[P2P-F] [Open Manufacturing] Re: The Open Factory - an Open Hardware factory in an Irish Ecovillage.

[Patrick Anderson]

Atrus wrote:
> It makes sense as more people want/need/will use
> a bar of soap then a machine that makes soap.


It is economically dangerous to allow users access
to the Source of that which you intend to sell.

It is true that many users will not or cannot setup,
operate and maintain the Sources of Production.

But when those unskilled users gain full access to
those Sources (and ownership is the ultimate access),
they can then hire anyone that happens to have those
skills, causing competition between workers to
approach maximum and wages to approach zero.

Profit disappear in a puff of greasy smoke, since,
though the unskilled users must pay all the costs
of production, including wages to any workers, they
cannot pay Profit because they do not buy the
Product, but own it already as a side-effect of
their owning the Sources.



Manufacturing will be far closer to 'Open' when we
begin helping users gain co-owership in the Sources
of all the things they need.

The Sources of food are self-replicating, solar-powered,
manufacturing plants that we do not yet know how
to co-own for our own, mutual, use-value benefit.


The keys to operating in this GNU way are:

1. Organize users to pre-pay for the products they need.

2. Those investors become the co-owners of Physical Sources.

3. Skilled users can commit Work toward that production.

4. Unskilled users can commit Land or Capital.

5. The return for those investments is the product itself.

6. The product is not sold because it is already allocated
   to the persons who intend to *use* it.

7. In the special case of surplus, the product can be sold
   to 'outsiders' (users with insufficient ownership), and
   Profit should be charged against those latecomers, but
   some percentage of that Profit must be treated as though
   it were an investment from the user who paid it.

8. Treating profit as user investment causes those payers
   to slowly gain co-ownership in the Sources of Production
   as they become the proprietors of the growth they caused
   when they paid more than cost.