[p2p-research] simpler way wiki

[Kevin Carson]

Michel solicited comments on Ted Trainer's "The Simpler Way" website.

On 4/18/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Kevin, and others,
>
> this seems a remarkable collection of material, see
> http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/
>
> if anyone has time to go through it and report on it for the blog, it would
> be much appreciated,

As you say, it's a remarkable collection of material.

I've only had time to look through the titles that caught my eye as
related to my own areas of interest:  mainly LETS systems and
relocalized economies.  The following passages seem particularly
relevant to my primary current interest in informal and household
economies.

1.  From "We Need More Than LETS":
<http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/localcurrency.html>

<blockquote>LETS members soon find that they can only meet a small
proportion of their needs through LETS, i.e., that there is not that
much they can buy with their LETS credits, and not that much they can
produce and sell. Every day they need many basic goods and services
but very few of these are offered by members of the system. This is
the central problem in local economic renewal; the need for ways of
increasing the capacity of local people to produce things local people
need. The core problem in other words is how to set up viable
firms....

The core task in town economic renewal is to enable, indeed create a
whole new sector of economic activity involving the people who were
previously excluded from producing and earning and purchasing. This
requires much more than just providing the necessary money; it
requires the establishment of firms in which people a can produce and
earn .</blockquote>

2.  From "Local Currencies":
<http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/localcurrency.html>

<blockquote>However the problem is that most people do not have much
they can sell, i.e., they do not have many productive skills or the
capital to set up a firm....

It is obvious here that what matters in local economic renewal is not
redistribution of income or purchasing power.  What matters is
redistribution of production power.</blockquote>

MY COMMENT:

Although Trainer mentions such new industries as community bakeries as
a way of putting productive power in the hands of the presently
unemployed, it strikes me that the underutilized capacity of ordinary
capital goods that most households already own is the single greatest
untapped resource.  There's already a (largely idle) "community
bakery" in existence, consisting of all the ordinary kitchen ovens
possessed even by most poor and unemployed people, which they
currently might use once or twice a week or less.

If people could be put to work using such household capital equipment
to full capacity, and exchanging directly with each other, the meeting
of a major portion of consumption needs might be shifted from the
wage-and-commodity economy to the informal and household sector.

One of the things standing in the way of such a development is the
zoning, occupational licensing, and local "safety" and "health" codes
that criminalize low-overhead, small-batch production.

For example:  a microbakery using an ordinary household oven could
produce high-quality bread, for exchanging for a neighbor's surplus
tomatoes, or for clothing produced by the best seamstress in the
neighborhood using her ordinary sewing machine, or for replacement
parts for a malfunctioning appliance custom-machined by a hobbyist
with a well-equipped but underutilized backyard metal workshop, or for
rides with an unlicensed cab service consisting only of a family car
and cell phone, or for daycare by one of the neighbors--all of them
networked together through a barter system.

But the local regulatory system mandates an industrial-sized oven,
fridge and dishwasher, and often expensive licensing, which imposes
mandatory minimum levels of overhead so that the only way to service
the overhead cost is to work full-time as a baker, with the risk of
going bankrupt if the business fails.

The CPSIA legislation, which mandates expensive testing of each
separate line of clothing, criminalizes small-scale apparel
manufacturers who design many clothing lines and then just produce
each one to demand on a lean basis, because the only way to amortize
the testing cost is to produce a given design in large batches.

On a national scale, "intellectual property" [sic] laws protect the
old corporate dinosaurs from competition by small producers in the
music, publishing and software fields, using only the cheap production
equipment made possible by the desktop revolution, and thus enable the
corporate dinosaurs to pursue a business model in which most commodity
price consists on oligopoly markup or rents on artificial property
rather than actual labor and materials cost.

IP law also restricts the competing production of replacement parts
for other companies' proprietary designs, and the consequent
development of modular product design with competing production of
features and accessories for other design platforms, or competing
product designs around a common basic platform.  This creates a legal
barrier to product design for easy repair and recycling.

Seventy years ago, Ralph Borsodi pointed out that electrical power put
household production on a superior footing to the factory, when the
latter's costs of distribution and marketing were factored in.  Since
then, we've had a quantum leap in the capabilities of household
appliances for milling, preserving, sewing, woodwork, etc.  The
desktop revolution has reduced the minimum capital outlays for
publishing, music, etc., from hundreds of thousands of dollars to at
most a few thousand.  And where larger capital outlays are still
needed, crowdsourcing and other forms of network finance have
eliminated the need for a capitalist banking system.

Borsodi's main shortcoming was in failing to recognize an intermediate
scale between household production and the capitalist economy.  He
argued that the individual homestead should substitute home production
for purchase with wages whenever it created a net efficiency, but
avoid producing a surplus for exchange, because one could only
exchange a surplus on disadvantageous terms in a capitalist market.
He neglected to consider the possibility of direct exchange of
surpluses with other producers in a NON-capitalist market, via small
barter networks.  As a result, the system of household autarky he
advocated resulted in each household having to duplicate most basic
capital equipment, with much of it remaining idle most of the time.
On the other hand, a small-scale barter system would remove the
unnecessary duplication and enable capital equipment to be utilized to
full capacity (i.e., the neighborhood seamstress doing most of the
sewing for the neighborhood and using her sewing machine to full
capacity--rather than every household, even those with mediocre sewing
skills, having its own sewing machine).

The mass production model, with its capital intensive,
product-specific machinery, results in an economy drowning in overhead
costs.  The planned obsolescence and push distribution it mandates
results in mountains of crystallized labor wasted in the landfills.

On the other hand, informal and household production, relying on
"spare cycles" or "idle capacity" of existing capital goods, makes the
informal economy potentially an order of magnitude more efficient.
It's an illustration of Buckminster Fuller's principles of
"ephemeralization" and "doing more with less."  It's much like the
rats in the dinosaurs' nests sixty million years ago, preparing to eat
them alive.  As John Robb says of his Resilient Communities, it offers
an order-of-magnitude "STEMI compression" over the system it's
supplanting:

<http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/11/stemi.html>
<blockquote>In the evolution of technology, the next generation of a
particular device/program often follows a well known pattern in the
marketplace: its design makes it MUCH cheaper, faster, and more
capable. This allows it to crowd out the former technology and
eventually dominate the market (i.e. transistors replacing vacuum
tubes in computation). A formalization of this developmental process
is known as STEMI compression:

*Space. Less volume/area used.

*Time. Faster.

*Energy. Less energy. Higher efficiency.

*Mass. Less waste.

*Information. Higher efficiency. Less management overhead....

...[I]s the Resilient Community concept (as envisioned here) a viable
self-organizing system that can rapidly and virally crowd out existing
structures due to its systemic improvements? Using STEMI compression
as a measure, there is reason to believe it is:

*Space. Localization (or hyperlocalization) radically reduces the
space needed to support any given unit of human activity. Turns
useless space (residential, etc.) into productive space.

*Time. Wasted time in global transport is washed away. JIT (just in
time production) and place.

*Energy. Wasted energy for global transport is eliminated. Energy
production is tied to locality of use. More efficient use of solar
energy (the only true exogenous energy input to our global system).

*Mass. Less systemic wastage. Made to order vs. made for market.

*Information. Radical simplification. Replaces hideously complex
global management overhead with simple local management
systems.</blockquote>

Unfortunately, the regulatory regime was created of, by and for the
corporate dinosaurs.

One of the chief strategies for a local economy should be to
facilitate networking of such household producers for mutual exchange,
and to run interference against the regulatory barriers.


3.  In "Thoughts on the Transition to a Sustainable Society," Trainer
advocates community gardens and workshops.
<http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/18-Transition.html>

This is a common theme throughout the alternative economic literature:
 Karl Hess, Keith Paton, Colin Ward, and Kirkpatrick Sale, among
others.  The most recent and promising incarnation of the idea was
Nathan Cravens' "Triple Alliance" idea
<http://www.appropedia.org/The_Triple_Alliance>, which was piggybacked
on Dougald Hine's sketch here:
<http://otherexcuses.blogspot.com/2009/01/social-media-vs-recession.html>.
 The one thing that's missing from the Triple Alliance IMO, that
belongs alongside the Fab Lab and Community-Supported Agriculture as
equal in importance, is cheap social housing. This might be done via
cohousing set up as an OS community version of the YMCA, located in a
barebones warehouse-style space of some kind with things like a cot,
plus access to water tap, toilet, and hotplate provided at cost and
perhaps subsidized by contributions. Or it might simply replicate the
immigrant model of several families sharing one house, with some sort
of network arrangement for hooking individuals up with openings.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html