[p2p-research] thinking about leapfrogging

[Michel Bauwens]

Kevin,

I was going to make the same argument about state protection, which I think
cooperatives do deserve as transitional measure.

However, I think that Marco comes from another perspective, that of the
internal political struggles between left-party associated cooperatives, and
the catholic competition, who may be politically discriminated against in
left-dominated regions, (and probably vice-versa)

Michel


On 10/6/08, Kevin Carson <free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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>



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