But here's one aspect that I think needs further research (and economics, to date, hasn't addressed it, although sociology and policy studies are beginning to): If factors of production are location, energy, and knowledge, you are in effect assuming that political power is not such a factor, and this seems to me problematic because so much of value, according to the institutionalist school of thought, is determined by political power. A particular piece of real estate has value, for example, not just because of its random location, but because of the politically determined benefits that a certain location provides. This seems problematic for a project of dis-intermediating economic activities from the state. I.e., P2P is entirely dependent upon an accommodating political environment, just like markets are.
The position now is that parties are organisations which create policies based on an ideology, and these are then subject to the process of representative democracy and implemented by an executive.
I think that an optimal policy (there must be one, and it must evolve organically) may be defined in protocols by - as J A Wheeler puts it - through continuously asking the right questions of reality. An evolving optimal policy would actually come to define the movement which gathers adherents who act within the policy framework to develop and implement specific implementations.
By way of example, I might write a document - call it a manifesto or kernel - of 'Open' policies based on partnership protocols.
Then any politician who subscribes to these policies could say so, or sign up consensually, and we could then get Open Labour, Open Lib Dem, Open Green, and Open Tory candidates standing for election. The way I see it, I would not have created a Party - merely the basis of an 'Open' movement.
I think - from having had the benefit of long conversations with John Banks (who recently died aged 95) that a Movement, rather than a Party, are what he and the founders of the Common Wealth Party actually had in mind. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
