Distributed Stakeholder Ownership

Discussion

A new modality of ownership for the p2p age?

Sepp Hasslberger:

Ownership in the p2p age

"Traditionally, in the early years of industrial society, production was organized by owner/managers who employed and paid workers. They also owned the tools necessary for production and the buildings where production happened. They decided what to produce and how, and enjoyed complete freedom in their decisions of how to sell those products and what to do with the income derived from them. Profits were usually re-invested to improve tools, machines and buildings, and at times the wages of workers, when demands were made with enough force. Gradually however, the functions of owner and manager became separated. We now have investors as owners of corporations. They hire managers, who in turn hire and fire workers and run the business. Their brief is to maximize production and profit, and to lower the costs. Practically the only thing that matters is the bottom line.

Worker ownership of factories and more generally of the means of production was promoted as a way to overcome the widening gap between profit and wages, but notwithstanding a few laudable examples, it never did acquire sufficient momentum to bring lasting change. The gap continued to widen. Absentee owners (investors) are demanding maximization of their profits on investment and managers are highly paid to deliver those maximized returns. In order to save costs, companies have broken unions wherever possible. Increasingly, they have transferred operations to those countries where they were able to hire the cheapest help. As profit maximization gets more sophisticated, the quality of products and their life span is reduced, while prices are kept as high as the market will bear. Competition is largely avoided by acquisition of competing operators. Technological innovation is kept to a minimum, except where it can replace labor.

In recent decades and as a consequence of those profit maximization policies, unemployment has been rising in the "developed" countries. Where once prosperity was almost taken for granted, we now see more and more people without a job, living on the streets, sleeping in cars and under bridges. For a limited time, services could take up the slack in demand for production of goods, but that is rapdily coming to an end. With rising unemployment, consumers no longer have the financial means to acquire the products offered by industry. In a vicious feedback loop, employment is further falling as demand flags because consumers, no longer working, are broke. The industrial model is showing that finance, not people, is its ultimate aim.

P2P - a new paradigm

For some decades now, a new economic paradigm has been developing as laid-off workers struggle to give meaning to their lives and to make ends meet. Production is moving from its globalized financial/industrial setting to localized activity. Industrial agriculture gives way to small-scale farming, often organic or inspired by principles of permaculture, where neither pesticide and herbicide poisons, nor industrial fertilizers are used. Work for a corporation is rapidly giving way to running a micro-business, often from home with sales on the net. Open source micro manufacturing is getting ready to revolutionize the way we source our hardware, from tools to electronics, from houses to our means of transport.

As the peer-to-peer way of life revolutionizes production, the old model of ownership is also slipping away.

In a world where workers were bound to industry and a job was a precondition for survival, where industry was owned by people who have succeeded to accumulate "capital", and where we saw the worker as one class and the industrialist/capitalist as its opposite, it made sense to demand worker ownership of the means of production. It was a requirement of social justice that those doing the producing should also receive at least a fair part of the fruits of their labor. A more just distribution of the fruits of labor would have allowed the workers to continue functioning as consumers, meaning both people and industry could have co-existed.

We have moved away from this direct counterposition of labor/capital, as the limits of the industrial model become obvious. Finance (or capital) has, with time, gained a too great an advantage over labor. Robots and computers are cheaper than most human labor and so workers are being replaced, sent home, relegated to marginal jobs with little pay. Collective bargaining has lost its edge because humans are no longer the only workers available.

Many of the former workers have become producers of goods and providers of service, and all of us are, to some extent, users. For now, this new paradigm co-exists with the remnants of the industrial model. There is no clear break, no line where one ends and the other starts. It is a fluid change.

The new world is p2p rather than hierarchy. It is a world where providers of goods and services are also users and vice versa.

Now the question: "Who should own the means of production" demands new answers. No longer are we the workers who would like to have a part of the industrial pie, neither are the means of production restricted to those who have "capital". We are working for ourselves, and largely to satisfy the needs of people just like us.

Distributed stakeholder ownership?

In a p2p world, it will no longer be possible to monopolize ownership through accumulation of capital. The industrial model will not lose its validity, but it will be one of many possible arrangements. New models of distributed ownership are needed.

In Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), we have a traditional farm, but the products are already owned by the farm's supporters, giving them a stake in the farm's production. This is moving in the direction of co-ownership of the farm. No longer is there a clear distinction between those who work and use the farm's products and those who pay and use the farm's products. The users of the product (milk, meat, vegetables, fruit) may own the farm, but if they share in the work needed to make the product, they become also producers. The same could be true for any kind of enterprise, such as a car factory, a maker of energy production equipment, a builder, a system to allow people to travel and to find a place to stay while in a strange city.

Is there even a need to distinguish any more between owners, workers and consumers?

Some of the participants do more work than others, so the distinction is no longer neat and clear. Separation of owner, worker and user is only a matter of degree. All are stakeholders, one contributes with physical labor, the other contributes with finance that is needed to acquire tools and pay for repairs or expansion. All of them enjoy the fruits of the labor.

Both users and producers should be considered to be stakeholders. In each type of enterprise, some of us hold a greater stake in consumption, some of us are predominantly producers. But all of us have an interest in the activity to continue.

Ownership should be with those who have an interest, be it the producers, be it the consumers. Distributed stakeholder ownership that can take many forms is definitely in our future." (email April 2011)