[p2p-research] Repurposing Profit for User Freedom

[Kevin Carson]

On 1/29/10, Patrick Anderson <agnucius at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ryan Lanham wrote:
>  > Patrick Anderson wrote:
>  >>
>  >> Co-Ownership is one way to hold physical sources.
>  >>
>  > There are already large numbers of ways to do this.
>  > Foundations, co-ops, governments, trusts, etc.

>  I'm afraid they are all wrong in their own ways.
>
>  More from ignorance than maliciousness, ALL of our attempts to
>  organize have failed to provide even our *basic* necessities.
>
>  How could so many people be homeless and hungry when there is far, far
>  more than enough land and water needed to do so?
>
>  If our planet was much smaller (or think of an island), and if there
>  proportionally fewer humans, would more than half of the inhabitants
>  be without clean water, food and shelter?
>
>  Would we, as islanders, also construct famine (as the US Farm Bill
>  does) by paying each other to NOT grow food - so that prices are kept
>  above cost?

The reason such attempts at organization (land trusts, etc.) have
failed is that they work within the larger framework of a system in
which artificial property rights (title to vacant and unimproved land,
IP, entry barriers to competition in the supply of credit, mandated
levels of capitalization for things like Greco's credit-clearing
networks, artificial scarcity from zoning and licensing, etc.) are
enforced by the state.

The only way to success IMO is through developing means...

1) to find ways of using limited amounts of land and capital so much
more efficiently than those with privileged access to large amounts of
it, that it becomes useless to the privileged class.  This means
Robb's STEMI compression, Nathan Cravens' productive recursion, Vinay
Gupta's distributed infrastructure, the lean principles Amory Lovins
discusses in Natural Capitalism, using networked stigmergic
organization for the superior reaction times Eric Raymond described,
etc.; and

2) to find ways of making the artificial property rights
unenforceable.  This means, to take a few examples:
2a) in the area of IP, by rapid improvements in encryption and
anonymization, the proliferation of darknets, etc., that make our
activity completely opaque to the state;
2b) garage manufacturing for networked local markets on such small
scales as to make the costs of detecting patent and trademark
infringements prohibitive;
2c) household microenterprises on such a small scale as to make zoning
and licensing regimes unenforceable;
2d) encrypted mutual credit and credit clearing systems that operate
without any state-mandated initial capitalization, and are invisible
to the state taxing authorities;
2e) etc.

>  Those who organize don't understand what profit measures, and so treat
>  it as some sort of reward - as though they should celebrate the
>  depravity and dependence that is the basis and only reason a consumer
>  would pay profit.

There is a significant difference between 1) natural profit which
results from temporary scarcity as supply adjusts to demand, where
there are no entry barriers to prevent competing suppliers from freely
entering the market to meet the demand, and 2) scarcity rents
resulting from entry barriers and artificial property rights.  The
former kind of profit is self-liquidating (free competition flushes
profit out of a system pretty quickly, so that the entrepreneur must
quickly move on to the next big thing, and the next, and so on, rather
than living off the rents of one-hit wonders).   What's more, it's
salutary while it does exist because it provides a strong incentive
for competing producers to enter the market rapidly, and to adopt new
innovations rapidly.  As a result, production costs and prices fall
much more rapidly as a direct result of such legitimate short-term
profit than they would under a regime where production costs were
painstakingly calculated and the last farthing of surplus used to buy
into the capital assets.

-- 
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