Thank you Roberto. I agree that to brush over the distinction between the household and the wider social economy will miss qualitative differences, and particularly the one you mention.

Kevin emphasises the recent nature of the nuclear family, but the quality you point to is a characteristic of more extended households. 

"The basic difference is that members of the household do not put a high priority, if they consider it important at all, to keep track of values created and exchanged within the household."

It is that quality, which is not based on reciprocity, which, I maintain, is the foundation of every sustainable society. It emanates from the mother child relationship, (seen as archetype rather than in the particular ways it manifests), which prioritises care and love above exchange values. It is this factor which has been confined as Kevin points out, to the smallest possible unit, because it challenges the very nature of the economy based on scarcity and objectifying people and nature, and which the Commons needs to acknowledge as the ultimate basis of any wholesome relationship. 

Anna

On 15 Oct 2017, at 07:16, Roberto Verzola <rverzola@gn.apc.org> wrote:

I will argue that the household (whether it is a nuclear family or a multi-generational one) is qualitatively different from the other three (govt, market, commons) and therefore deserves to be treated separately.

The basic difference is that members of the household do not put a high priority, if they consider it important at all, to keep track of values created and exchanged within the household. Governments and markets keep very close track. Those who share common resources presumably want some accounting and tracking too, if not as detailed as the other two, to guard against free-riders and to reward to some extent those who contribute most to the common resource pool.

In our work on energy, for instance, we consider it important that a microgrid operated as a commons have a bidirectional electric meter (the old analog meter is enough) installed per household, to keep track of imports and exports of electricity. We have, by the way, concluded that net metering is the simplest way to do so, making it a long-term solution to the problem of accounting for the P2P exchanges that will increasingly occur in a grid. (Unlike the feed-in-tariff system successfully pioneered by Germany, which seems to be approaching the end of its useful life.)

Greetings to all,

Roberto


On Sun, 15 Oct 2017 12:13:15 +0700
Michel Bauwens <michel@p2pfoundation.net> wrote:

thanks Kevin, good point,

Michel

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2017 14:13:47 -0500
From: Kevin Carson <free.market.anticapitalist@gmail.com>
To: P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation@lists.ourproject.org>
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] thinking true meta-governance and the gaps in p2p
      theory regarding the household economy
Message-ID:
      <CANETeEz58DrDsYAbc9bnak18Z5JnFZHUN102QtdQbXj13VFLuA@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

IMO the boundary between the household and the larger informal/social
economy is very permeable. The nuclear family household is relatively
recent and artificial, and to a considerable extent encouraged by 20th
century capitalism's promotion of social atomization which reduced the
household to the smallest possible size which would still socialize
the costs of reproducing labor-power and the culture of obedience
without providing a potential base for cost-, income- and risk-pooling
which might increase the bargaining power of labor. It's quite likely
that as total labor hours decline and precarity increases, we'll see a
lot more not only of multi-generational houses but of multi-family
cohousing, micro-villages and the like that internalize an increasing
share of direct production for use.
--
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--
Roberto Verzola <rverzola@gn.apc.org>

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