[ox-en] Re: (Non-)rivalrous, public/private goods/products
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Sat, 05 Apr 2003 12:57:35 +0200
Hi Raoul and all!
3 weeks (22 days) ago Raoul wrote:
Before trying to contribute to the discussion, it may be useful to attempt to
summarize it, or rather describe some threads I saw in it.
Thanks for the great summary :-) .
In ancient times I maintained a FAQ
[http://www.oekonux.de/liste/faq.html] by extracting interesting
quotes from the (German) mails and summarize them under a question
they are an answer to. I did that by re-reading the mails some time
after they have been written. Though I think this is useful and a nice
form to let the list(s) speak it is a rather time consuming thing :-(
. Today I'm glad when I'm able to cope with the list traffic by just
reading mails once. So this is not maintained any more :-( .
Rivalry and scarcity deal with different dimensions of reality. Rivalry deals
with a situation and behaviour of humans; scarcity deals with a quality of
goods. One concept cannot replace the other. The relation between both is the
idea that scarcity of goods leads to competition for them.
Graham says (2feb03) that, in neo-classical economics, the concept of rivalry
"has no connection with the word 'competition'. A non-rivalrous good is one
which is not diminished in any way by sharing it". But, the word was not been
chosen by chance. It simply tells that, for other kind of goods, their scarcity
leads to rivalry, to competition for them.
This relation between scarcity and competition is generally true. Marxism sets
the possibility of a communist society, without economic rivalry, on the
conviction that capitalism creates, for the first time in history, the
conditions of a society of abundance, where scarcity is reduced to its last
limits.
But, in some circumstances scarcity may lead to cooperation and solidarity.
Marxism also believes that a class confronted to scarcity, and because it is
confronted to it, can develop an extraordinary solidarity to build this
society.
Using "nonrivalrous" to describe the fact that digitalized goods are not
subject to scarcity presupposes only one type of human beahaviour in front of
scarcity. This is why, like Stefan Merten (8feb03), I feel "uncomfortable with
the neo-classical approach".
I'd like to expand / ramble on this a bit. I don't know whether this
is really new, however.
We have some notions here: "rivalry", "scarcity", "competition" and -
I think we need to add - "limited supply" / "limitation".
I think limitations are the most basic concept. This is the dimension
of reality which can't be denied. However, limitations by no way lead
to anything by some automatic. For instance the supply of mineral oil
has always been limited but only for a very short period of human
history this is even a relevant question to humankind. This shows,
that the relationship between limitations and humans is determined by
the form of society. I think this is generally true for all goods.
The question is how to deal with these limitations. More and more it
seems to me that capitalism follows the approach to make a virtue of
the necessity and to invent scarcity. Instead of removing limitations
or at least deal with them in a way they hurt as little as possible,
capitalism as a form of society creates numerous institutions to hold
up the limitations. *This* turns limitations into scarcity - at least
as I'm understanding the concept of scarcity. In fact capitalism
projects the concept of limitations to it's very central institution:
money.
Rivalry I understand as a concept to describe the social situation
which arises is situations where humans are confronted with
limitations. Rivalry describes this social situation on a very basic
level and without taking into account humans as social beings. Indeed
humans as social beings deal with that rivalry in a form specific for
the form of society they are living in.
Capitalism regulates this by imagining / constructing a un-societal
type of human (yes, this is a contradiction in terms). Capitalism
"regulates" this by market forces / competition. That is there is no
means to really act as humans and to communicate about the general
problem of a given limitation.
However, as Raoul pointed out this is not the only way a society can
deal with limitations. In fact nearly all human societies dealt with
limitations in a totally different way. However, all had their kind of
regulation regime and may be this is what Russell means when he
emphasizes that this is needed for every form of human society. I
agree with him that this sort of regulation regime is needed in some
form.
When being interested in an emancipatory vision the question is then
how such a regulation can look like. One of the main aspects IMHO is
to revert that making a virtue of the necessity. No, there is *no*
good in things being limited when there is a demand for it. This
prevents self-unfolding and thus an emancipatory form of regulation
needs to strive for removing limitations as much as possible. (For
some discussion about needs see below.) On first glance it is clear
that when there is no limitation given by nature there should not be
an artificial limitation - such as for digitized goods in the light of
the existence of the Internet.
Note that only the Internet makes the digitized goods as sharable as
they are. Before the Internet became as wide-spread as it is even
digitized goods were difficult to distribute because they were bound
to a material good - mainly a floppy or a tape. However, that sheds
some light on a second glance at the problem: Any regulation regime
being interested in maximum self-unfolding needs to develop means such
as the Internet because they effectively eliminate limitations. So, if
we already had had an emancipatory society beforce the existence of
the Internet this society should have developed a facility similar to
the Internet ASAP.
In general such a regulation regime has to look at the needs of people
and should try to remove limitations as far as possible. While an
invention like the Internet is an easy case there are of course more
difficult questions where two or more needs conflict with each other.
However, I expect these conflicts are easier to resolve when the
society does not need to hold up scarcity to function. These conflicts
are then reduced to their inevitable factual level and can be
discussed on that level. In other words: Alienation from this factual
level as well as from the people concerned with the problem would be
absent then. I think this very fact furthers understanding of a
decision once it is made.
BTW: When talking about a regulation regime I have no specific form in
mind. Particularly I'm extremely sceptical about the state as one form
of this regulation regime making sense for an emancipatory society.
But, aside from the question of human behaviour in front of scarcity, there is
the need of a word to describe this new specific quality of digitalized goods:
to escape scarcity. Stefan Merten asks: ".why not saying information goods?" I
don't think it is enough. The word information has commonly a restricted
meaning. Digitalized goods have common qualities with information or knowledge,
but they also have other powerful capacities like being direct means of
production, (driving assembly lines, etc.) or means of consumption (games,
films.).
But these are qualities of special sorts of information. The artisan
needs knowledge as well as the worker (currently I'm using knowledge
mainly as "information represented in a brain"). And even in the tool
machine there is knowledge about the production process embedded.
And every day, new products or parts of products are digitalized. The
specific quality of digitalized goods, in itself, needs to be named.
It should be a word meaning precisely: "non-subject to scarcity, once
produced".
This is true when you set the Internet as given. However, I think a
more general approach would be useful. In fact this is true for all
information. What changes are the means how to distribute that
information. For instance cooking recipes as a (very valuable :-) )
form of information have been shared and distributed for thousands of
years.
When looking at the specific software aspect - that is: pure
information becomes a means of production - this is what I think is
the revolutionary thing. At first time in history the information
about the production process can be used not only independently from
any human representing that information in his/her head but also from
a specific machine representing that information in the way it is
constructed. For the first time in history computers as universal
information processors allow for the complete separation of the
information about a production process from any specific material
substrate.
The second question posed by Russell is the idea that "physical things, as
food, clothing, housing, etc. are naturally rivalrous". Russell says: "The fact
is, however, that if I eat an apple, you can't also eat it the same apple." I
agree with Stefan Meretz answer: "The apple is not found, it is produced. It is
not necessary to share if we can produce another one."
The problem of competition for a good depends essentially on its scarcity and
not on its physical nature. Competition can develop for services (as medical
attendance, to take the example given by Ph.). Russell's answer to Stefan
Meretz consists in creating a situation of scarcity: "Just because something is
renewable, does not mean than in 'this time' and 'this place' it is not
rivalrous." If, in 'this time' and 'this place', I have a million of apples for
two people, there will be no competition between them for apples.
Ph. says: "Our ability to produce apples is limited". May be, in the future,
but modern agriculture can be made without land, for example, and before we
reach an hypothetic limit, we can make of apples, for a long time, an abundant,
not scarce good.
Yes. That perspective takes into account that there *is* time and
often there *is* some place which can be created if society "wants".
May be all these examples only work when looking at situations where
artificial boundaries like "at this time" are created. Ok, these
situations exist but from my experience (mainly with consensus
processes) concerned humans nearly always are intelligent enough to
solve the problem in one or the other way given some time. To me a
emancipatory vision should provide a general framework for this types
of processes to happen.
If we want to imagine a society based on "taking instead of buying", the
question of scarcity is crucial. From that point of view, three kind of goods
can be identified:
1. The digitalized products. By nature, they escape scarcity, as they may
become abundant almost immediately, as soon as they are produced.
See above about this specificity.
2. The socially renewable goods. If humans decide it, they can be produced in
sufficient quantity to make them abundant, non-scarce in relation to human
needs.
Yes.
3. Goods or products that are not renewable and will remain scarce. Ph. talks
of "front places at a soccer match, villas in South of France.". One could add
Van Gogh paintings or feudal castles.
For this last category of goods, but also, at the beginning of the building of
such a new society, for some (always fewer) renewable goods, there will be the
necessity of managing scarcity.
At this point the needs come into play. There simply is no such thing
as a *need* for a villa in South of France. There exist needs for a
certain climate, certain conditions of living and so on. These are the
needs which need to be addressed.
The "need" for a car is a good example. What most people really *need*
is some sort of transportation to get to their job. This need is
already determined by society because they "need" a job and today the
job seems to need to be a substantial amount of kilometers away from
the place someone lives. But though these concerns show how deep
society is embedded in what we think we need, I'll ignore that for now
and say: What really is important is the need for transportation from
A to B. However, there is no law of nature a society needs not
organize this by an insane system like cars and streets. This can -
and should - be done differently.
I think this is true for a big part of the needs satisfied by goods of
the third category. So I think most of what seems to belong to this
category actually belongs to the second category.
And this leads us to the third problem posed by Russell: the need "to set up
some type, some sort of laws to arbitrate this rivalry".
Humans have always had rules to distribute scarce goods. Advanced social
animals, like the chimpanzees or bonobos, too. This is necessary to prevent
competition or rivalry to destroy the group. For humans, the forms of rivalry
and the rules to manage scarcity have been different through history. For
example, things were completely different before and after the division of the
original community, where global solidarity was a condition of survival, into
economically antagonistic classes. The evolution between feudalism and
capitalism was also crucial. It opened the door to the expansion of the most
inhuman way to deal with the problem of scarcity, submitting any human
consideration to the production of profit and capital accumulation, which
become the only goal of production, transforming the work force into a
commodity condemned to misery if it does not find a profit-maker buyer.
Advanced capitalism has reached an unthinkable degree of absurdity in managing
scarcity. Johan is right to recall that "200-300 tons of foodstuffs is
deliberately destroyed annually in US and about the same quantities in EU, -
while a quarter of world population is starving (!!!)." And I agree with him
when he says that in capitalism "law is not simply there to save us from
rivalry, but equally to sustain it."
Oh shit. For eons this has been the first time I replied to a mail
while reading it - and now I see you're saying more or less the same
as me. Well, I'll take that as a lesson ;-) .
It is a fact that in a post-capitalist (GPL?) society, specially at the
beginning of it, there will be the need of social rules to manage the
distribution of scarce goods.
I think this is not only needed at the beginning. I think you need
some social rules which guide the society. Usually this is called
culture. I think the problem with these rules start when they alienate
from needs / people / society.
There is not very much written on that problem.
Marx wrote very little on this subject and so the non-Stalinist Marxists of the
20th century. (I am keen to know what Oekonux has worked about it).
IMHO we have a long-term discussion on that very issue on the German
list centered around the concept of Herrschaft (domination) now being
called H. because Herrschaft implies to many misunderstandings. Free
Software has this sort of inter-individual regulation / organization
(two terms which have been suggested for replacing Herrschaft) in some
way and the discussion started with asking how this sort of regulation
/ organization can be named.
I think the reason for that there is so little thought about this is
that it is very hard to think about it while looking for a form of
society which at first glance can not have any form of regulation
because every regulation means that it must be backed by some force to
enforce it. And the application of force is what we want to fight.
Today I think the challenge is to think about forms of regulation
which can be applied even in an emancipatory society. This includes
that the need to apply force is minimized.
This *is* a difficult discussion and seemingly it is especially
difficult to leave the boundaries of standard leftist thinking. But I
think it is needed badly.
At the moment there is a discussion about (technical) standards which
set up some regulation while their implementation effectively enforces
them. I see this as a form of structural force. However, I think we
all quickly agree on that a standard like TCP/IP is a useful thing -
today as well as in an emancipatory society.
The price question is: What is needed to create standards with these
features. I think part of the answer is that the standard does not
serve alienated interests - such as making money from it by excluding
others. In this case the standard is formed along the (technical)
facts and the needs of people. I just suggested
http://xml.openoffice.org/xml_advocacy.html
for an example for an explicit rationale for a standard.
I am sorry for the length of this mail. But I could not manage to split it into
smaller ones.
No problem with me :-) .
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
PS: I didn't read Graham's reply to Raoul's mail yet. May be I'm
doubling even more...
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