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Market Anarchist vs Social Democratic-Influenced Ideas about the potential of "Peer to Peer" technologies.

Over at the excellent P2P Foundation blog, there is another interesting new post with an excerpt of a piece by Kevin Carson, titled "The Third Industrial Revolution Won’t Be As Easily Coopted as the Second".

I think this is of interest since Carson's certainly an original thinker and is working to update anarchist thought for the modern world. Similarly, the whole "Peer-to-Peer" movement, as curated by Michel Bauwens on the site, seems to me also extremely relevant and worth engaging with for anyone trying to distill the features of a better social, economic and political system for the 21st century.

Anyway, I posted a rather long response comment to Kevin's piece there, with the main points I'm trying to get across being:

  • A need for a more nuanced understanding of technology networks ...
  • The need for some kind of strong Commons basis if P2P technologies like Open Hardware and Open Source are to really flourish;
  • An effort to think through where a 'Market anarchist P2P' and 'Social-democratic inspired P2P' might be able to find common ground (e.g., if the rules for corporations were majorly re-thought).

Perhaps other Isocratians would be interested to take a look, and extend the debate there? For example, it seems the idea of Resource Rent Taxes and unimproved land value taxes, part of the current Isocracy platform as I currently understand them, could play an important element here.

Comments

In relation to the ideas in my reaction to Kevin's piece, especially the "morality of the Market", just came across Compass' latest Thinkpiece, "Can Citizens or Consumers make a New Moral World?".

The article, by Prof Noel Thompson of Swansea University, gives an engaging review of changing ideas about Market exchange and the role and morality of consumption in the UK socialist tradition.

One quote I like is: "Consumer sovereignty, within cooperative communities, was therefore predicated on the socialization, and therefore moralization, of individual choice."