[p2p-research] simpler way wiki

Mon Apr 20 04:57:07 CEST 2009

great Kevin, in the blog on the 26th

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 9:14 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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