"from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."

Thoughts in relation to Bauwens 1000 Days of Theory (2005):

Peer to peer projects are initiated by a core of founders who strives to meet the project’s original aims and constantly provide insights and inputs to the common objectives. Participants can freely determine their behaviour and linkages without the intermediary of obligatory hubs. Why P2P? What captures my attention is how with P2P, people voluntarily and cooperatively construct a commons without any monetary exchange but rather for the good and advantages of the people. In this capitalistic driven era, monopolisation of profit driven companies are dominating the economy. Big companies like News Corp are doing whatever they can to garner huge revenues and most recently, Rupert Murdoch imposed a minimal fee for online users to gain full access to the Wall Street journals. He believed that professionals, elites and business agents would have the ability financially to do so. This is a complete contradiction to the P2P principle of non-reciprocal exchanges. The communist principle: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” depicts the idea of P2P as individuals should have the freedom to develop what they need or desire and therefore, P2P provides them with sources and platforms to experiment and do so in order to flourish creativity for the common good.

I think we should be grateful for P2P projects as the thought of not being treated as merely buyers of the money pinching industries all around the world is somewhat gratifying. It is as if we are now treated and influenced by the myriads of media mediums to purchase or obtain something. Everything, including basic softwares are labelled and copyrighted by companies and we are subjected to get all these necessities for a hefty price. So why buy when you can create? And why buy when you can have them for free? Why exclude the poorer community from getting information that should be available to them to adapt to the technological driven era we are in?

Immaterial should be available for the information, education and entertainment hungry community to foster creativity, for leisure and to downplay the domination of huge profit driven companies. We as citizens should be allowed to create new ideas that will benefits the society as a whole and share them with the rest of the world, not just solely depending what profit driven companies have to offer us.