Experiment in thought

When Leadbeater set out to write his book on the growth of collaborate enterprises on the internet, he decided to put his first draft up on the web - you can still read it at tiny.cc/7uh4N - and ask for comments, which flooded in.

He kicks off a discussion of property and value with Adam Smith and Karl Marx and goes on to disagree with the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, who maintained that a clear system of property rights was necessary for the development of the economies, for instance, of Third World countries.

But what he doesn't even address is the fact that what he is really talking about is a form of communism, albeit not the collective ownership of the means of production, etc, but of ideas.

Nevertheless, he has written - with the help of his wiki-helpers - a stimulating examination that all those who seek the revolutionary transformation of society need to study.

KARL DALLAS