OPEN EVERYTHING: SOCIAL SHARING ECONOMICS BEYOND THE MARKET AND THE STATE

OPEN EVERYTHING: SOCIAL SHARING IS THE ALTERNATIVE TO ECOCIDE, INJUSTICE AND ALIENATION.


I think Yochai Benkler is going to outshine Adam Smith and Keynes, his concept of social sharing provides an economics that will work in meeting human needs, ending bureaucratic forms of government control and in replacing markets with real human creativity. Ofcourse none of this is new, of course Benkler's paper on sharing nicely is quite modest and of course the whole project is open source so never one person's pet but lets celebrate Benkler, a rare thing...an economist with something interesting to say...the economist who shows how we can work with rather than against the planet.

Thanks for sharing

SIR – Yochai Benkler's contention that social sharing provides an economic alternative to both markets and the state sounds both novel and obscure (Economics focus, February 5th). Yet the principle of “usufruct”, which allows resources to be used by any individual provided he or she leaves them in at least as good a state as they were given, can be found in ancient Roman law. Commons regimes (where local communities share the use of common land through rationing, so replenishing their resources without eroding them) are found throughout history and across four continents. Such sharing provides a way of restoring economics back to its original promise as a science that finds ways of matching scarce resources with unlimited human wants. In other words, while there may be no such thing as a free lunch, you can use my crockery as long as you wash and dry.

Derek Wall

Windsor, Berkshire (Economist, 17th February, 2005)


Yocai Benkler in an issue of Harvard Law Review has argued that there is an alternative to both market based economics and state regulation, inspired by open source principles he calls this social sharing. Social sharing is essentially a new term for traditional commons regimes and provides the essential basis for a green economy, not simply an environmental economy which internalises externalities but an economy which is ecologically sustainable, socially just and grassroots democratic.


'BY NOW, most people who use computers have heard of the “open source” movement, even if they are not sure what it is. It is a way of making software (and increasingly, other things as well), which relies on the individual contributions of thousands of programmers. The resulting programs are owned by no one and are free for all to use. The software is copyrighted only to ensure it remains free to use and enhance. In essence, therefore, open source involves two things: putting spare capacity (geeks' surplus time and skill) into economic production; and sharing. (Economist 3rd Feb, 2005)




Switch on your computer and click on the web and you will use a browser to enter the site you want. Ninety per cent of computers come pre-packaged with Microsoft Explorer. So when you bought your PC a proportion of the cost went to Bill Gates. Yet open source internet browsers like Firefox can be downloaded for free and are generally agreed to do a better job than purchased products. OpenOffice, a free office software suite with almost 50 million downloads, does more than its commercial rivals. The open source movement produces programmes, designs and an ever expanding range of other forms of information that are developed, passed around and continuously adapted and improved.





I learned about open source within days of finishing my book on anti-capitalism, Babylon and Beyond, took a look on the computers at work and found all of them connected to the internet with Firefox. Students and teaching colleagues whose computer skills don’t necessarily extend beyond email and web browsing are all keen advocates of open source software.



While the terminology is disputed, open/free source is based on two key principles. First, packages of information are free for use, although sometimes cash is generated by selling allied products or services. Firefox is provided by Mozilla, which generates income via donations to the Mozilla Foundation and work with corporate users.



Participatory production is the second key theme. Individuals are encouraged to adapt and change products – an approach that underlies the development of the world wide web itself. Tim Berners-Lee, who is widely credited as being one of the two main inventors of the web, combined pre-existing software to create it and insisted that it be based on royalty-free use so that it could grow quickly. While Bill Gates is probably the richest man in the world, the web upon which his wealth is based was made for free. This apparent paradox provides a puzzle for conventional economists and indicates that a very different notion of economics is possible.



Economists tie themselves in knots trying to explain open source. To cut a long and complicated story short, traditional capitalist economics assumes that greed is good. If Tim Berners-Lee had charged for every click on the world wide web, he would long ago have bought out Bill Gates and built the first dacha on the moon. Explaining why things are done for free is challenging for a discipline that insists that human beings are always motivated by material self-interest.



With open source, however, people produce things simply for the satisfaction of doing so. Computer geeks don’t think ‘career first’ but get on the net for the sheer hell of creating something new and ironing out some bugs in their mate’s software. Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is written, edited and available for free. Articles have no named authors, so note even prestige can be seen as the motivation – people just go online and contribute for the satisfaction of doing so.



Some more conventional economic benefits arise from this. Free software development pushes down labour costs and is helping to attack monopolies like Microsoft, earning open source a following among right wing liberatarians.



But this has obviously progressive implications too. The ‘free’ market is actually built on the principle of enclosure – converting previously unowned, shared resources into paid-for commodities. This is a process that can be seen in one of its most blatant forms today when corporations try to patent naturally occurring seeds so that peasants who have previously used them for free have to pay for them – a process that leads to economic expansion on the one hand and increased poverty and restrictions on freedom on the other. A similar situation applies with computer software, where the capacity for creative sharing is reined in by the enclosure of computer code as corporate intellectual property.



Open source challenges this approach and returns software to common ownership. This is far from a new idea. Commons regimes, where local communities share the use of common land through rationing, are found throughout history. The term ‘usufruct’ is used to denote this process, whereby a resource can be borrowed and used as long as it is put back in its original state. Open source means it is put back in a better state than it started out.



Attempts to produce for free, to share and to make resources serve the community will always be resisted by corporations, which are invariably keen to promote renewed enclosure. The non-corporate vision, however, is that the free use of productive resources will facilitate the creation of a society that is both ecologically sustainable and equal, based on participation rather than command. The future of radical politics, then, is inextricably linked with the fight for an open source or free society. One day our descendents may even say with amazement that their grandparents used to work for money rather than for pleasure and necessity.



What is the Commons?

Open source is far from a new idea. Commons regimes, where local communities share the use of common land through rationing, are found throughout history. The term ‘usufruct’ is used to denote this process, whereby a resource can be borrowed and used as long as it is put back in its original state. Open source means it is put back in a better state than it started out.

There are numerous well documented accounts of commons regimes, where regulation occurs through local bargaining and shared use. In Canada the Ojibway Nation of Ontario still harvest wild rice from Wabigoon Lake using commons principles:
Violations of harvest allocations by machine harvesters are dealt with at community meetings: a recent case resulted in one machine harvester being denied harvest rights for the rest of one season. For each canoe harvest area, the community agrees upon ‘a field boss’ whose responsibilities are to regulate the harvest cycle according to custom, and to arbitrate in any disputes. Where harvesting rules are breached, the offender may be ‘grounded’, one person in a recent harvest being told to ‘relearn the Indian way by sitting on the shore and watching’. (Ecologist 1993: 127)
The Ecologist claims that while the commons has an old fashioned feel for many of us in Europe and North America it is a reality for the ‘vast majority of humanity’ (Ecologist 1992: 127). Ninety percent of inshore fisheries are regulated by commons. Depletion is a product of high tech hoovering by unregulated Japanese and European fleets keen to increase profit rather than more local abuse (Ecologist 1992: 127). In Maine, lobster fisheries have long been preserved by the commons, in Finland, many forests are communally regulated and in Switzerland, grazing is controlled by commoners to prevent ‘tragedy’ through over exploitation:
[in] Torbel in Switzerland, a village of some 600 people […] grazing lands, forests, ‘waste’ lands, irrigation systems and paths and roads connecting privately and communally owned property are all managed as commons. […] Under a regulation which dates back to 1517, which applies to many other Swiss mountain villages, no one can send more cows to the communal grazing areas than they can feed during the winter, a rule that is still enforced with a system of fines. (Ecologist 1992: 128)
Ostrom (1991) provides numerous case study examples of commons in land, river use, fisheries, etc.




Some ecological gains from social sharing

1. Reduced resource consumption without poverty.

By sharing goods, for example, car pooling we can reduce our resource use and have access to essential goods. Only the market social shring does not have a built in growth imperative.


2. Usufrucht
Social sharing is based on the principle of usufrucht, using resources without damaging, this is an ecological alternative to traditional property rights. Permaculture rather than intensive agriculture to serve Tescos would be a social sharing usufrucht model. The whole idea is we use property and make sure that when we have finished with it, it is in just as good a state if not better than when we found it.


Social sharing is socialism
It is in a sense even communism, based on sharing, equality, it aims for free access not privatisation. Social sharing is democratic and participatory.
Marx links the open source principle to socialism and use, we should take what we want but nurture what we use for the benefit of the next generation:
From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuries, and like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. (Marx quoted in Kovel 2002: 238)

Or as Nandor notes in my book Babylon, 'We humans think that we can own the planet, as if fleas could own a dog. Our concepts of property ownership are vastly different from traditional practises of recognising use rights over various resources. A right to grow or gather food or other resources in a particular place is about meeting needs. Property ownership is about the ability to live on one side of the world and speculate on resources on the other, possibly without ever seeing it, without regard to need or consequence.'



The struggle for social sharing.

In short while traditional socialism sees centralised planning as a model and usually ignores the environment and the market seeks to enclose and exploit, social sharing in its varied guises provides the only model of economic regulation that tends towards green goals. Greens should abandon environmental economics which is based on further extensions of the market and embrace the open source option. Today millions of people are struggling to defend, extend and deepen the commons...join them, spread the word, embrace the practical struggle against those who would fence, sell back and devastate. Today wikipedia is a dictionary, tomorrow if we are to have a tomorrow it will be the world.

Bibliography

Benkler, Y. “Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production.” Yale Law Journal, November 2004. http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_114-2.pdf

Ecologist (1992) Whose Common Future? Ecologist, 22 (4).

Kovel, J. (2002) The Enemy of Nature. New York: Zed Press.

Wall, D. (2005) Babylon and Beyond: the economics of anti-capitalist, anti-globalist and radical green movements. London: Pluto.

see also Open Source Economics www.redpepper.org.uk/tech/x-nov05-wall.htm



This is culled from Babylon, from a paper for the Green Economics Institute, from Red Pepper, from my letter to the economist below, from talks I give nearly every week to greens, socialist groups and others about genuine alternative economics, please open source it by rewriting and distributing to others!