I. Cooperative Organization – The Production Economy
Cooperative freedoms permit the division of knowledge and labor, which decrease everyone’s costs, or the concentration of effort to increase both the likelihood of success, and decrease the individual costs. Many people use subjective analysis, expressing these cost reductions as emotions. But our emotions exist to assist us in identifying cost reductions. Emotions describe changes in state. They inform us. They inform us in particular about changes in the state of our costs. Human aesthetics may be wounded by this fact, but all group emotional sensitivities are to costs and discounts.
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- Coercion: Norms under threat of violence.
Opposition: Violence, Fraud, Theft, Coercion, Physical Restraint, Enslavement
Cost: Forgone Opportunity costs of Coercion, Fraud, Theft and Violence. The cost of not stealing.
Perception and Calculation: Property and prices allow us to percieve beyond our senses. To cooperate in large numbers. Property IS calculation.-
- a) inventory our efforts so we are less a victim of time and uncertainty,
b) break the world into utilitarian objects of exclusive use
c) divide the effort of calculating the possible uses of the exclusive objects
d) develop specialized knowledge
e) form a division of knowledge and labor
f) create a reason for cooperation : trade
g) decrease costs through the division of labor and knowledge, and the act of trading.
Key Concept:
Property allows us to:
While almost all social groups do and always have, recognized personal property (possessions), and ownership of portable work products, there have evolved varying degrees of abstraction in addition to personal property: in particular, reputation or honor, family members, homes and other built capital, land and particular farm land, and territory. Other civilizations have created entirely abstract property (really, options) such as intellectual property, debts, and complex financial instruments.
Without property we cannot calculate: break up the world into bits over which we have exclusive use, and calculate the best use of it in real time, in a complex division of knowledge and labor, without which costs would be very high. We are not wealthier than our cave dwelling ancestors. Our only currency is time itself and we are born with the same amount of time as they were. By dividing our labors, and implementing trade, we make everything infinitely cheaper. We are not wealthier than cave men, we have simply made everything infinitely cheaper.
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- Coercion: Inclusion in opportunities, inclusion in division of labor, inclusion in numeric security and safety. ie: “discounts.”
Opposition: Restraint, Ostracization, (including ignoring), Deprivation of opportunity. Ostracization from the division of labor.
Cost: adoption of norms. limitation on choices.
Perception and Calculation: allows humans to swarm and therefore identify opportunities that can be more easily appropriated by a concentration of effort, even if the concentration is to develop a division of labor.
Properties:
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P.1) Life, Movement and Action:
We grant each other life, freedom of movement (in particular, not occupying the same space) and freedom of action. Partly because cooperation is simply easier than conflict. Partly because we are buying options on future cooperation with the same people. We pass these options or ‘chits’ back and forth all the time, every moment of every day, in a vast unspoken economy of cooperation.
P.2) Property (Exclusive Use. Inventory)
Property is an object over which one person has exclusive use.
We often create ‘shares’ whether they are acknowledged or not, of common property.
Some of our most common forms of property are beliefs, habits and morals.
P.3) Exchange (Trade)
Properties:
P.4) Freedom of Cooperation: Cooperating for production purposes, security, safety, comfort.
P.5) Freedom Of Assertion (Theft, war, conquest, oppression)
