The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto by Kevin Carson

Author:Kevin Carson [Carson, Kevin]
Format: epub

As the reference to “distributed financial capital” indicates, the availability of crowdsourced and distributed means of aggregating dispersed capital is as important as the implosion of outlay costs for actual physical capital. A good example of such a system is the Open Source Hardware Bank, a microcredit network organized by California hardware hackers to pool capital for funding new open source hardware projects.647

The availability (or unavailability) of capital to working class people will have a significant effect on the rate of self-employment and small business formation. The capitalist credit system, in particular, is biased toward large-scale, conventional, absentee-owned firms. David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald648 found that childhood personality traits and test scores had almost no value in predicting adult entrepreneurship. On the other hand, access to startup capital was the single biggest factor in predicting self-employment. There is a strong correlation between self-employment and having received an inheritance or a gift.649 NSS data indicate that most small businesses were begun not with bank loans but with own or family money....”650 The clear implication is that there are "undesirable impediments to the market supply of entrepreneurship."651 In short, the bias of the capitalist credit system toward conventional capitalist enterprise means that the rate of wage employment is higher, and self-employment is lower, than their likely free market values. The lower the capital outlays required for self-employment, and the easier it is to aggregate such capital outside the capitalist credit system, the more self-employment will grow as a share of the total labor market.

Jed Harris, at Anomalous Presumptions blog, reiterates Bauwens' point that peer production makes it possible to produce without access to large amounts of capital. “The change that enables widespread peer production is that today, an entity can become self-sustaining, and even grow explosively, with very small amounts of capital. As a result it doesn’t need to trade ownership for capital, and so it doesn’t need to provide any return on investment.”652

Charles Johnson adds that, because of the new possibilities the Internet provides for lowering the transaction costs entailed in networked mobilization of capital, peer production can take place even when significant capital investments are required—without relying on finance by large-scale sources of venture capital:

it’s not just a matter of projects being able to expand or sustain themselves with little capital.... It’s also a matter of the way in which both emerging distributed technologies in general, and peer production projects in particular, facilitate the aggregation of dispersed capital—without it having to pass through a single capitalist chokepoint, like a commercial bank or a venture capital fund.... Meanwhile, because of the way that peer production projects distribute their labor, peer-production entrepreneurs can also take advantage of spare cycles on existing, widely-distributed capital goods—tools like computers, facilities like offices and houses, software, etc. which contributors own, which they still would have owned personally or professionally whether or not they were contributing to the peer production project.... So it’s not just a matter of cutting total aggregate costs for capital goods...; it’s also,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.