[VBbuilders] Co-Owning the Physical Layer

[Michel Bauwens]

I've been asked privately if I could not clarify my own position regarding
owners vs. users/consumers forms of ownership,

so here is attempt,

as I tried to indicate, the issue is primarily ethical and concerns the
sovereignity of the producers of value,

so without even necessarily having to be a believer in the labour theory of
value, I think it is pretty clear that humans are the primary creators of
value when they 'rework' what is given to us by nature,

if this is true, then it follows that the producers of value, the workers,
should be the primary 'owners', 'possesors' or beneficiaries of that value,

now, does this necessarily mean that they should be the 'sole' owners?

not at all, first of all, because it may be difficult to identify 'single'
value creators, as we inherit so much from nature, from previous
generations, and form the complex present society that we belong to, i.e.
value creation is increasingly socialized

this means that a wider variety of forms that marry individual and
collective ownership must be possible,

my second belief in in pluralism, freedom of choice, experimental freedom
and the like, which is a strong argument for plural forms of property, but
within limits, i.e. no property forms that destroy the environment,
create/increate injustices to intolerable levels etc .. so I'm strongly
opposed to leaving the current form of profit maximising forms of property
'as is'; if it is to survive, it has to be strongly reformed to recognize
positive and negative social and environmental externalities, stripped of
its personhood, etc ...

Finally, there is the important issue of stakeholders and people afffected
by any activity, this is an argument for extend ownership and at least
stakeholder ship to user communities and all others that are affected,
including eventually the wider citizen community ...

sepp poses the important issue of governance vs. ownership, there it seems
to me, and this is the great weakness of peer production until now, is that
governance without ownership is weak, and therefore it is worth posing the
issue of ownership, and not leaving it on the side

this is by the way also a strong argument to keep forms of individual
ownership along with collective forms, as an ultimate guarantee of personal
sovereignty in a socialized world

distribituted, plural forms of ownership and governance, with freedom of
choice, is the key; the producers should not be separated from the means of
production, so that the wage relationship does not become another name for
slavery

Michel

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 5:32 AM, Sepp Hasslberger <sepp at lastrega.com> wrote:

>
> Patrick Anderson wrote:
>
> > 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?
>
> No, nothing of the sort. All I was saying is that the network is owned by
> the users and it is maintained by them, in the sense that the users are
> responsible for its maintenance. Of course they could hire anyone to do that
> work, or one of the users could be compensated by other users to take care
> of maintenance of a larger part of the network.
>
> I do not think that outsiders (like a technician who is not a user of the
> particular network he maintains) should be required to be owners. A clean
> professional relationship would be just fine. That is not to say that the
> technician could not also become a user and part owner of the network, if he
> so desired.
>
> Sepp




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