The (Australian) Simpler Way website seems a remarkable collection of material, I’ve asked for commentary which was provided by Kevin Carson.

Commentary by Kevin Carson:

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”:

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 .

2. From “Local Currencies”:

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.

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:

“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.

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.

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, which was piggybacked on Dougald Hine’s sketch here.

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.”