What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy

Tom Slee What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy Toronto, Canada: Between the Lines, 2016From the sixteenth-century Levellers through the nineteenth-century utopian socialists and on to present-day dissenters from neoliberalism and globalization, idealists of every description have dreamed about and occasionally taken abortive steps to implement new, equitable and emancipatory social arrangements. They have sometimes championed not merely equality and equity, but the very existence of private and even personal property, preferring a society in which people would hold "all things common. " In these circumstances, everyone would contribute to the common weal according to their abilities, and they would "make distribution unto every man according as he had need. " The preceding quotations, by the way, are not from a tract by the ever-optimistic Karl Marx, though similar sentiments can be found in his far-famed Critique of the Gotha Program (1875); rather, they are from the fourth chapter of the Christian New Testament's Book of Acts, verses 32 and 35. Call it Early Christian Economics 101.Currently, somewhat less romantic, but nonetheless impressively ambitious efforts are once again being made to encourage a "sharing economy" (henceforth, I shall follow Slee's lead and refrain from the repetitive use of terms such as "alleged" or what he correctly calls "annoyingly frequent scare quotes; instead I will express my scepticism or, at least, my sensitivity to ambiguity by capitalizing the Sharing Economy.The phrase relates to proposed innovations or, perhaps, reclamations of earlier egalitarian principles that have been promoted in such up-to-date forms as "charity-style" food banks and volunteer medical clinics as well as in local lending societies in which neighbours purchase household appliances or gardening tools for common use. It also applies to more complex practices such as consumer co-ops, civic crowdfunding projects, resident-owned condominium apartments, worker-owned businesses, credit unions and other well-established institutions that fall far short of "commune"-ism, but that nonetheless provide producers and consumers with viable alternatives to "exploitative" private owners and "bureaucratic" state controllers of the means of production and distribution of goods and services.For the most part, efforts in support of sharing are motivated by the individual savings that can be accrued by pooling wealth, exercising participative management and "grass roots" control, and cutting out the "middle man" in programs of mutual assistance. The basic goal is to avoid providing profits to big business and submitting to government regulations by conducting transactions among a society of friends or, at least, putative equals. In some cases, modernized barter systems are in place. In others garage, yard or street sales achieve similar purposes on a small scale. Some participants, however, go several steps further and speak of the values of social justice, democracy and environmental sustainability as crucial aspects and aspirations of the Sharing Economy. So far, so good.Among the many examples of larger scale social innovations are the Japanese town of Kamikatsu, which will soon become the country's first Zero Waste community as a result of a local recycling and repurposing program (Johnson, 2016). It is complemented by Berkeley, California's achievement of 80% waste reduction due to grassroots mobilization (Johnson, 2016). Likewise, by combining apparently different, but largely complementary objectives, urban and even regional initiatives can revitalize the venerable notion of "laboratories for democracy. " Even on this larger scale, however, there can be keen awareness of the inherent dangers of overgeneralization, routinization and what Kenneth Burke (1961) famously warned against: "the bureaucratization of the imaginative. "So, as Gar Alperovitz (2016) writes, some of the most successful modern innovators are opting out of grand narratives with immense economic planning strategies and government welfare programs in favour of more manageable efforts to restructure both economic regulation and social relations on a more human scale. …