Re: [ox-en] Material peer production (Part 1: Effort Sharing)
- From: "Patrick Anderson" <agnucius gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:17:55 -0700
Hello Christian and everyone.
Christian Siefkes wrote:
The first characteristic of peer production is that the effort required to
reach the goals of a project is shared among those who care enough to
contribute.
Would you say this set of people you describe also happens to be the
same set traditionally called 'consumers' or 'users' of the product?
I understand you want all of these consumers to simultaneously be
workers in that exact industry (operating the physical sources
required for that exact production), but is there any case where they
would not be consumers of the product?
If some of these people are ever not consumers (users) of those
products, then why would those people ever choose to work?
If all of these people are consumers (users), then what you are
describing happens to be a "User Owned" organization; though your
requirement that every consumer also be a worker in that exact
industry also makes it "Worker Owned"...
Everybody who wants to benefit from the project (to get a bike) might thus be
expected to _contribute some effort_ to the project
So you want every consumer to be a worker in that exact industry. I'm
not trying to be a thorn, but I just don't understand why we would
want to stop these consumers from using a currency to trade labor.
will end up with a lower labor weight (say, 0.5), while an unpopular task
(say, garbage removal) will end up with a high labor weight (say, 2.0).
Yes, what you say makes sense, but wouldn't it work just as well if
each of these users owned percentages in each industry (such as
garbage collection and recycling) in just the amount that they need
for that product, so they were mostly not trading *goods* (since the
owner of an apple tree owns the apples even before they are produced,
even if he happened to hire some (paying a wage as a cost of
production) to pick them), but were also allowed to trade *labor* by
paying each other with tokens - so as to avoid needing to switch jobs
and travel so much etc.?
All who want just a single bicycle contribute roughly the same
effort (as in the flat rate model), but those who want _two_ bicycles now
have to contribute twice as much, and so on.
So the consumer "price" is twice as high for 2 bikes. That sounds
fine, but is this (one part of your whole system) any different from
what we see today?
I understand the Debt-Based currency we use today (such as the Federal
Reserve Note) has terrible problems, but wouldn't it be ok if we made
an 'internal', local currency or credit/point system to ease the
trading of *labor*?
If there is more demand for a product than
can be satisfied, the peer project can thus "auction" the product: it can
raise the relative _cost_ (the amount of required contributions) of the
product until sufficiently many of the prospective users get second
thoughts. I call this the _preference weighting_ model since the
preferences of people regarding the goods they want to get are "weighted"
(similar to the "weighting" of different tasks in the _weighted labor_
model discussed above).
This also sounds the same as letting the 'market' take care of _this
portion_ of the system.
in a different way--those who get an auctioned good will have to contribute
more, while those who want other goods (which can be produced in sufficient
quantity) will all have to contribute less.
And that is also what we see today using the market and regular money, right?
It is important to understand that no _exchange_ takes place between those
who produce a good and those who use it: increasing the _cost_ (expected
contributions) of a good won't increase it's _production effort_, and it is
the production effort which the producers get recognized as contributions.
If there was exchange, a higher cost for the consumers would go (wholly or
in part) to the producers, but this is not the case.
This is a very important point, but it is from the fact that the
Owners are also the Consumers that exchange of *goods* need not take
place(1).
Allowing the exchange of *labor* is not something we need to avoid as
long as the Consumers are the owners of the means of production (User
Owned).
(1) We could still allow the exchange of goods, and this would be
important for newcomers (johnny come latelys), but in order to hold
the system in place we would just need to treat any profit (price
above cost) as an investment from the consumer (user) that paid it to
help them buildup their own percentage of ownership in each industry
of that community.
Hoping we can work together to figure this out,
Your fellow GPL-Society engineer,
Patrick Anderson
President, Personal Sovereignty Foundation
http://EcoComics.org
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de