User Ownership

Model proposed by Patrick Anderson.

See our entry on the Inter-Owner Agreement

Description

"Producers" sometimes means "Owners" and sometimes means "Workers".

If you mean "Owners" then of course they are already in control.

If you mean "Workers" then you create the Mode that Marx dreamt of, and which might be temporarily slightly better than what we experience now.

If you mean "Consumers" then you create the Mode that Richard Stallman invented through the General Public License, and is the most correct arrangement.

As an example, when you pay for the costs of copying an apple, which would you say is better:

1. An arbitrary, non-working group of Owners control the care (they may spray the orchard with dangerous chemicals) of those Sources, and can charge a price above cost to Profit limited only by other competing Owners.

2. Marxism - where the Owners are the Workers that plant, water, maintain and harvest the fruit. They control the Sources similarly to the Owners in #1, but at least they can pay themselves a higher Wage. The consumer still has little control, is not allowed to do any of the work himself, and is still at the mercy of those who Own.

3. The perfect Mode where the collective Owners are the Consumers themselves. They can make the copies themselves (tend their portion of the orchard in the manner they see fit - and within the constraint of realistic divisibility), or they may hire others to work for them, but either way we (the users/consumers) are in complete control. Such a mode also causes Price to be the same as Cost, as Profit has no meaning when the consumer Owns the Sources - or in other words, if the Consumer did pay profit it, he would be paying himself.

Since option 3 is not achievable in a perfect or static manner (especially during the initial growth period) because the consumer may not yet Own the Sources that were used during the round of production that created that exact object, but this Mode can always be "approached" by Owners who choose to apply an inter-owner contract that requires any profit paid by consumers be an investment in more sources, or toward paying-off some current investments, and that that those shares become the semi-divisible property of that very same consumer."

Discussion

Patrick Anderson:

"“It is the difficulty in organizing large collective investments that keeps Users (Consumers) from owning the physical Sources of Production that would allow us to then have “at cost” access and full control of the Objects of that production.

If a group of Users (Consumers) were to incorporate and purchase some physical Sources that they voluntarily put under a contract that required all profit at each transaction be targeted as an investment for that very user in more physical Sources, then that collective ownership would grow according to the interest of the participants until it would soon outperform large holders - whether they be Google or ConAgra.

I wonder how we could prove it is the Users (Consumers) who must OWN for optimum economic efficiency, and who will otherwise continue to beg and wonder why those that do OWN withhold access for the purposes of profit (usury).”

More Information

Please see http://EcoComics.org for a more thorough analysis

"The Comical Ecology Of Political Economy - or how the poor fund the war" at http://EcoComics.org/ecocom.html