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

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

The context

While fair markets are an acceptable mechanism to regulate supply and demand for certain scarce goods, unregulated capitalism has become 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. When this outside is weak, the dominant corporate form lacks self-regulating mechanisms to respect natural limits and social justice.

However, open design and production communities have no compulsion to create artificial scarcity, and entrepreneurial 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. These commons are surrounded by an entrepreneurial coalition of ethical companies, who use relocalized, open, and distributed manufacturing; but are organized in global material networks 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

• Worker-Owned Cooperatives and Consumer-Owned Cooperatives

• The Entrepreneur Commons

• Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding

• 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)

Poor Richard:

The problems described above by Chris Carlson apply to most publicly-held for-profit corporations and many privately held ones, although the legal obligations to shareholders are much less strictly regulated in the latter case. In the case of not-for-profit corporations, if they receive tax-exempt status they are generally restricted to donations and grants for their funding. The regulations on tax-exempt non-profits are in part intended to prevent them from engaging in competition with for-profit businesses. They must remain dependent on charitable and philanthropic support. On the other hand, a cooperative may generate its own revenues in the same fashion as a for-profit corporation. It may distribute net revenues to its members, rebate them to customers, and/or retain them for expansion or other purposes. Certain kinds of non-profit cooperatives may qualify for tax exemptions, but as long as a cooperative does not book a profit it pays no income tax whether it has a specific exemption or not. Property tax treatments may vary. In the US there are several other corporate and cooperative forms, each with its own regulations and tax treatment. These include Limited Liability Companies (LLC), Subchapter S Corporations (S-Corp), Farmer Cooperatives, Electric Cooperatives, Credit Unions, and others. The most recent form in the US is the For-Benefit Corporation which is essentially a hybrid of the public, for-profit corp and the not-for-profit corp. Choosing the most appropriate form for any given purpose can be a complex task.

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