humans are not rational, calculating, and selfish, their behavior in market settings is inherently imperfect, unpredictable, and inefficient. Laypeople know this far better than experts.

Markets are a type of ecosystem that is complex, adaptive, and subject to the same evolutionary forces as nature. As in nature, evolution makes markets an unparalleled way of effectively solving human problems. But evolution is purpose-agnostic. If the market is oriented toward producing junk and calling it good GDP, market evolution will produce ever more marketable junk. As complex adaptive systems, markets are not like machines at all but like gardens. This means, then, that the following must be true:

–The market is often wrong.
–Markets distribute goods, services, and benefits in ways that often are irrational, semi-blind, and overdependent on chance.
–Market outcomes are not necessarily moral—and are sometimes immoral—because they reflect a dynamic blend of earned merit and the very unearned compounding of early advantage or disadvantage.
–If well-tended, markets produce great results but if untended, they destroy themselves.
–Markets, like gardens, require constant seeding, feeding, and weeding by government and citizens.
–More, they require judgments about what kind of growth is beneficial. Just because dandelions, like hedge funds, grow easily and quickly, doesn’t mean we should let them take over. Just because you can make money doing something doesn’t mean it is good for the society.
–In a democracy we have not only the ability but also the essential obligation to shape markets—through moral choices and government action—to create outcomes good for our communities.

You might think that this shift in metaphors and models is merely academic. Consider the following. In 2010, after the worst of the financial crisis had subsided but still soon enough for recollections to be vivid and honest, a group of Western central bankers and economists got together to assess what went wrong. To one participant in the meeting, who was not a banker but had studied the nature of economies in great depth, one thing became strikingly, shockingly clear. Governments had failed to anticipate the scope and speed of the meltdown because their model of the economy was fantastically detached from reality.

For instance, the standard model used by many central banks and treasuries, called a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, did not include banks. Why? Because in a perfectly efficient market, banks are mere pass-throughs, invisibly shuffling money around. How many consumers did this model take into account in its assumptions about the economy? Millions? Hundreds of thousands? No, just one. One perfectly average or “representative” consumer operating perfectly rationally in the marketplace. Facing a crisis precipitated by the contagion of homeowner exuberance, fueled by the pathological recklessness of bond traders and bankers, abetted by inattentive government watchdogs, and leading to the deepest recession since the Great Depression, the Fed and other Western central banks found themselves fighting a crisis their models said could not happen.

This is an indictment not only of central bankers and the economics profession; nor merely of the Republicans whose doctrine abetted such intellectual malpractice; it is also an indictment of the Democrats who, bearing responsibility for making government work, allowed such a dreamland view of the world to drive government action in the national economy. They did so because over the course of 20 years they too had become believers in the efficient market hypothesis. Where housing and banking were concerned, there arose a faith-based economy: faith in rational individuals, faith in ever-rising housing values, and faith that you would not be the one left standing when the music stopped.

We are not, to be emphatically clear, anti-market. In fact, we are avid capitalists. Markets have an overwhelming benefit to human societies, and that is their unmatched ability to solve human problems. A modern understanding of economies sees them as complex adaptive systems subject to evolutionary forces. Those forces enable competition for the ability to survive and succeed as a consequence of the degree to which problems for customers are solved. Understood thus, wealth in a society is simply the sum of the problems it has managed to solve for its citizens. Eric Beinhocker calls this “information.” As Beinhocker notes, less developed “poor” societies have very few solutions available. Limited housing solutions. Limited medical solutions. Limited nutrition and recreation solutions. Limited information. Contrast this with a modern Western superstore with hundreds of thousands of SKUs, each representing a unique solution to a unique problem.

But markets are agnostic to what kind of problems they solve and for whom. Whether a market produces more solutions for human medical challenges or more solutions for human warfare—or whether it invents problems like bad breath for which more solutions are needed—is wholly a consequence of the construction of that market, and that construction will always be human made, either by accident or by design. Markets are meant to be servants, not masters.

As we write, the Chinese government is making massive, determined, strategic investments in their renewable energy industry. They’ve decided that it’s better for the world’s largest population and second-largest economy to be green than not—and they are shaping the market with that goal in mind. By doing so they both reduce global warming and secure economic advantage in the future. We are captive, meanwhile, to a market fundamentalism that calls into question the right of government to act at all—thus ceding strategic advantage to our most serious global rival and putting America in a position to be poorer, weaker, and dirtier down the road. Even if there hadn’t been a housing collapse, the fact that our innovative energies were going into building homes we didn’t need and then securitizing the mortgages for those homes says we are way off track.

Now, it might be noted that for decades, through administrations of both parties, our nation did have a massive strategic goal of promoting homeownership—and that what we got for all that goal-setting was a housing-led economic collapse. But setting a goal doesn’t mean then going to sleep; it requires constant, vigilant involvement to see whether the goal is the right goal and whether the means of reaching the goal come at too great a cost. Homeownership is a sound goal. That doesn’t mean homeownership by any means necessary is a sound policy. Pushing people into mortgages they couldn’t truly afford and then opening a casino with those mortgages as the chips was not the only way to increase homeownership. What government failed to do during the housing boom was to garden—to weed out the speculative, the predatory, the fraudulent.

Conventional wisdom says that government shouldn’t try to pick winners in the marketplace, and that such efforts are doomed to failure. Picking winners may be a fool’s errand, but choosing the game we play is a strategic imperative. Gardeners don’t make plants grow but they do create conditions where plants can thrive and they do make judgments about what should and shouldn’t be in the garden. These concentration decisions, to invest in alternative energy or not, to invest in biosciences or not, to invest in computational and network infrastructure or not, are essential choices a nation must make.

This is not picking winners; it’s picking games. Public sector leaders, with the counsel and cooperation of private sector experts, can and must choose a game to invest in and then let the evolutionary pressures of market competition determine who wins within that game. DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology), NIH (National Institutes of Health), and other effective government entities pick games. They issue grand challenges. They catalyze the formation of markets, and use public capital to leverage private capital. To refuse to make such game-level choices is to refuse to have a strategy, and is as dangerous in economic life as it would be in military operations. A nation can’t “drift” to leadership. A strong public hand is needed to point the market’s hidden hand in a particular direction.

Markets as Machines vs. Markets as Gardens

Understanding economics in this new way can revolutionize our approach and our politics. The shift from mechanistic models to complex ecological ones is not one of degree but of kind. It is the shift from a tradition that prizes fixity and predictability to a mindset that is premised on evolution. Compare two frames in capsule form:

Machine view: Markets are efficient, thus sacrosanct
Garden view: Markets are effective, if well tended

In the traditional view, markets are sacred because they are said to be the most efficient allocators of resources and wealth. Complexity science shows that markets are often quite inefficient—and that there is nothing sacred about today’s man-made economic arrangements. But complexity science also shows that markets are the most effective force for producing innovation, the source of all wealth creation. The question, then, is how to deploy that force to benefit the greatest number.

Machine view: Regulation destroys markets
Garden view: Markets need fertilizing and weeding, or else are destroyed

Traditionalists say any government interference distorts the “natural” and efficient allocation that markets want to achieve. Complexity economists show that markets, like gardens, get overrun by weeds or exhaust their nutrients (education, infrastructure, etc.) if left alone, and then die—and that the only way for markets to deliver broadbased wealth is for government to tend them: enforcing rules that curb anti-social behavior, promote pro-social behavior, and thus keep markets functioning.

Machine view: Income inequality reflects unequal effort and ability
Garden view: Inequality is what markets naturally create and compound, and requires correction

Traditionalists assert, in essence, that income inequality is the result of the rich being smarter and harder working than the poor. This justifies government neglect in the face of inequality. The markets-as-garden view would not deny that smarts and diligence are unequally distributed. But in their view, income inequality has much more to do with the inexorable nature of complex adaptive systems like markets to result in self-reinforcing concentrations of advantage and disadvantage. This necessitates government action to counter the unfairness and counterproductive effects of concentration.

Machine view: Wealth is created through competition and by the pursuit of narrow self-interest
Garden view: Wealth is created through trust and cooperation

Where traditionalists put individual selfishness on a moral pedestal, complexity economists show that norms of unchecked selfishness kill the one thing that determines whether a society can generate (let alone fairly allocate) wealth and opportunity: trust. Trust creates cooperation, and cooperation is what creates win-win outcomes. Hightrust networks thrive; low-trust ones fail. And when greed and self-interest are glorified above all, high-trust networks become low-trust. See: Afghanistan.

Machine view: Wealth = individuals accumulating money
Garden view: Wealth = society creating solutions

One of the simple and damning limitations of traditional economics is that it can’t really explain how wealth gets generated. It simply assumes wealth. And it treats money as the sole measure of wealth. Complexity economics, by contrast, says that wealth is solutions: knowledge applied to solve problems. Wealth is created when new ideas— inventing a wheel, say, or curing cancer—emerge from a competitive, evolutionary environment. In the same way, the greatness of a garden comes not just in the sheer volume but also in the diversity and usefulness of the plants it contains.

In other words, money accumulation by the rich is not the same as wealth creation by a society. If we are serious about creating wealth, our focus should not be on taking care of the rich so that their money trickles down; it should be on making sure everyone has a fair chance—in education, health, social capital, access to financial capital— to create new information and ideas. Innovation arises from a fertile environment that allows individual genius to bloom and that amplifies individual genius, through cooperation, to benefit society. Extreme concentration of wealth without modern precedent that has undermined equality of opportunity and thus limited our overall economic potential.

(c) 2011 by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer. Excerpted from The Gardens of Democracy by permission of Sasquatch Books.

Illustration credit: Elliot Gerard. To see more artwork from Elliot, follow him on Instagram and Twitter @elliotgerard

The post Economics Shows Us Why Laissez-Faire Economics Always Fails: Why markets are like gardens, not machines appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Markets are generally conceived as the bulwark of capitalism, greasing the wheels of capital accumulation and mobilisation and creating the class relations characteristic of modern capitalism. It creates winners and losers, and displaces workers and firm owners through the mechanisms of creative destruction and competition. This re-circulates ownership into increasingly fewer hands, placing the winners at the top as the owners of the means of production and capital and the losers as wage labourers or the lumpenproletariat, open to exploitation and domination.

This picture ignores the potential of markets. Markets need not be structures of organisation bound in capitalism or statism, but rather systems that can be shaped and determined by those within them, voluntarily controlled and distributed. In other words, bound in the collectivities and heterogeneities of an anarchist social order. By anarchism, I mean ‘a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life’.

From this, I see markets as simply one example of an anarchist setting, allowing for free, equal actors to determine outcomes and achieve goals and values. But this definition inherently removes markets from the bounds of the state and capitalism. Both prompt their understandings as relative to that of the governmental and clerical respectively. The institution of the state encompasses the realm of law and order, the monopoly on violence, from which the institution of private property and the power relations of capitalism are maintained. Capitalism, as that of the clerical, creates consciences, pathologies and ideologies that allow for the maintenance of capitalist organisation. The two together comprise the modern socio-economic structure.

These clerical and governmental forces that wield vast amounts of power are a recent phenomenon. From my analysis, I hope to see some of the pathways which can change this system, moving from exploitation toward a system of voluntary collaboration and an economy embedded in the realm of the social. One that is heterogeneous and decentralised. As Paul Mason states, ‘It is entirely possible to build the elements of the new system molecularly within the old. In the cooperatives, the credit unions, the peer-networks, the unmanaged enterprises and the parallel, subcultural economies, these elements already exist’.”

The full study is available here.

The post Essay of the Day: Rethinking Markets – Anarchism, Capitalism, and the State appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Tine De Moor calls this a ‘Silent Revolution’ because it didn’t involve riots, but the construction of new social institutions. This is a big part of what is also happening now, and what the P2P Foundation has been cataloging, observing and trying to understand.

Article: The Silent Revolution: A New Perspective on the Emergence of Commons, Guilds, and Other Forms of Corporate Collective Action in Western Europe. By TINE DE MOOR. IRSH 53 (2008), Supplement, pp. 179–212

Excerpted from the introduction by Tine De Moor:

“During the late Middle ages, to an extent and with an intensity previously unknown, Europeans formed alliances which were based primarily not on kinship, but on some other common characteristic such as occupation. Guilds and fraternities were organizations providing good examples of that in urban settings, while in rural areas the late Middle Ages were the period when communal land tenure arrangements, or simply ‘‘commons’’, were increasingly frequently formed and then institutionalized. It is not the actual formation of such types of collective action that is so striking, nor did their institutional characteristics make the region in that period at all exceptional, for as the essays in this volume demonstrate, craftsmen and merchants formed guilds elsewhere and in other times.
It was, however, the great intensity of the formation of new units of such collective action that makes this movement striking enough to refer to it as a ‘‘silent revolution’’. A revolution, inasmuch as it was a movement which started from below, and because it might prove to have been as important to the ultimate course of European history as any other revolution; and silent, in that it was at first based primarily on tacit agreements between powerful rulers and demanding subjects, whether villagers or townsmen, and became explicit, which is to say written down, only after a time.

Mostly such agreements were formed peacefully. The rather discreet development of the forms of collective action described here means that for a long time it remained an unnoticed revolution too. Most attention in research into collective action has been devoted to short-term demands for change in the form of riots, protest demonstrations, and the like as motors of democratization and political change. In this article I will argue that the silent revolution to a large extent created the institutional infrastructure for socio-political change, and so for other forms of collective action which became characteristic in western Europe and came to be considered as a vital ingredient in preparing for its exceptional economic head start.”

Image by Andrew Taylor.

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Some time ago Arthur Chu said on Twitter — entirely correctly — that “capitalism” didn’t make the iPhone, or anything else. Labor is what has produced things under every ism in history. The isms just determine who gets paid.

On Facebook, Doug Henwood — author of Wall Street and editor of the Left Business Observer — recently pointed to the U.S. Arpa-E agency’s development of an advanced storage battery as an example of the “public sector” outperforming the “private sector” (March 3 at 10:48AM).  “While VC is funding the world’s first stabilized action camera,” he wrote, “the public sector did this.” The achievement in question was a “holy grail” breakthrough in battery technology that could make solar power and electric cars more viable, as well as transforming the electrical grid (Suzanne Goldenberg, “US agency reaches ‘holy grail’ of battery storage sought by Elon Musk and Gates,” The Guardian, March ). The takeaway is that “Arpa-E has come out ahead of Gates and Musk in the multi-billion-dollar race to build the next generation battery for power companies and home storage.”

Some time ago Arthur Chu said on Twitter — entirely correctly — that “capitalism” didn’t make the iPhone, or anything else. Labor is what has produced things under every ism in history. The isms just determine who gets paid. It was intended as a response to the right-wingers who mocked the protestors tweeting #ResistCapitalism on their iPhones. In fact Apple didn’t create the iPhone. The distributed knowledge and cooperative social relationships of its workers did. Apple just used “intellectual property” in its hardware and software to enclose that knowledge and those relationships within a corporate framework. Apple’s main function was to set itself up as a toll-gate between the knowledge workers and designers inside its own corporate walls, and the workers in the independent job shops in China that produced the hardware, and exact tribute both ways.

But if “capitalism” or “corporations” don’t create anything, neither do government agencies. Henwood’s celebration of the “public sector” is an exact mirror-image of the right-wingers cheering on Apple. And it’s just as meaningless.

I don’t think “public sector” or “private sector” really means much in these situations. In either case, the work is done by actual human beings through what anthropologist David Graeber, in Debt, calls “everyday communism” — by cooperating and sharing information. All achievements attributed to institutional hierarchies, whether corporations or government agencies, are really the work of the peer groups of cooperating human beings inside them, keeping them going despite authoritarian interference and irrationality from the managers at the top of the hierarchy. The question of what kind of parasitic hierarchy least impedes this process matters less than abolishing the hierarchies altogether.

If government and corporate institutional hierarchies were ever needed, it was when they could be justified in terms either of the scale of capital outlay and plant and equipment that had to be administered, or of the transaction costs of coordinating large-scale operations of many thousands of people. Both these justifications are obsolete, or rapidly approaching it. On the design side, absent Apple’s “intellectual property” everything currently done inside its corporate walls could be done on a peer-to-peer basis by open-source software and hardware communities. On the production side, Apple doesn’t do anything except contract out the manufacturing of its workers’ designs to independent manufacturers overseas.

Through its ownership of “intellectual property,” Apple is able to preempt the horizontal relationships between designers and producers and skim off the top. It is able to use its legal monopoly on disposal of the product to sell computers and smart phones made entirely by somebody else at a markup far, far above cost of production.

Apple — the corporation — is parasitic. All its functions could be carried out by peer producers freely distributing hardware and software designs to anyone who wanted to use them, with independent worker-managed shops building the hardware anywhere in the world there was a demand for them.

Similarly, some misguided folks like to praise the development of the Internet backbone under ARPA as a triumph of “socialism,” implying that any form of government-owned and -directed activity should be celebrated as an example of “socialism.” It was socialism, all right — but not the kind they mean. The actual human beings who developed Arpanet and the Internet shared an internal culture — cooperative and p2p in character — fundamentally at odds with the mindset of the Pentagon bureaucrats they were theoretically working for. It was their own horizontal human relationships — their “everyday communism” — that actually built the Internet, and laid the groundwork for the subsequent ethos of the World Wide Web.

So the right-wing mockers of the #ResistCapitalism hashtag, and enthusiasts for the “public sector” like Henwood, are equally wrong — and in very much the same way. It’s time to recognize the central role of human freedom, and human agency, in building a better world, and throw the corporate-state nexus and all its allied extractive institutions off our backs.

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(see below what she says about post-capitalist markets and de-marketing)

“Markets predate capitalism by thousands of years.

Almost from the very beginning of human history, there were markets. As early as the Ice Age, long before the rise of cities with permanently settled populations, there were specialized meeting areas for ritual and trade between groups. When hunting and gathering bands began to settle on land to cultivate crops and domesticate animals, they created the conditions to produce something unprecedented: an economic surplus. By the Bronze Age, people had amassed sufficient “surplus food, oil, and wool,” as economic historian Michael Hudson writes, “to support a permanent superstructure of handicraft, mercantile and administrative occupations.” Temples became the first public institutions, functioning variously as storage facilities for the surplus resources of their communities, gathering places, trading depots, refuges from local feud justice, establishers of contract law, enforcers of trade obligations, and sponsors of standardized weights and measures.

Temples also employed the labor of dependents: war widows, orphans, the blind and infirm, and others who could not function in normal family contexts. Housing the workshops where these dependents wove, Mesopotamian temples consigned textiles to merchants under instructions to trade them abroad for raw materials not found between the Tigris and Euphrates: metal, stone, and hardwood. To facilitate this export enterprise and regulate the markets it sponsored, Sumer developed most of the major instruments of modern commerce during roughly the third millennium BCE — money, credit, interest, contracts, and legacies — and established profit-seeking mercantile operations as far away as Anatolia and the Indus Valley. Thus, roughly 4,000 years before the emergence of capitalism, we were economizing our resources by haggling in markets which connected people thousands of miles apart.

Deposit banking, insurance policies, corporations, municipal bond markets, and, what was crucial for all of these, double entry bookkeeping, were developed later on, but still well before capitalism, in medieval Venice between about the eleventh and fifteenth centuries CE. From there, merchants would acquire and peddle wares on an intercontinental scale: after Marco Polo extended the silk route to Venice, the lagoon nestled in the pit of the Adriatic Sea became the world’s chief hub of trade in commodities, bullion, and various financial instruments, with a market network connecting West Africa to Siberia, the South Pacific to England. As Wood points out, the feudal system was compatible not just with “advanced urban cultures, highly developed trading systems, and far-flung commercial networks” but indeed “profit-seeking middlemen, even highly developed merchant classes.” None of these, it follows, should be confused for, nor even considered evidence of, capitalism. Capitalism isn’t distinguished by its capacity to provide market opportunities, but by the imperatives the market places on its unique system of production.”

Capitalist Markets

“It wasn’t until hundreds of years after Marco Polo’s travels that the dramatic transformation of the system of production began—and in a curious place. Wood demonstrates that the capitalist “laws of motion” did not emerge in urban commercial centers, as is normally supposed, but in the countryside. Specifically, the English countryside. English landholding was inordinately concentrated, so “an unusually large proportion of land was worked not by peasant-proprietors but by tenants,” as Wood explains. For most of the feudal age, English tenancies were “Freehold leases,” with rents fixed by a legal or customary standard, but by the sixteenth century, a growing number were “Copyhold leases,” auctioned by landlords to the highest bidder, their rental value set at whatever the market would bear. The more competition there was in the market for rental land, the more notice landlords and their surveyors began to take of the “value above the oulde Rentes” that could be extracted through this market. And so England underwent great waves of land enclosure, separating the masses from direct access to the means of their own subsistence.

At this point, in addition to competing in a market for consumers, tenants were obliged to compete in a market for access to land. In the system emerging out of the particularly English invention of a land-rent market, farmers were subjected to a “systematic need to lower the costs of production in order to prevail in price competition.” Those who failed to compete in this market found themselves dispossessed of all but their own capacity to perform labor, which they flocked to cities to sell, or else to starve.

This, and not the availability of markets, is the essence of capitalism, the engine motoring in its depths. From this imposition, and thus this dispossession, capitalism sprang to life. Now the masses were at the mercy of a job market to obtain the means to reproduce themselves socially. Now the process of production was systematically subordinated to market imperatives: “competition, accumulation, and profit-maximization, and hence a constant systemic need to develop the productive forces.”

These imperatives, in turn, give capitalism its ability (and charge it with the necessity) to relentlessly expand in unprecedented ways and degrees. “It can and must,” as Wood insists, “constantly accumulate, constantly search out new markets, constantly impose its imperatives on new territories and new spheres of life, on all human beings and the natural environment.”

* Markets After Capitalism

“The key to imagining what post-capitalist markets might look like, according to David Schweickart, is to discard the unitary idea of “markets.” Too general a term to be useful, markets, Schweickart suggests, should be divided into three types: markets for goods and services, capital markets, and labor markets. The first sort was compatible with feudalism, and it can be compatible with socialism: with solid regulation, price discovery through market clearance is a useful tool in signaling demand and avoiding the shortages in goods and services that may result from clumsy, or capricious, central planning.

But the other markets are not nearly so capable in the resource-allotment division. Capital markets are prone to careening wildly between booms, when they allot far too many financial resources, and busts, when they allot far too few. Labor markets are volatile because of this careening, but even in the boom times, commonly maintain a reserve army of unemployed workers amid back-breaking overwork. It is these capital and labor markets, therefore, that Schweickart contends must be socialized to give rise to the next system. To these, I’d add two that might broadly be thought of as capital markets, but which beg different, if similar, solutions: the market for intellectual property and the market which birthed capitalism, land.

There are basically two strategies for de-marketing labor, and they work best together. The first is the aggressive encouragement of worker co-ops, including buying out (not bailing out) failing firms and leasing them to workers, giving workers the right to buy out their shops as an alternative to closure, and providing public financial and technological support for start-up co-ops. The more workers can become owners, the less they’ll have to work for wages, thus shrinking the labor market. The second strategy is to provide the option to exit the job market by filling out the welfare state: public health care, education, and “last resort” guaranteed employment, capped off with a basic income to subsidize culture- and community-production. The ability to survive without submitting to the dictates of the job market would incapacitate the capitalist imperative to compete with everybody else.

Co-ops also help to de-market capital, relocating ownership from stock market gamblers who are physically and sentimentally remote from the firm’s operations to workers who inherently give a damn about the fate of the firm and the labor they deploy for it. In addition to this, it is crucial to expand our public wealth funds in number and scope. The Alaska Permanent Fund, CalPERS, and even the Social Security trust funds are pools of capital whose income streams (dividends and interest) flow to the public. A national sovereign wealth fund and/or many regional ones would shrink capital markets. (It might make sense to emulate Alaska, using the fund to outlay the aforementioned basic income.) For best results, this should be held together by a public banking system, most easily run through the postal service, featuring a publicly-controlled mobile payments system.

De-marketing intellectual property is especially exhilarating, because we can skip the socialist step of moving ideas from private to public ownership, and go straight to the communist state of non-ownership. Ideas such as pharmacological discoveries, software developments, and works of media are immaterial, their digital representations as sound, video, image, text, etc. files infinitely reproducible at negligible cost. In order, therefore, to effect their decommodification, the government only needs to take a laissez faire approach to enforcing their patents, copyrights, etc. Beyond possibly brief, non-transferable licenses for authors and inventors (as the founders intended), there is no need for the government to impose artificial scarcity, without which, an infinitely abundant product will approach its “correct consumer price”: zero dollars.

Lastly, there are also already existent vehicles for democratic land management and development that can allow us to undo the initial act of capitalism and de-market land. Foremost, in recognition of the fact that the price of a location is determined by the desirability of the surrounding community, the government can impose a fee on land-owners equivalent to the ground rent they derive. Especially elegant would be to have these fees provide the initial investment into the public fund paying out the basic income, thus compensating everyone for their exclusion from the locations in question. Additionally, the government should devote public financing and its power of eminent domain to energetically foster Community Land Trusts. Perhaps most importantly, the government should massively grow the public housing stock so that it does not merely provide poor people undignified living conditions, but rather houses major swaths of large cities in modest, comfortable units. This last is probably the most difficult, seeing as how the federal government is prevented by law at the moment from financing public housing.

A socialism like this, with capital, labor, ideas and land brought out of the market and into the democratic sphere, could accommodate markets in goods and services without imposing on all of society the imperatives unique to capitalism. Mass liberation from capitalist market imperatives would effect reparations for the dispossession that incited the capitalist laws of motion. The system would no longer have the necessity, or perhaps even the means, to impose its relentless imperatives on you and me and the whole wide world.”

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