Workers are Consumers

Every Worker is a Consumer.

We must protect the Worker's ability to Consume.

Our faulty approach pits Owners against Consumers.

Owners want Prices high and Consumers want them low.

But imagine the case where the Owners are Consumers, in just enough amount to produce what they each will use.

Consider a group of 1,000 milk-drinkers who invest to buy and co-own a dairy for the purpose of receiving the milk as the return for that risk.

Since Product is ROI, there is no sale and so Price == Cost and Profit == 0 (actually undefined).

This means Prices are the lowest possible, and yet the Owners (who are also the Consumers) are not harmed since their goal is Product, not Profit.

This pre-allocates goods to those who predict they will need them when they prepare by investing either Property or Promises.

By 'Promises' I mean Workers gain co-ownership by investing "Promises of Future Labor" instead of Property.

This eliminates the need for traditional wages by helping workers swap skills before production begins.

We will charge profit against latecomers who buy surplus, but will then invest that profit *for* the payer, causing each users to incrementally gain co-ownership in the Sources of all the production he needs.

Free as in Freedom Production

Could we ever learn to share the hardware needed for production?

Notice corporations are also 'sharing' and must also cover costs.

But corporations must charge *more* than costs to collect Profit
because that is what their investors expect as a Return for risk.

But if the investors were the consumers, then they could accept
Product as their Return, making Price and Cost identical since
there is no sale, and so Profit is undefined.

Learning to Share Sources (co-own the Means of Production) is one
half of a plan we can use to begin ignoring the Capitalists.

Learning to Swap Skills (barter our specialized labor for the benefit
of others while those others perform labor for our benefit) is the
other half.

When we finally can co-own the infrastructure of all our Production,
including ISP and cloud services, but more importantly, agriculture
and housing and even city infrastructure will be under our control.

And since the Product will not be sold (except during surplus), we
will not need to pass tokens to receive those goods and services
because the user will already own what he would have otherwise
been forced to purchase because of his co-owning the inputs.

When we finally can trade work by committing to achieve future
production in return for others committing to do the same for us,
then we can specialize without passing tokens.

Jobs are a Problem to be Eliminated when Product is the Return on Investment

Work is not a solution, it is one of our primary problems!

We don't want the drudgery of repeating rote tasks when we could be otherwise engaged in solving larger issues.

But we have been confused into this bizarre stance from long-standing problems with Property concentration caused by misapplication of Profit.


There is another way to look at this.

We use the wrong lenses, seeking wrong goals.

Our goals should be peace, abundance and leisure, but Profit requires scarcity and finally war, while leisure is a problem because we do not use Property for Use-Value, but can only imagine it being for Exchange-Value unless on single-ownership basis...


Product is goal when Users (co-)own Sources.

You can imagine owning an Apple Tree all alone, with no trouble with eliminating all the work that might ever be needed to care for the tree and harvest and store the fruit.

But try to imagine owning an Apple Orchard with 99 other people, and a Milk Dairy with 150 other people, and a group of cell-phone towers with 1,000,000 other people.

If we will co-own as Users, treating Product as the Return for that risk, then we can safely eliminate all the chores we are able to eliminate without worring that we are doing the wrong thing.

Employment will not be a goal of society when Users co-own the Sources of Production.

Goals

Many people try to co-own the Sources
of production for their mutual benefit.

It is a very old problem with nearly as
many approaches as attempts.

My goal here is to expose the 'bugs' in
the various ways we try to achive this
so we might finally understand *why* and
*how* our systems of production tend to
grow out of our control and even finally
turn against us in their quest to keep
Price above Cost.

This analysis is meant to be a mechanical,
emotionless disection of our systems of
production and trade with the intent to
derive the 'algorithm' needed to stop
individuals or sub-groups from capturing
excessive portions of the available re-
sources - very much the same goal as an
Operating System kernel attempting to
allocate and schedule the components of
a computer among competing processes.


----


I am trying to devise a better way
for willing participants to share the
Sources of those Objectives they need.

A scenario that repeats again and again
is that of the family or communal group
that tries to create a self-sufficient
farm only to realize too late that the
growth of that group is not controlled
by those who use it, but by those who
originated and/or now currently *own*
those Physical Sources.

I hope to convince people like Marcin
Jakubowski that it will take more than
biology and technology to compete with
Capitalism: we are going to need another
way to allocate Property that solves
the long-standing issue of Capital
Overaccumulation so Villages can grow
and even become growth 'conduits' that
allow others to grow their own Villages
in an incremental fashion as they buy
surplus from established Villages and
pay Profit which funds the purchase of
even more land and more construction
needed to finally house all of humanity.

This can be done through a legally binding
Social Contract analogous to the goals
of the GNU GPL, but applied by Contract
or Terms of Operation or some such thing
to Private Property (probably in a Trust)
which enforces the constraints we are now
discovering about how to create Freedom
within the Physical realm - and from that,
real Freedom within the Virtual realm -
for no Virtual thing can exist without the
Physical Sources needed to *host* it.

Profit as Payer Investment Safely Reduces Trade

Imagine crowds buy and co-own the Physical Sources used to create the goods and services they need.

They pay all the Costs of production, including wages to all workers and any managers.

But since the Product itself is the Return for their investment risk, there is no Sale.

And since there is no Sale, there is no Profit (which would usually be Consumer_Price - Owner_Costs).

There would also be no Tax since that final transaction does not even occur.

...

This is sufficient for the perfect case - where the Consumers own *exactly* enough Sources (for example a milk dairy) to create *exactly* enough Product (milk, butter, cheese, etc.).

When there is surplus, we could sell it to those outside the Crowd, and could likely sell it for more than the real Costs of production, meaning we would 'Profit'.

But we misunderstand the true purpose and therefore correct destination of Profit.

Profit measures Property mis-allocation, and is *eliminated* when the Consumers own the Sources of the things they need.

We should treat Profit as an Investment from late Payers so they incrementally become co-owners in *new* Sources the current owners would buy (land, water rights, etc.) to grow the corporation.

Local Production is Global Resistance

Sharing hardware to host the production of our solutions.

Swapping skills within a permaculture production mosaic.

In these two ways we finally eliminate charge and wage.

Charge is gone since owners do not buy, but own already.

Wage is gone through early commitments as real insurance.

For example, we might attract a Dentist to the mosaic with
only 'Wage' being a nice living space, all he needs to eat
of organic, on-site grown prepared meals, simple but good
clothing, health care, etc.

In return for our the rest of us shoveling manure, slaughtering
hogs, flipping burgers, brain surgery, etc., the Dentist will
promise (some legally-binding contract) to provide all of us
with dental care for as much as we need. The hardware
needed for these operations are provided by the customer
or are co-owned by groups of customers.

Freedom Hardware

I wonder why we, as users, refuse to accept the mantle of ownership.

We don't need yet another layer; we need to collapse the role of Customer and Vendor into one, cohesive unit so the Owners and Users no longer fight, but are one and the same.

This can be done in new businesses we start by choosing potential Consumers AS the Investors. This is similar to crowd-sourcing or crowd-funded, but is actually Crowd-Owned.

When the Crowd (the Users, Consumers, Customers) choose to co-own the Physical Sources of Production this delimma will disappear.

But there is one more issue: we must also protect the late-comer who does not yet have enough co-ownership and is subject to the whims of those who are already established. If we do not solve this problem, then the business will move more and more toward the typical model of centralized control.

The solution for the dynamic case is to write a Terms of Operation that we, as co-owning Users can choose to apply to our Physical Sources in the same way software developers choose to apply the GNU GPL to their Virtual Sources.

This Terms of Operation will state that all Profit gathered from late-comers will be invested on behalf of that payer and must become that payer's co-property (after some vesting period or after some conditions are met that are not yet clear to me).

By doing this - by treating Profit as Payer investment - the User-Owned collective can grow in size while avoiding the usual problem of power concentration that occurs when Profit is treated as the property of those who are already established (the current owners usually treat it as their own reward).

Gmail, Facebook, Amazon, etc. hold our data and do things we do not want them to do, but we are mostly defenseless because - even though Freedom Software exists to replace those services, there is not yet a fully realized vision of Freedom Hardware.

When I say Freedom Hardware, I am not talking about the design of hardware, but am talking about real, physical instances of material assets such as land, water, buildings, computers, wires, and all the energy needed to power any of that production.

We, the Users need to gather together to co-own the Material Means of Production (the Physical Sources) required to *host* the production for which we need the outputs.

We, the Customers can co-own the Datacenters, the Hotels, the Farms, the Factories. We already pay all the costs of those establishments anyway, and we also pay Profit because of our lack of ownership!