A Boring Technical Detail Regarding the Sharing Economy
October 5, 2013
How, one might ask, would the sharing economy* actually work, from the point of view of a customer walking into a store to obtain an item or service? How, exactly, would it be determined whether the customer is in a sharing economy with the producer of the item, in which case the product is free for the taking (or rationed equitably according to need by some means democratically determined by the appropriate local assemblies of egalitarians), or if the customer is not in the same sharing economy, in which case the customer would be out of luck (although possibly able to barter something for the item)?
To start with, in any given local community the Local Assembly of Egalitarians, by mutual agreement from voluntary federation with local assemblies of other local communities, has joined a sharing economy and items/services from this sharing economy are what is available in the stores of the given local community.
When the ‘customer’ tells the store worker what he/she would like to have for free, this is what happens.
The store worker determines if the customer is a member in good standing of the sharing economy. If so, the customer can take for free what he/she wants if it is available. If it’s not available because it is a scarce item then the customer can enter the lottery and write what his/her need is for the item, which is equitably rationed according to need by a method determined by the Local Assembly of Egalitarians (the sovereign authority in the local community, now that the anti-egalitarians have been removed from power).
If the customer is not a member in good standing of the sharing economy then the customer can only obtain the item or service by bartering for it with the store worker (who acts on behalf of the Local Assembly of Egalitarians, not as the owner of the item/service in question.) Whatever the store receives in barter becomes just another item/service available at the store. If the customer cannot reach a mutual barter agreement, then he/she is just out of luck. (This is one reason most people would prefer to be a member of the sharing economy, which is voluntary.)
Here’s one way (of course there are other possible ways) that a local community might decide how to verify membership in good standing in the sharing economy.
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The Local Assembly of Egalitarians creates membership (in the sharing economy) cards periodically, say monthly, with an expiration date.
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It distributes these cards to a designated worker in every economic enterprise (which includes schools whose students are considered to be working in the enterprise and organizations such as hospitals or anything else) that the Local Assembly of Egalitarians deems to be (as an economic enterprise) a member in good standing of the sharing economy (i.e., that the enterprise does something useful in a reasonable manner.)
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The person who receives the membership cards then gives one to each person who works in the economic enterprise (all such people are members in good standing of the sharing economy unless the Local Assembly of Egalitarians says otherwise regarding a specific individual, for example if the person is hogging stuff or doing something in violation of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire.”
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The Local Assembly of Egalitarians would also distribute membership cards to people who do not work in any economic enterprise but whom it believes should be members of the sharing economy, such as people above the retirement age and people who for some reason (mental or physical) cannot do any useful work. (Children, because they are children, do not need a membership card and can have for free what they need or reasonably desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.)
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These membership cards would, like money currency today, be hard to counterfeit (not impossible, but paper currency worked fine for hundreds of years just by being difficult to counterfeit) and of course illegal to counterfeit.
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To make the cards useless for anybody who stole one, the policy could be for the rightful person to sign the card when he/she first receives it. Then when the owner of the card wants to prove to the person working at a store that he/she is the true owner all he/she needs to do is demonstrate that he/she can write an essentially identical signature on a piece of paper. This is how traveller’s checks worked before the days of internationally acceptable credit cards.
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* As discussed in detail in "Thinking about Revolution" and "What Replaces the 'Free Market' in a Sharing Economy?" and "What Is an Egalitarian Economy"