[p2p-research] a new funding mechanism for useful online services

[Kevin Carson]

On 1/3/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> on the one hand, I've have a really working class background, both my parents were worker orphan children who started working in factories by age 13, my father spend the first third of his working life as a worker, the second as a white collar employee, the third in the lower ranks of management, but always as a union member; I worked in factories doing physical labour for 3 months each summer from 16 to 23; the fact that I could go to school, enjoy free education and medicine, makes me a product of social democracy, for which I'm hugely thankful
>

To a large extent, I think European-style social democracy is just a
simulation of the way civil society would have developed in free
societies over the past several hundred years, had not absolute states
suppressed the free town communes, expropriated and enclosed peasant
land, etc., starting in the late Middle Ages.

The kinds of socialsafety net functions currently provided by the
government welfare state, and by the employer-based welfare state,
would have been provided within the context of voluntary communal
institutions like mutual aid associations, multi-family or -household
risk- and income-pooling arrangements, etc.


-- 
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