This is derived from original proposals by the Telekommunisten group, where entities capable of doing transvestment are called ‘Venture Communes’.

The following short text and audio lecture explain the background to this idea and practice.

Ian Wright: Dmytri Kleiner‘s “venture communism” is a recent proposal for getting from here to there. You can download Dmytri’s manifesto here.

A key idea is a new kind of institution — the “venture commune” — an association of co-operatives that is the sole owner of all the assets of all constituent worker-owned firms.

All land, buildings, capital etc. are rented by the co-ops from the venture commune. All members of co-ops are automatically members of the commune. Hence, the means of production are communally owned.

In theory this institution solves the problem of the highly unequal distribution of capital between worker-owned firms in a market economy.

In addition, the venture commune democratically allocates funds to new worker-owned start-ups. The idea here is that the institutions of the venture commune will compete with the institutions of venture capitalism, and eventually crowd-out the latter.

I gave a half-hour talk on Dymtri’s ideas in Oxford, UK, which provides more details. You can listen to the audio here:

In that talk I refer to the input/output relations of the venture commune with the surrounding capitalist sector. This diagram summarises the main monetary flows:

Venture communism is precisely the kind of institutional proposal that satisfies the requirement of a political economy of socialism that is immediately a new kind of political practice. For me, it is an highly instructive reference and starting point.

The post Dmytri Kleiner’s Venture Communism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Reciproka facilitates the development of a co-owned network of open co-operatives through ownership transfer, network building and co-operative accumulation.”

David Bollier and I (see David’s post from yesterday) had the pleasure of meeting Janosch Sbeih and Jérôme Birolini (“The Reciprokans”) at the Open 2017: Platform Cooperativism conference in London. We were very impressed with their overall concept and presentation, it aggregates and puts a fresh spin on some of the proposals we have been discussing over the last few years regarding open cooperativism and mutalization. It also draws from Telekomunnisten’s idea of the Venture Commune for “commonifying” productive assets. The model needs refinement, careful development and feedback so it can mature into an actionable proposition, but we fully support it and are eager to see how it progresses. Here is their brief introduction to the project:

Reciproka: All over the world, inequalities are reaching alarming levels. The structural reproduction of economic inequality lies in the unequal ownership of productive assets as it maintains a distributive mechanism in which owners accumulate ever more wealth while the majority of salaried workers remain in precarious positions of dependence. At the same time, the current growth-dependent, extractive economic model is bringing us to the brink of socio-ecological collapse.

By facilitating the transfer of ownership from privately owned corporations to their employees, we can provide an opportunity for employees to accumulate more wealth through their newly acquired ownership (hence reducing inequalities) and provide greater opportunities for workers to participate in decision-making process (hence allowing for a more democratic culture). Simultaneously, local owners gain access to a mechanism to “cash out” when they want to retire, while resting assured that that their enterprises remain active and anchored in their local community, managed by the very people who have built it up over their lifetimes. Since this transition of ownership already involves an organisational restructuring, why not simultaneously rethink the organisation’s business model to make it work not only for the people who create the wealth, but also for the planet from which all wealth ultimately originates?!

A timely opportunity

The coming retirement of millions of baby boom entrepreneurs around the world represents an enormous opportunity to grow worker ownership. In the US alone, an estimate states that 671,000 middle market businesses (worth an estimated US$ 2.47 trillion) will have to be sold, closed, or otherwise disposed of between 2011 and 2029, by baby boomers[1]. This generational transfer ahead can prove to be a once in a lifetime historic opportunity to catalyse a transition towards a sustainable and community-empowering economy by providing mechanisms to transform these private enterprises into sustainable open co-operatives. The conversion of these businesses into democratic ownership models would mean a tremendous reduction of inequality and the dawn of a new co-operative and democratic era.

To achieve scale, new forms of co-operative lending coupled with technical and process support are necessary. While several organisations are already working to provide that type of service, we believe that a more systematic approach is required if we are to create an ethical and federated counter-economy able to perpetuate itself on its own.

Isolated transfers of ownerships are not enough

Unless co-operatives can be federated as a unified, ethical, entrepreneurial coalition organised around the shared goal of sustaining the commons and the commoners, we believe that isolated transfers of ownership will not be enough for the open co-operative movement to gain sufficient traction to become autonomous, therefore leaving the issue of livelihoods and social reproduction unresolved and the movement dependent on the capitalist economy (i.e. fragmented, exposed to exploitation and overall highly precarious).

In a similar vein, isolated transfers of ownership do not guarantee nor encourage the weaving of links among newly-formed open co-operatives, leaving essential features to accomplish a comprehensive economic transition – such as co-operation and solidarity – outside of their strategic scheme.

Reciproka

Inspired by Mondragon’s internal capital account (ICA) and Dmytri Kleiner`s concept of “commons-based venture funding[2]”, Reciproka holds in its core an innovative co-operative accumulation mechanism which allows for the self-propelling build-up of an ethical counter-economy while gradually providing each of its members with increasing cash transfers, representing a new kind of basic income.

Instead of assisting working people to acquire their enterprise (as most financial services organisations that invest in worker- and community-owned operations currently do), Reciproka acquires the SMEs in transition for a commons (i.e. a trusteeship legal structure) in which both consumers (i.e. citizens) and producers (i.e. co-operative workers) become members.

In addition to assuming 100% of the financial risks linked to the operation, Reciproka assists traditional privately-owned enterprise in their organisational conversion to open co-operatives, while leaving managerial autonomy to the workers. A network of experts and mentors provide the technical and process support necessary to assist with the organisational transition both from a legal, social and sustainability point of view. The enterprises in transition gain thus access to the necessary facilitation, education and mentoring resources to ensure that their newly formed co-operatives are well equipped with the governance and business models that suit their particular needs and desires.

Reciproka will look to ensure the viability of each project as well as its commitment to a low-carbon future where the well-being of people and planet are primary. Reciproka has thus written into its DNA to effectively address the core challenge of our time: the transition to an equitable society that meets everyone’s needs while living within the limits of one earth.

The result is an integrated network of mutually co-owned open-co-operatives working towards that goal, where each co-operative is at the same time autonomous while being co-owned by all other members of the Reciproka common.

This type of structure offers several benefits:

• The system gives citizens the opportunity as well as financial and social incentives to play an active part in the transition to a co-operative, ethical and sustainable economy (see www.reciproka.cc for further information on the incentives and benefits for the various stakeholders).
• The mutual ownership structure aligns the interests of the newly formed co-operatives to collaborate with each other for their own interests and the greater good of the overall coalition.
• By holding the assets in a trusteeship legal structure, Reciproka protects the ethical entrepreneurial coalition from external investors, as its assets can never be sold out.

Last but not least, Reciproka also contemplates the creation of a co-operative incubation centre for the development of new products and services and the integral support of young open co-operative entrepreneurs.

We are currently in the early stages of designing Reciproka and building up alliances for collaboration once we start operating. If you are an experienced facilitator of co-operative ownership transfer, organisational transition, interested in funding Reciproka and/or want to discuss further possibilities to collaborate, please contact us at [email protected] and [email protected].

Notes:

[1] Dennis Roberts, “Middle market investment banking offers opportunity for trained valuators, accountants,” Accounting Web, May 10, 2010, http://www.accountingweb.com/aa/auditing/middle-market-investment-banking-offers-opportunity-for-trained-valuators-accountants

^[2] A system in which co-operatives needing capital for machinery, post a bond, and the other co-ops in the system would fund the bond, and buy the machine for a commons in which both funders and users would be members. The interest paid on these loans create a fund that would gradually be able to pay an increasing income to their members, constituting a new kind of basic income.

Photo by ganast

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Brilliant explanation by Dmytri Kleiner on the ‘transvestment‘ approach, i.e. how to transfer value from the system of capital to the system of peer production.

Kleiner explains for example why federated systems, depending on servers and investments, can’t compete with centralized technologies, because they cost money as they grow, but true ‘end to end’ systems grow in resources as they add users, with their existing resources.

Learn also why we need, ‘counter-anti-disintermediation’.

Watch the video here:

Photo by transmediale

The post “You can’t code away their wealth”: Dmytri Kleiner explains why the construction of P2P alternatives is conflictual appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Demand full automation:

As long as the automation is monopolized by capital it will first and foremost serve to precaritize and exploit labourers and their class.

Capitalism will not automate itself out of existence. It will not eliminate the workforce, and it will not even try. What it will do is create a deskilled workforce, ever more dependent on capital for the ability to produce, and create a divided workforce, that does not share a common proletarian consciousness, thus diffusing its class power. And, for when and where discontent does bubble up, it will automate the deadly force required to repress uprisings. The brutal Enforcement Droid is much more viable than the pleasant robot servant. [1]

Demand Universal Basic Income:

This is a neo-liberal ruse to side-track more fundamental demands for socially provisioned basic needs, such as health care, housing, and education.

UBI is increasingly advocated by the Silicon Valley elite precisely because it enables more of the neoliberal withdrawal of state provisioning of social necessities. If you ‘choose’ to spend your UBI on fast food and gambling and then end up unable to pay your rent, have a pension, or have health care, its your problem, because there are no more social services to provide for you. UBI will have made it politically tenable to do away with them. [2]

Demand the Future:

The Future can only ever emerge from the present. Left concern for the Future requires the thoroughest concern with the conditions of the vast majority of humanity on earth right now. When Full Automation is advocated with only a vague reckoning of the destruction automation has historically wrought for humanity up to this day, S&W are clearly not with us here today on the ground but off in high concept.

The left imagination, it is claimed, has been invigorated by S&W’s provocations. Such vigor would be well channeled then towards elaborating practices and politics which can fundamentally improve the lot of the great majority of people on the earth right now. Part of this will require us to look soberly at the kinds of technologies we are told are inevitable and evaluate their applicability towards the general emancipation we demand.”

The post Inventing the Present: a critique of Left Accelerationism by Telekommunisten appeared first on P2P Foundation.

My criticism of Facebook and other sites is not they are not useful, it is rather that they are private, centralized, proprietary platforms. Also, simply abstaining from Facebook in the name of my own media purity is not something that I’m interested in, I don’t see capitalism as a consumer choice, I’m more interested in the condition of the masses, than my own consumer correctness. In the end it’s clear that criticizing platforms like Facebook today means using those platforms. Thus, I became a user and set up the Telekommunisten page. Unsurprisingly, it’s been quite successful for us, and reaches a lot more people than our other channels, such as our websites, mailing lists, etc. Hopefully it will also help us promote new decentralized channels as well, as they become viable.

Dmytri Kleiner

I couldn’t agree more; using the master’s tools to help bring down a rapidly collapsing house is better than leaving those tools untouched. This certainly doesn’t stop us from finding or creating new tools to repurpose what remains. The shortcomings and profit-driven design imperatives of these platforms should be well understood by their users, and that is what we strive to do at the Foundation: educating users on the full spectrum of ideas related to Social Media.

Personal reflections aside, it’s good to see Kleiner and the gang at ThoughtWorks Werkstatt Berlin still leading the way in combining proprietary access with surveillance-conscious tools. Their latest creation in this burgeoning space is Werkstatt Groups, a web forum running on a Tor hidden service!

How have they achieved this? Kleiner explains it in the article below (originally published in his blog).

The post Dmytri Kleiner on how to set up a publicly accessible Tor-based forum appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In joint collaboration with reSource and transmediale 2013, Telekommunisten unveiled to potential investors and partners the most radically disruptive project in the history of telecommunications, bringing the transformative power of digital communications to the physical sphere with a global sharing platform for the transmission of physical objects. OCTO is building a global system to interconnect every household and place of business with pneumatic tubes, which will permit the high-speed delivery of packages to and from any subscriber worldwide.
For transmediale 2013 a prototype of the system was deployed at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, called OCTO P7C-1. Curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli, and working with Vittore Baroni and an international network of artists, OCTO P7C-1 Intertubular Pneumatic Packet Distribution System was not only be used for on-site communications by transmediale staff and festival guests, but also be a part of the PNEUMAtic circUS international mail art project highlighting the potential and versatility of the platform.

OCTO-P7C-1 Intertubular Pneumatic Packet Distribution System was
transmediale 2013?s Official Miscommunication Platform and the result of
a joint collaboration between the reSource transmedial culture
berlin/transmediale, the Telekommunisten collective and raumlaborberlin.

For more OCTO images and videos, (and investment opportunities) follow this link

The post Project of the Day: OCTO appeared first on P2P Foundation.