[p2p-research] against human rentals

[Kevin Carson]

On 8/5/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree with your points,
>
> my main issue is that in the current system, self-employment is rarely
> better than wage labour, as it replaces wage dependency with market
> dependency ... except for the few that make it, self-employment is a very
> hard and insecure path, though of course with obvious advantages ..

True.  But the lower the cost of the means of production, the less
onerous market dependency becomes.  The lower the cost of the means of
production, the less overhead there is to service, which means the
revenue stream required to avoid going in a hole dwindles to nothing,
and revenue becomes free and clear.  Not only the revolution in
low-cost tools, but the effect of the network revolution in destroying
overhead that comes from the transaction costs of administration and
coordination, are reversing the main cause that brought about
large-scale factory production and the wage system in the first place.

That's not to say that a worker can reliably support himself through
self-employment alone, without fear of periods of slow business.  But
it means he can incrementally shift a portion of his labor to
self-employment while keeping the day job at reduced hours, without
undertaking any significant debt or incurring major costs that require
steady business to service.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html