Venture Communism

Venture Commune's

URL = http://www.thetransitioner.org/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=WhatIsVentureCommunism

Description

A proposal for `venture communism'

"A Venture Commune is a joint stock corporation, much like the Venture Capital Funds of the Capitalist class, however it has four distinct properties which transform it into an effective vehicle for revolutionary worker's struggle.

1 -- A Share In The Venture Commune Can Only Be Acquired By Contributions Of Labour, and Not Property.

In other words only by working is ownership earned, not by contributing Land, Capital or even Money. Only Labour.

It is this contributed labour which represents the initial Investment capacity of the Commune.

The Commune Issues its own currency, based on the value of the labour pledges it has.

It then invests this currency into the private enterprises which it intends to purchase or fund, these Enterprises thus become owned by the Commune, in the same way that Enterprises which receive Venture Capital become owned by a Venture Capital Fund.

2 -- The Venture Commune's Return On Investment From Its Enterprises Is Derived From Rent and Not Income.

As condition of investment, the Enterprise agrees to not own its own property, neither Land nor Capital, but rather to rent Land and Capital from the Commune.

The Commune, unlike a Venture Capital Fund, never takes a share of the income of the Enterprise nor of any of its workers.

The Commune finances the acquisition of Land and Capital by issuing Bonds, and then Rents the Land and Capital to its Enterprises, or an Enterprise can sell whatever Land and Capital it acquires through other means to the Commune, and in turn Rent it.

In this way Property is always owned Mutually by all the members of the Commune, however all workers and the Enterprises that employ them retain the entire product of their labour.

3 -- The Venture Commune Is Owned Equally By All Its Members.

Each member can have one share, and only one share. Thus although each worker is able to earn different prices for their labour from the Enterprises, based on the demand for their labour, each worker may never earn any more than one share in the ownership of the Commune itself, and therefore can never accumulate a disproportionate share of the proceeds of Property.

Ownership of Property can therefore never be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and used to exploit the worker as in Capitalist corporations.

4 -- All Those Who Apply Their Labour To the Property of the Commune Must Be Eligible For Membership In The Commune.

The Commune may not refuse membership to any Labour employed by any of its enterprises that work with the Land and Capital controlled by the commune. In this way Commune members can not exploit outside wage earners, and the labour needs of the Enterprise will ensure that each Commune continues to grow and accept new members."

Discussion

Dmytri Kleiner:

"I see venture communism in two initial phases, in the first phase proto-venture-communist enterprises must break the Iron law and then join together to found a venture commune.

In a mature venture commune, cost-recovery is simply achieved by using rent-sharing to efficiently allocate property to its most productive use, thereby ensuring mutual accumulation. Rent sharing works by renting the property for it's full market value to member enterprises and then distributing the proceeds of this rent equally among all commune members.

Investment, when required by exogenous exchange, is funded by selling bonds at auction. Endogenous liquidity is achieved through the use of mutual credit.

However in the initial phase there is no property to rent-share and the demand for the bonds is likely to be insufficient, thus the only way the enterprise can succeed is to break the iron law and somehow capitalize and earn more than subsistence costs, making mutual accumulation possible.

IMO, there are two requirements for breaking the iron law:

a) The enterprise must have highly skilled creative labour, so that the labour itself can capture scarcity rents, i.e. artists, software developers.

b) Production must be based on what I call "commodity capital," that is Capital that is a common input to most, if not all, industries, and therefore is often subsidized by public and private foundations and available on the market for below it's actual cost. Examples of this are telecommunications and transportation infrastructure, both of which have been heavily subsidized.

Also, a third requirement for me, although not implied by the simple economic logic, is that the initial products are of general use to market segments I believe are most directly agents for social change, i.e. other peer producers, activists, diasporic/translocal communities and the informal economy broadly.

Also, I would like to note that while the initial enterprises depend on complex labour and should focus on products of strategic benefit, a mature venture commune can incorporate all types of labour and provide all types of goods and services once the implementation of rent-sharing, bond-auction and mutual-credit is achieved." (Oekonux mailing list, January 2008)

More Information

"Venture communists promote the ideal of workers owning their own means of production, to learn more about the theoretical, practical and philosophical implications of this mode of production, we invite you to explore these resources:

• http://www.mutualist.org

• http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/proudhon.htm

• http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/AboutDavidEllerman.htm

• http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/iron_fist.html

• http://www.thetransitioner.org/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=VentureCommunism

• http://www.iww.org/culture/official/preamble.shtml

• http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/hodgskin/labdef.txt

Telekommunisten.net is a company working on that model, at http://www.telekommunisten.net/