[p2p-research] The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto

[Kevin Carson]

On 1/11/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Any text we can use to announce it?

The Homebrew Industrial Revolution is based on a series of research
papers on industrial history I did for Center for a Stateless Society.
 It is available as an ebook:
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/contents/

In writing Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective, I found
myself most engaged in researching the material on micromanufacturing,
household microenterprises, the alternative economy, and the
singularity resulting from them.

A major part of the material in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution is
drawn from Organization Theory, but was imperfectly tied together and
developed there.  I attempted to draw these themes together into my
first C4SS monograph, and then found myself developing them in a
series of followup papers.  Those papers gradually took shape in my
head as a book.

One theme is the rise and fall of Sloanist mass-production in light of
Mumford's paleotechnic/neotechnic periodization and his theory of the
cultural pseudomorph, and the rise of networked manufacturing as (in
the words of Michael Piore and Charles Sabel) the rediscovery after
more than a century of how to integrate electrical power into
industry..

Another is the contrast of Sloanism to the leanness, agility and
resilience of the alternative economy, with low overhead as the
central conceptual  principle around which my study of the latter is
organized.  Large inventories, high capital oulays, and high overhead
have the same effect on mass-production industry that shit has on a
human body bloated by constipation.  The higher the fixed costs
required to undertake an activity, the larger the income stream
required for a household or firm to service that overhead; the
enterprise must either get big or get out, and the household must have
multiple sources of full-time wage income to survive.  The alternative
economy, on the other hand, operates with almost no fixed costs, so
that almost all its revenue is free and clear and it can survive
prolonged periods of slow business.  Because it's organized
stigmergically, with modular open-source designs, innovation costs are
spread over the widest possible product ecologies with a minimum of
transaction costs.  The alternative economy is breeding the rats in
the nests of corporate dinosaurs.

> Also would you consider serialising it?, say one chapter per month over the
> next year?
>
> You probably remember I did so on several occasions with your past book, but
> until April, I'm rather overwhelmed, so I was hoping you could choose the
> excerpts?

Thanks much, Michel.  It's seven chapters, so would you prefer two
excerpts for chapter or a seven-month run?


-- 
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