[p2p-research] Exchange with S.M. Stirling on Decentralized Production

[marc fawzi]

Why do we have one huge sun instead of a thousand tiny stars in our
solar system?

Or why is there a lower limit on the size of stars in the first place?

Energy production in the universe seems to be concentrated in massive stars.

If you think of the large centralized production facility as the sun
and the customers of that facility as the planets then you start to
see that it follows an established natural pattern, which must be
driven by a very basic and universal issue.

But it does not mean that we cannot have peer production. It just
means that there is a lower limit on the size of the production
facility in order for it to sustain an ecosystem (think: solar system)
around it.

For example, in the P2P Energy Economy model, it's hard to see how
individual energy producers would have any substantial surplus if they
had tiny solar generators and it's even harder to see how there could
be a flow of energy from peers with surplus to peers with deficit if
everyone had a surplus. This is the basic and universal issue (or two
issues,) IMO. For each given type of product (e.g. energy, milk, cars,
etc) we can't have everyone be a producer because the "flow of energy"
is the "economy of life" and without a deficit on one side and a
surplus on the other there is no flow (or movement) of energy (and no
flow of energy equal no life, literally.)

So in order to have both the maximum surplus of the thing being
produced and the maximum flow of that thing from the surplus side to
the deficit side, the production tends towards centralization (within
each geographic or virtual market)

However, peer producers can become the stars (or suns) to their own
solar system (or customers) by becoming big enough relative to the
size of their market. The reason peer producers would eventually have
to get more and more massive, thus replicating the very pattern of
centralization peer production is supposed to dissolve, is because if
one peer producer grows in sizthen they will have higher efficiencies


Marc

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 12:30 AM, Kevin Carson
<free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was surprised and pleased to find that S.M. Stirling had visited my
> blog discussion of his book Island in the Sea of Time.
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2009/02/long-emergency-sm-stirling-and.html
>
> He left a comment which led to an interesting exchange:
>
> STIRLING:  Note that the economy of Nantucket in the "Island" books
> doesn't -stay- small and decentralized, or rather doesn't stay any
> smaller or more decentralized than is required by the small
> population, relatively low productivity and hence the limited
> opportunity for division of labor and application of comparative
> advantage.
>
> As Adam Smith pointed out, the limiting factor in the division of
> labor/specialization is the size of the effective market.
>
> By end of the trilogy they've got a mini-steel-mill built in Britain;
> in Ironbridge Gorge, in fact, the original cradle of the Industrial
> Revolution.
>
> The reason nobody builds cars in small machine-shops isn't that it's
> technically impossible. It's perfectly feasible.
>
> It's just not -economically- possible; the result would cost too much.
>
> That's why most manufactured goods are made in great big honking
> plants; you get more for less that way.
>
> If you got rid of all the big manufacturing entities, you could cobble
> together something from local resources.
>
> And the process of reconcentration would begin immediately, driven by
> the same ineluctable economic logic that caused it the first time, and
> by the (instinctual) urge of most humans to follow the "least effort
> principle".
>
> ME:  I originally intended to address some of the points you raised
> (not only Leaton's enthusiasm for the Thames valley as the "Silicon
> Valley of the first industrial revolution," but the seeming recreation
> of many forms of anti-market privilege by Nantucket like land grants
> in the colonies instead of allowing free Lockean homesteading). But I
> decided it was outside the immediate scope of my post.
>
> My main area of disagreement with you concerns your assumption that
> the rise of mass-production industry resulted from the "ineluctable
> economic logic" of superior efficiency.
>
> In fact, I believe that with a few exceptions, small-scale factory
> production on the Emilia-Romagna model (integrating general-purpose
> powered machinery into craft production, with small batches and
> frequent changes between production runs, geared to local demand on a
> just-in-time basis) is *more* efficient than mass-production when the
> latter's costs of long-distance shipping and push-distribution are
> taken into account.
>
> I agree with Borsodi and Mumford that the invention of the electric
> motor eliminated the main imperative behind the large factory
> (economizing on horsepower from a single prime mover), and put the
> household and small shop on an even footing with the "Dark Satanic
> Mill." Most of the economies of machine production are captured with
> the bare adoption of machinery on a small scale; the modest additional
> reductions in unit production cost with large-scale machinery are more
> than offset by increased costs of distribution and marketing.
>
> In a free market, American industrialization arguably would have taken
> the pattern of a hundred Emilia-Romagnas. Instead, the state tipped
> the balance with massive railroad subsidies, "intellectual property"
> law, tariffs, regulatory cartelization, etc. Electrical machinery,
> rather than living up to the full decentralizing potential of
> Mumford's "neotechnic" revolution, was fitted into the older
> organizational forms of the paleotechnic era. So what we wound up with
> was Sloanist mass-production: enormously expensive product-specific
> machinery, which mandated large-batch production 24/7 to minimize unit
> costs, which mandated in turn corporate control over external society
> to make sure the stuff would be bought up and the wheels could keep
> turning. When you figure the enormous amounts of crystalized labor
> wasted to keep the system running (the buffer stocks of unfinished
> goods and the inventories of finished goods awaiting orders, described
> by Waddell and Bodek in Rebirth of American industry; and the
> mountains of discarded products in landfills that could have been
> better designed around modular components for easy repair and long
> life), it's not really that economical.
>
> In fact the costs of extending Adam Smith's market area exceed, in
> most cases, the savings from increased division of labor. The problem
> is that the state subsidized those costs and externalized them on
> taxpayers.
>
> In some cases, like heavy engine blocks, the large mass-production
> factory really is most efficient in absolute terms. But in most such
> cases, I would argue that the product is itself an answer to an
> artificial problem created by the state. The present extent of demand
> for cars results from state subsidies to sprawl and monoculture. The
> civilian jumbo jet almost certainly would never have come into
> existence on its own nickel, abseent the heavy bomber program to fully
> utilize the expensive machine tools required to produce it.
>
> The most prominent case I can think of of a genuinely valuable product
> that requires large-scale production, is the microprocessor
> foundry--but even there the scale of demand would be considerably
> reduced by easily reprogrammable chips (in which case chips would be
> harvested from landfills on the same pattern as local minimills
> harvesting scrap metal).
>
> Without government subsidies to economic centralization and
> capital-intensive production methods, IMO our economy would look a lot
> more like Borsodi and Mumford, and a lot less like Chandler and
> Schumpeter.
>
> I have an extended critique of Alfred Chandler's Whig theory of
> industrial progress in Ch. 2 of my org theory book:
> http://members.tripod.com/kevin_carson/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/chapter1.pdf
>
> It's distilled in a blog post here:
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2008/06/alfred-chandler-critique.html
>
> Anyway, thanks much for your comments.
>
> --
> Kevin Carson
> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
> Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
> http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>