[p2p-research] Venture Communism or social capitalism

[Patrick Anderson]

Ryan Lanham wrote:
> My own view of this is that ownership is moot in p2p.

I agree property ownership has caused and continues to cause big
problems for those that would otherwise organize for 'righteous'
purposes.

But if we cannot or will-not use some form of property ownership, then
how will we even secure the Land and Tools we need to begin?  Are we
going to beg the Capitalist controlled governments to hand these to
us?

But even if we can somehow gain access to the Means of Production
without simply purchasing them, how will we solve the difficulties of
allocation and scheduling that many would rather not even think about?

It's nice to think we would all just share and do the right thing, but
that is both naive and even downright dangerous because we then fail
to prepare for those that WILL do the wrong thing.

Protecting any organization requires we plan for the worst elements.
Security is made best by taking the stance of the would-be attacker or
disrupter and then designing measures that will thwart those advances.

Again, 'raw' property ownership is a problem, and we cannot use it in
'bare' form while expecting to see a difference from what we already
experience (Excessive Capital accumulation for example).

But since owners are traditionally the semi-ultimate controllers of
that property, maybe we could utilize the 'good' portions of ownership
to have a place to stand while applying some restrictions against the
'bad' portions of ownership (since owners can always add "Terms of
Use" to their own property) in a manner analogous to the way the GNU
GPL uses Copyright against itself.

I won't say what I think should be in the "Terms of Use", since I've
already said this part in the past, and will only get in trouble if I
repeat that now.

I don't want to debate (right now) *what* the constraints should be,
I'm only wondering if such an approach is worthy of consideration as
an avenue of implementation.

Patrick