[p2p-research] thinking about leapfrogging

[Kevin Carson]

On 10/5/08, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:

>  Bologna and Emilia Romagna are indeed among the places in Italy where
>  quality of life is higher and public administrations and services work
>  better.
>
>  However, the reality of the Emilia Romagna cooperatives is a bit less
>  idyllic, shall we say, than it looks from reports like those.
>
>  Searching on italian web pages would yeld you several reports of those
>  coops doing as well as they do because of unfair fiscal privileges
>  (*), "more-equal-than-others" treatment and coop-only
>  express-tender-approval-procedures by leftist local administrations
>  even when non-leftish cooperatives had better treatments, practices
>  and partners just like those of multinationals and so on.

>  "Coop rosse" by R. Ridolfi is a book which denounces just that. I
>  haven't read the book itself, but I've read or read enough stories of
>  the same kind to suggest taking that Williams report with a big grain
>  of salt.

>  (*) like independent, small scale entrepreneurs complaining because
>  they, who incidentally are much closer to the p2p model, lose business
>  simply because they must pay more taxes than a coop which is much
>  closer in structure, size and behavior to a Wall-Street style
>  corporation.

OTOH, the privileges granted to co-ops are arguably simply
countervailing examples of statism that offset the larger, more
fundamental privileges granted to capitalist enterprise in state
capitalism at large.  Eliminating the latter structural privileges to
concentrated ownership of investment capital, absentee ownership,
etc., would render co-ops less dependent on state favortism.

An end to the artificial scarcity of land and capital, to the
attendant monopoly rents on them, and to the concentration of enormous
amounts of wealth in the hands of a small number of absentee
investors; a shift to distributed capital ownership; and a reduction
in the transaction costs of aggregating dispersed small capital
through networked means--all these things will rectify the imbalance.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html