[p2p-research] The nature of apple trees (was: Re: [ox-en] apples and moonfruits)

[Kevin Carson]

On 4/25/09, Stan Rhodes <stanleyrhodes at gmail.com> wrote:
> Exchange of rival goods works best with ownership, because fair
>  exchange depends on ownership.  BUT, the more equitable (not equal,
>  but equitable--fair) the ownership among people, the better.  Not all
>  ownership is the same.  At the very least ownership varies by the
>  thing owned, and the laws and norms that establish, maintain, and
>  evolve that schema of ownership.  So, how we define ownership types in
>  a model makes a huge difference.

Agreed.  At the very least, we need a legal system that 1) refuses to
enforce absentee claims to unoccupied and unimproved land (all the "no
trespassing" signs on vacant lots and undeveloped rural acreage will
come down), and 2) removes all regulatory to things like LETS systems
advancing credit, or crowdsourced pooling of credit secured by member
properties, etc., without legally mandated capitalization.

>  We can't equivocate non-rival (free software, free design docs) and
>  rival (land, fruit, a laptop) goods when saying this, because they are
>  fundamentally different.  Goods ideal for peer production--and thus
>  where nearly all peer production occurs--are almost entirely
>  non-rival.  E.g. FLOSS.

But the distinction between "free speech" and "free beer" gets blurry
when you consider how much of capital cost, in conventional industrial
production, results from inflated overhead and methods that are more
capital-intensive than optimal.  There's an enormous literature by
people like Ralph Borsodi, Colin Ward, Karl Hess and Keith Paton on
just how much of what we consume could be produced with machinery
affordable to most individuals, whether in the household or pooled in
neighborhood workshops.

That's one reason I find the Marxist objection to cooperative markets
("what happens to the losers") so unconvincing.  The miniscule capital
outlays required to undertake production using small-batch production
on cheap machinery mean that there's much less of a threshold between
being in the market and out of it, and not much cost to being a
"loser."  What's more likely, in such an environment, is flexible
manufacturing networks in which nobody is permanently out of the
market, and most "firms" are replaced with ad hoc peer networks of
people constantly shifting back and forth, and one producer or shop
intermittently being the subcontractor and the subcontractee.  The
whole idea of permanent "winners" and "losers" presupposes a
capital-intensive mass-production industrial model with a fixed
worksite, and the firm as the locus of control over invested physical
capital.  In a society where most people own their homes free and
clear and can feed themselves "squatting on the commons," own sewing
machines and garage workshops, etc., outside work will be something
people can take when they damn well feel like it.

Outside work will probably be necessary in the long run, and prolonged
periods of unemployment or underemployment may be uncomfortable, but
the ability to ride out such periods with nothing more than discomfort
or inconvenience means that labor will be in a position to walk away
from the table for a change.  Whatever remains of capital will be in
the position lamented by Wakefield, where it's almost impossible to
find people willing to work at a profitable wage.  And with cheap
capital goods and low physical capital requirements, "outside work"
will more often amount to networking with one's equals to produce
something, rather than working at a wage for the person who owns the
tools you're using.

>  Kevin, to clarify, you're talking about "actually-practiced
>  capitalism" or theoretical capitalism (i.e. the general definition a
>  place like wikipedia might give it--essentially, private ownership
>  with a market economy)?

Well, I prefer to distinguish between capitalism and free markets,
because robber (primitive accumulation) and privilege are integral to
capitalism as we know it.  And "private property" requires some
enormous qualifiers.  I'm partial to usufructory (or
"occupancy-and-use") models of property in land, although even
standard vanilla-flavored Lockeanism would result in an enormous
dismantling of artificial property rights, if ownership required some
past act of "mixing one's labor with the soil."  And of course there
would be no "private property" in ideas, no copyright or patents, and
no trademarks beyond the bare minimum right to tort action for actual
fraud or identity theft.

-- 
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