P2P Foundation

A project, but this one has traction and may well be a pivot:

Arcade City is a project based in the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Details from an interview with co-founder Christopher David:

* “CoinTelegraph: You were an Uber driver before. How does this system contrast with traditional ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft?

Christopher David: Imagine a decentralized Uber that connects drivers with customers peer-to-peer using the Ethereum blockchain. When we hit $2 billion in annual revenue, it won’t go to line the pockets of investors or sustain a corporate hierarchy. It will be reinvested in our drivers, and in improving the customer experience.

Driver engagement is key. Thanks to our Free Uber campaign, I got to connect and speak with Uber drivers all over the country. Dealing with government regulation is definitely an issue for drivers, but an even bigger issue has been drivers being mistreated by the distant corporate HQ. I’ve been a driver myself, working sometimes 50 hours per week. I’ve been to the meetings. I’ve seen firsthand how drivers are treated and how feedback is ignored.

Uber and Lyft are run by nerds in San Francisco. To them, drivers are just numbers. The fares that determine drivers’ livelihood are… Continue reading »

“Do these myriad stories add up to a viable alternative to the system that’s wrecking the place now? On their own, probably not. But for me, the most important unfolding transformation of all is the emergence, in many places at once, of a new understanding of our place in the world. .. This new story is, to put it mildly, a rather large ‘narrative adjustment.’ But it is neither utopian, nor fantastical. It speaks to our innate compulsion to change, progress, and create – indeed, to grow – but with new kinds of growth in mind: Soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier; more cooperation and social connectivity; communities becoming more resilient.”

Excerpted from John Thackara:

“Since How To Thrive In the Next Economy was published in the autumn, my 29 conversations about the book have prompted all kinds of feedback. One question has cropped up repeatedly: In a world filled with melting ice caps, war, species extinctions, and economic peril, how can I possibly argue that the small-scale actions I write about can transform the bigger picture for the better?

My answer: It depends how you frame the picture.

Take, for example, COP21. For many people I met, the outcomes of the… Continue reading »

Excerpted from the recently deceased Ellen Meiksins Wood:

“However constructive its uses in defending human liberties against state oppression, or in marking out a terrain of social practices, institutions, and relations neglected by the “old” Marxist left, “civil society” is now in danger of becoming an alibi for capitalism.

Gramsci’s conception of “civil society” was unambiguously intended as a weapon against capitalism, not an accommodation to it. Despite the appeal to his authority which has become a staple of the “new revisionism,” the concept in its current usage no longer has this unequivocally anticapitalist intent. It has now acquired a whole new set of meanings and consequences, some very positive for the emancipatory projects of the Left, others far less so.

The two contrary impulses can be summed up in this way: the new concept of civil society signals that the Left has learned the lessons of liberalism about the dangers of state oppression, but we seem to be forgetting the lessons we once learned from the socialist tradition about the oppressions of civil society. On the one hand, the advocates of civil society are strengthening our defense of non-state institutions and relations against the power of the state; on the… Continue reading »

This is excerpted from the second part of an in-depth review of the book, Commun, by Martin O’Shaughnessy.

Here, first in summary, are the nine propositions:

* Proposition 1: it is necessary to construct a politics of the common:

* Proposition 2: we must mobilise rights of use to challenge property rights.

* Proposition 3: the common is the route to the emancipation of labour:

* Proposition 4: we must institute the common enterprise:

* Proposition 5: association within the economic sphere must pave the way for the society of the common:

* Proposition 6: the common must establish social democracy:

* Proposition 7: public services must become institutions of the common:

* Proposition 8: it is necessary to institute the global commons:

* Proposition 9: It is necessary to institute a federation of commons:

Martin O’Shaughnessy:

“What I want to do now is focus on the nine key political propositions about how to build the common to which their thought leads them. I have inevitably had to condense their writings and leave out many of their key references but have done my best to convey the spirit of what they propose faithfully.

* Proposition 1: it is necessary to construct a politics of the common:

Although the politics of the… Continue reading »

In this article, Peter Turchin makes the very important argument, in a response to Branko Milanovic, that “Naked Self-Interest is a Recipe for Social Dissolution”.

Very much worth reading.

Peter Turchin:

“The main question is whether economic agents, most importantly businessmen (including both corporation officers and business owners), should be motivated solely by self-interest, or should they also be motivated by personal ethics. In your view, businessmen should act as purely selfish rational agents, whose utility functions are based solely on material benefits (to themselves). In other words, they should simply maximize how much money they get. You argue that if they act in this way, externally imposed laws and institutions that embody moral rules will ensure that their private interest will lead to greater social good. As you say, this idea goes back at least to Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits.

Now, what do you mean social good? In economics and evolution we have a well-defined concept of public goods. Production of public goods is individually costly, while benefits are shared among all. I think you see where I am going. As we all know, selfish agents will never cooperate to produce costly public… Continue reading »

Excerpted from a great and clarifying contribution from Natalia Fernández, translated by Steve Herrick:

“Municipal goods and services are not “commons,” and a rental vehicle from a company-owed fleet is not “collaborative.” Confusing things only can lead to disillusionment and disappointment.

Anglo culture and the absence of public policies in the US tended to distort the terms “commons” and collaborative consumption/”sharing.” Municipal bicycle or car-sharing services, even though they may be shared in the sense that there is one vehicle and many users, don’t create any kind of commons, nor are they collaborative consumption. They are mere extensions of transportation services, no different from other public utilities when they are publicly owned, or from a car-rental company when privately owned.

The “commons,” that which is communal, is goods that belong to a community, a group of real people, a demos, that manages it jointly and directly. Public property is something else: it is State property.

But, isn’t public property, by definition, the common property of all citizens? Wouldn’t municipal public goods be, by definition, “communal?” No. Publicly-owned goods are managed through specific institutions that decide how they are used and where the profits go. Citizens don’t take part directly in management and… Continue reading »

Guy Standing focuses here on the research and experiments which show basic income guarantees are working where they have been tried. The first 3.50 minutes are a dutch-language introduction to the speaker.

Watch the video here:

A thought module proposed by Bob Haugen, via email:

“Most such discussions (about Economic Calculation) miss what I talked about here:

The short version is that the people who are still talking about the calculation problem do not seem to understand how planning and replanning is done now in capitalist supply chains (as well as US military supply chains), by propagating signals from the end customers or users back along the networks.

“I have maintained that the actual signals by which the advanced capitalist supply chains coordinate their physical production and transportation are valid precursors to, and directly usable by, a very different economic system. They do not depend at all on prices. Those signals are always through a medium, but sometimes indirect (as between agents who do not directly coordinate with each other) and sometimes direct (the agents do coordinate directly with each other, but use messages via some medium to do so).”

Grassroots and commons-based productive movements must of course continue their efforts, and the negative orientation towards more and more inequality (and surveillance/repression), and biospheric destruction are largely unchecked. However, it is also important not to be blind to real adaptations that are effectively occurring within the dominant system.

In 2010, I wrote an editorial in which I expressed my pessimism about the ability of capitalism to create a next long wave based on its integration of green and p2p models. Paul Mason has also eloquently expressed this in his last book on PostCapitalism, where he examines the Kondratieff long waves in depth, and comes to the conclusion that the new wave is stalled, and may not come about, leading to the necessity of post capitalist strategies and scenarios.

The crux of the debate is of course whether capitalism, which has been based on expelling ‘negative social and environmental externalities’ from its logic of value and profit, could actually internalize them, and still operate profitably. As a system, I still believe this is a fundamental structural impossibility, but that doesn’t mean that people operating within the system are not trying, and that this may lead to various hybrid adaptations. Capitalism has… Continue reading »