Can we invent new corporate formats for P2P and commons-friendly market approaches?

What we need, specifically for peer production, is a supportive ecosystem!

The context

While markets are an acceptable mechanism to regulate supply and demand for certain scarce goods, capitalism is an infinite-growth, scarcity engineering mechanism, which is incompatible with the long-term survival of humanity and the biosphere. More specifically, profit-maximising companies are engineered to ignore natural and social externalities, are legally obligated to maximally enrich their shareholders, and can only be regulated from the outside, and when this outside is weak, lacks self-regulating mechanism to respect natural limits and social justice.

However, open design communities have no compulsion to create artificial scarcity, and enterpreneurial coalitions that align themselves to such commons, will have more sustainable practices. This sustainable practice can be strengthened even more through the choice of legal and institutional formats that regulate corporate entities 'from the inside', by creating a social and natural context for eventual profit making (and not 'profit-maximising'). Ideally, peer producers and contributors to commons of knowledge, software and design, could create their own ethical structures and network each other in ecologies of solidarity around the commons from which they derive their value.

So, at the core we have shared innovation commons, and the for-benefit associations which maintain them, and these commons are surrounded by an enterpreneurial coalition of ethical companies, who use relocalized open and distributed manufacturing, but are organized in global material coalitions that are specifically designed to sustain their commons, i.e. Phyles.

What we like

• The concept of Phyles, global, mission-oriented, community-supportive market entities

• A license to support the Commons and the Solidarity Economy: the Peer Production License

• Growing in solidarity: Solidarity Franchising

• Intro to For-Benefit Corporations‎ and other Fourth Sector Organizations

• The Entrepreneur Commons

• Key video on corporate reform: Michael_Yaziji_on_Rethinking_the_Structure_of_Corporations; beyond 'free market', regulation and socialization, what is needed is to broaden the ownership of firms to bring in social interests within the firm.

Citations

Chris Carlsoon:

"Corporations ARE the problem as the common institutional form of late capitalism, the social system that is the real root of poverty and inequality. Corporations are (temporarily) immortal, often unaccountable to national laws, brazenly criminal, murderous, and have only one purpose: to accumulate capital. They are not, and cannot be, moral actors in society. Even if the most pious, ascetic monks were put in charge of large corporations, the fiduciary responsibility of corporate leaders is to ensure the growth of profits and wealth for the stockholders or private owners. Corporations are not formed to do anything useful or beneficial to humans (except as an accidental byproduct), nor other species, nor the planet as a whole, unless (and only if) the activity produces profits. Corporate leaders can be personally very greedy or completely indifferent to personal wealth. It does not matter. If they don’t show steadily increasing “growth” (accumulating capital) they will be replaced by the next interchangeable “captain of industry.” (http://www.nowtopians.com/work-and-the-economy/%E2%80%9Ccorporate-greed%E2%80%9D-is-not-the-problem)

Visualisations

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  Solidarity Economy visualisation

Related Sections

• Information on licenses
• Information on open business models
• Information on cooperatives
• Information on p2p-friendly market approaches
• Information on p2p-friendly property formats