Table of contents of this page Patrick Anderson    Reply by Sepp Haselberger    Patrick Anderson reply    Sepp Haselberger Reply

Patrick Anderson    

(not posted in the videobridgebuilders list) March 2011

Suresh Fernando wrote:

> what you are saying is that most exchanges
> of goods and services are not sales

The goods are not sold, AND they are not exchanged.

This is easy to see for a single owner, and probably nobody will dispute the idea that the owner of an Avocado tree - even if he pays another to harvest that fruit, does not *buy* those Objects because he owns them already - as a side-effect of his owning the Sources (the tree, land and water rights).

This Mode of Production applies to all industries.

We, the people, can co-own the internet as clusters of peers who invest for the purpose of receiving that connectivity without paying more than cost.

You are not connecting to anything outside of your house, but are just creating an internal network.

You buy the wires and routers and maybe hire someone to install and configure that equipment.

You must also pay any other costs such as the electricity and any sort of upkeep those Sources require to keep them operational.

Obviously you do NOT send yourself a bill in the mail every month and then pay that bill back to yourself.

This is so obvious it may be too boring to consider.

But bear with me for a few more seconds, as it becomes very interesting as we scale this network to more and more users.

You both pitch-in to buy the wires and probably the neighbor pays for the router that will sit in his house.

You must pay all of these initial costs, and continue to pay the costs of electricity (until you finally build or buy a photo-voltaic array...).

Now, there is no reason for each of you to *buy* that connectivity from your collective self. You just pay the costs and that is it.

Imagine your neighbor also connects to *his* neighbor and you to another, and those to more, until there are hundreds and then thousands and even possibly millions and billions of people connected.

• That* intranet/internet would be owned buy the users

They must pay all the real costs of being connected, but cannot pay Profit, since they are not buying that service from anyone - but own it already as a side- effect of their owning the Sources of those Objectives.

> How, in the transition to this model are portions
> in the Sources (of production I assume) allocated?

Simply according to the % of ownership.

Reply by Sepp Haselberger    

Patrick's description of ownership and co-ownership of the physical
layer of the internet is quite clear.=20

Of course you can run any program you want on your own network, you can
exchange files with your neighbors, you can, in other words, enjoy the
fruits of what you own.

Perhaps for some time in the beginning, those co-operatives (or whatever
we call them) of co-owners of the physical network infrastructure will
wish to connect to other such co-operatives that are out of reach of
their physical network infrastructure and they may decide to rent, from
an internet service provider, a broadband connection to be shared among
the users of the network. They would all chip in to pay for that
connection as a group, and they would use it to reach peers who are too
distant, or to use services on the "traditional" internet. They might,
in co-operation with other user groups, eventually take over a failing
service provider and run it under their own collective steam. Everything
would get much cheaper (no need to make profit) and probably more
reliable as well, as potential points of failure of the network get
distributed to numerous nodes, each one run by someone who's responsible
for its good functioning

Whether in the interim of time between building a local net of
connectivity and taking over or establishing a provider of long distance
connectivity, the co-operative's co-owners will collectively rent a
broad band connection, or will decide to share several of their existing
connections with the rest of the co-operative, makes no difference.

The end result will be a user-owned and user-maintained network that
provides secure, stable, resilient connectivity between peers.

Sepp

"The individual is supreme and finds the way through intuition"

• http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/ =20
• http://www.laleva.org
• http://blog.hasslberger.com/=20
• http://www.facebook.com/hasslberger
• http://twitter.com/healthsupreme

Patrick Anderson reply    

Sepp Hasslberger wrote: > The end result will be a user-owned and
> user-maintained network

I'm curious about this particular statement.

Are you saying the only agents allowed to work on a network must be within that specific subnet?

If not, and if groups are allowed to hire anyone to work on the equipment, then should we require those workers buy ownership in that subnet before beginning work to protect them from exploitation?

This approach is a very heartfelt and widely accepted as being the obvious answer to wage slavery.

But let's "step through" the logic of this by reducing the scale to just one owner, and then slowly increasing the size of the operation...

Imagine you own a single Olive tree.

You pick the fruit yourself and turn some of them into oil - all for your own, personal use.

You use all of the outputs of that tree and you do all of the work.

One day you slip and hurt your back. You can no longer pick the Olives, but the work must be done.

If you hire someone to work for you, should that worker have some ownership in your personal tree?

If yes, then should the mechanic that fixes your car become also co-owner of that vehicle?

What about a plumber that fixes your pipes? Should he become part owner of your home?

What if you hire someone to fix your laptop? Should he become a stakeholder of that device?

Why do these questions seem illogical?

What if the Olive tree is co-owned by you and your neighbor? What if an orchard is co-owned by 10 people? What if by 100? And 1,000? 1,000,000?

The same of the other questions.

What if the car is co-owned by 2 people? 3 people? 4, 5, 6, 7, etc...

What if the house has more than one owner? What if it is an apartment complex?

What if the laptop is a massive datacenter?

When does the question of "Should the worker have ownership in the Means of Production" switch from "Obviously NO" to "Obviously YES"?

Sepp Haselberger Reply    

Patrick Anderson wrote:

> When does the question of "Should the worker have
> ownership in the Means of Production" switch from
> "Obviously NO" to "Obviously YES"?

I believe what you are driving at is a distinction between 'workers' and 'consumers' or rather 'users'.

In a world

• where workers are bound to industry and a job is a precondition for survival,
• where industry is owned by people who have succeeded to accumulate "capital",
• where we see the worker as one class and the industrialist/capitalist as its opposite,

A more just distribution of the fruit of labor allows the workers to function as consumers, meaning people both produce and consume their production, because they have sufficient money to buy what they produce. In an industrial setting, both of those functions actually "work for" the industrialist/capitalist who gains along the whole chain of production, distribution and consumption.

We are gradually moving away from this direct counterposition of labor/capital, as the limits of the model become more and more obvious.

• Finance (or capital) has, with time, gained a great advantage over labor.
• Machines are cheaper than most human labor and so workers are being replaced, sent home, relegated to marginal jobs with little pay. * * Collective bargaining is losing its edge because humans are no longer the only workers available.
• The worker/consumer is becoming less and less important in economic life.

We are in a transition phase to a new world, where the main actors of industry, the workers and industrialists of old, no longer make up the economy. The new division is providers and users. Many of the former workers have become providers, and all of us are, to some extent, users. For now, this new paradigm co-exists with the remnants of the industrial model, there is no clear break, no line where one ends and the other starts. It is a fluid change.

The new world is p2p rather than hierarchy. It is a world where providers are users and vice versa.

Now the question becomes: Who should own the means of production - the provider or the user?

I tend to say it should be the provider who owns, but then...

Note that we can be both user AND provider at the same time, and usually this is the case.

Take the co-ownership of a farm. It is the users of the product (milk, meat, vegetables, fruit) who own the farm, but if they share in the work needed to make the product, they are also producers. Some of them do more work than others, so they are more producers, but they are still also consumers.

Is there even a need to distinguish any more?

Perhaps we could consider both users and producers to be stakeholders. In each type of enterprise, some of us hold a greater stake in consumption, some of us are predominantly producers. But all of us have an interest in the activity to continue. So perhaps ownership should be with those who have an interest, be it the producers, be it the consumers.

Distributed stakeholder ownership?

Sepp