[p2p-research] The "Free Market" requires scarcity

[Ryan Lanham]

On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 11:49 PM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 4/25/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I actually think consumer cooperation might play a significant role in
> the larger alternative economy movement, and as a building block in
> the post-capitalist economy.  I just don't see the producer-consumer
> distinction as that central.


To me, this is a crucial theme.  To flip a few questions on their heads, we
need to ask a set of basic questions:

1. Is there some reason why, given a plurality of nations and cultures, that
a "correct" economic system has not arisen?

By way of partial answer to my own question, I have serious doubts that
there is anything new under the sun without significant technology changes.
That is, I am will to declare the end of political economics as a separate
field from technology futurism.  There is no "post-capitalism" absent
technology change or cataclysm beyond anything any sane person might wish
for.

2. If P2P is really a technology and not a political movement, isn't there a
much broader umbrella for participation and hope?

3. If the issue is technology, and not purely commons, what sorts of
technologies are sea change/game change impactors that will move things in
some positive direction?

4. What are we not willing to give up?  I think this is really the dividing
question where politics are concerned.

A. Liberty to make a profit
B. Liberty to hire wage workers
C. Liberty to accept work as a wage earner
D. Freedom from collective takings of property
E. The right to property
F. The right to personal sovereignty (and definitions of what that means)
G. The right to form nations/states and the right to establish certain rules
and orders in those states
H. The right to have co-operative or corporate entities
I. The right to form and share commons
J. Freedom of movement
K. Freedom of expression
L. Freedom to transfer wealth from one party to another
M. Freedom from...?

Partial Answer:  For me, P2P hints at a refinement of existing co-operative
elements combined with the hope that technologies will allow low cost
sharing in manners that eliminate the market value of most intellectual
property--not through unlawful takings, but through the obvious capacity of
people to build alternative mechanisms to those created at cost by investors
and to redistribute those alternatives at prices that make capital
investment profit less likely if not impossible.  That is, technology is
causing a movement to free and a movement to "here comes everybody."

If this partial answer is true...P2P ought to search out the following:

1. How to enable and expand co-ops
2. How to redistribute the intellectual know-how of society in fair and
appropriate means so as to expedite an expanding free universe.
3. How to discuss and predict outcomes as older social systems predicated on
credit/investment/profit frameworks start to become infeasible.
4. How to interject value propositions concerned externalities (e.g. the
environment) that are often overlooked in conventional political economic
and social discourses.

Just some random thoughts...
Ryan
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