The ExO Foundation’s MTP (Massive Transformational Purpose) is Migrating Society to Abundance. Michalski explores exactly what abundance means in that context.

Jerry Michalski is the former managing editor of Release 1.0, a technology newsletter. He is the founder of Sociate.com and ReX (Relationship Economy eXpedition).

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System Reset is a feature-length documentary which explores this story of change in our economy. Shot in London, Amsterdam and Barcelona, this film is a DIF 2018 exclusive. It features some of the leading thinkers in materials, economics, the commons movement, FabLabs, digital citizenship, urban planning and architecture. Don’t miss your opportunity to see them collectively weave a picture of how our economy could operate.

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But can we really end scarcity?

We believe that the post-scarcity vision of the future is problematic because it reflects an understanding of technology and the economy that could worsen the problems it seeks to address. This is the bad news. Here’s why:

New technologies come to consumers as finished products that can be exchanged for money. What consumers often don’t understand is that the monetary exchange hides the fact that many of these technologies exist at the expense of other humans and local environments elsewhere in the global economy. The intuitive belief that technology can manifest from money alone, anthropologists tell us, is a culturally rooted notion which hides the fact that the scarcity experienced by some is linked to the abundance enjoyed only by a few.

Many people believe that issues of scarcity can be solved by using more efficient production methods. But this may overlook some of the unintended consequences of efficiency improvements. The Jevons Paradox, a key finding attributed to the 19^th century British economist Stanley Jevons, illustrates how efficiency improvements can lead to an absolute increase of consumption due to lower prices per unit and a subsequent increase in demand. For example, the invention of more efficient train engines allowed for cheaper transportation that catalyzed the industrial revolution. However, this did not reduce the rate of fossil fuel use; rather, it increased it.  When more efficient machines use less energy, they cost less, which often encourages us to use them more—resulting in a net increase in energy consumption.

Past experience tells us that super-efficient technologies typically encourage increased throughput of raw materials and energy, rather than reducing them. Data on the global use of energy and raw materials indicate that absolute efficiency has never occurred: both global energy use and global material use have increased threefold since the 1970s. Therefore, efficiency is better understood as a rearranging of resources expenditures, such that efficiency improvements in one end of the world economy increase resource expenditures in the other end.

The good news is that there are alternatives. The wide availability of networked computers has allowed new community-driven and open-source business models to emerge. For example, consider Wikipedia, a free and open encyclopedia that has displaced the Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta. Wikipedia is produced and maintained by a community of dispersed enthusiasts primarily driven by other motives than profit maximization.  Furthermore, in the realm of software, see the case of GNU/Linux on which the top 500 supercomputers and the majority of websites run, or the example of the Apache Web Server, the leading software in the web-server market. Wikipedia, Apache and GNU/Linux demonstrate how non-coercive cooperation around globally-shared resources (i.e. a commons) can produce artifacts as innovative, if not more, as those produced by industrial capitalism.

In the same way, the emergence of networked micro-factories are giving rise to new open-source business models in the realm of design and manufacturing. Such spaces can either be makerspaces, fab labs, or other co-working spaces, equipped with local manufacturing technologies, such as 3D printing and CNC machines or traditional low-tech tools and crafts. Moreover, such spaces often offer collaborative environments where people can meet in person, socialize and co-create.

This is the context in which a new mode of production is emerging. This mode builds on the confluence of the digital commons of knowledge, software, and design with local manufacturing technologies.  It can be codified as “design global, manufacture local” following the logic that what is light (knowledge, design) becomes global, while what is heavy (machinery) is local, and ideally shared. Design global, manufacture local (DGML) demonstrates how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development, celebrating new forms of cooperation. Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, the DGML model emphasizes application that is small-scale, decentralized, resilient, and locally controlled. DGML could recognize the scarcities posed by finite resources and organize material activities accordingly. First, it minimizes the need to ship materials over long distances, because a considerable part of the manufacturing takes place locally. Local manufacturing also makes maintenance easier, and also encourages manufacturers to design products to last as long as possible. Last, DGML optimizes the sharing of knowledge and design as there are no patent costs to pay for.

There is already a rich tapestry of DGML initiatives happening in the global economy that do not need a unified physical basis because their members are located all over the world. For example, consider the L’Atelier Paysan  (France) and Farmhack (U.S.), communities that collaboratively build open-source agricultural machines for small-scale farming; or the Wikihouse project that democratizes the construction of sustainable, resource-light dwellings;  or the OpenBionics project that produces open source and low-cost designs for robotic and bionic devices; or the RepRap community that creates open-source designs for 3D printers that can be self-replicated.  Around these digital commons, new business opportunities are flourishing, while people engage in collaborative production driven by diverse motives.

So, what does this mean for the future of tomorrow’s businesses, the future of the global economy, and the future of the natural world?

First, it is important to acknowledge that within a single human being the “homo economicus”—the self-interested being programmed to maximize profits—will continue to co-exist with the “homo socialis”, a more altruistic being who loves to communicate, work for pleasure, and share. Our institutions are biased by design. They endorse certain behaviours over the others. In modern industrial capitalism, the foundation upon which our institutions have been established is that we are all homo economicus. Hence, for a “good” life, which is not always reflected in growth and other monetary indexes, we need to create institutions that would also harness and empower the homo socialis.

Second, the hidden social and environmental costs of technologies will have to be recognized. The so-called “digital society” is admittedly based on a material- and energy-intensive infrastructure. This is important to recognize so as not to further jeopardize the lives of current and future generations by unwittingly encouraging serious environmental instability and associated social problems.

Finally, a new network of interconnected commons-based businesses will continue to emerge, where sharing is not used to maximize profits, but to create new forms of businesses that would empower much more sharing, caring, and collaboration globally. As the global community becomes more aware of how their abundance is dependent on other human beings and the stability of environments, more and more will see commons-based businesses as the way of the future.

Vasilis Kostakis is a Senior Researcher at Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, and he is affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.

Andreas Roos is a PhD student in the interdisciplinary field of Human Ecology at Lund.

Originally published at HBR.org

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In other words, Ostrom and the commons movement have yet to define the dynamic equilibrium which they seek as the balance between two opposing forces – population and resources – which continually counteract each other. Instead, the commons movement is more focused on counteracting the Market and the State than on measuring the replenishment of renewable and non-renewable resources and managing them to sustain their yield. In short, the commons movement does not seem to be producing alternative indicators for the production and provisioning which can be used to guide policy.

The book, Secular Cycles, made me realize that the commons, as Ostrom viewed it and as others are now envisioning it, is too informal and small-scale to work in a way that establishes empirical targets that will bring down exponential growth to arithmetic growth levels; and thus organizing society according to the dynamic equilibrium between population and the availability of food, water and energy. Instead, what we get in the commons movement is a general opposition to quantitative analysis because it reminds people too much of the metrics of unbridled capitalism.

My point is that if we don’t know how to develop evidence-based policy for a soft landing toward a reasonable level of subsistence — and I’ve seen very little of this in the commons movement — then I don’t know how we expect to create a long-term system for meeting human needs through sustainable yields. I would hope that the commons movement begins to create the basis for a viable new society by actually focusing on the optimum rate at which a resource can be harvested or used without damaging its ability to replenish itself. That would be something.

Let me put this in more structural terms. First, the carrying capacity rate for renewable resources follows a carefully guided policy of maintenance and sustenance to ensure that resources are replenished sustainably in meeting the needs of people in the present. This requires that social policies are made more equitable to ensure that everyone’s needs are met. Meanwhile, the needs of people in the future are in no jeopardy, so long as renewable resources continue to be replenished and provisioned within their carrying capacity. Hence, the carrying capacity rate of renewables is geared toward market coefficients for provisioning resources, goods and services for people at the current time, and will continue to be sustainable far into the future. This carrying capacity rate, based on renewable resources, in no way precludes (in fact, should be accompanied with) the creation of taxes toward a universal basic income and for maintenance of renewable resources.

Second, the carrying capacity rates of non-renewable resources are much more challenging and must be treated very differently. Society must decide scientifically how much non-renewable resources to use in the present and how much to save for the future. By guaranteeing that valuable resources will be ‘left in the ground’ or put away securely into a tamperproof lockbox, as it were, this formula has a benefit which, in one way, is similar to how gold used to function as a guarantee of reserve asset values and as a disciplining measure for currency exchange rates. Since a certain percentage of non-renewables are held in strict reserve for future generations, adherence to this process creates a value which is entirely *independent of the market* and is based on a relative scarcity index of non-renewable resources. This fraction (how much non-renewables to use for people now / how much non-renewables to set aside for people in the future) provides for a fixed and stable monetary rate that is tailor-made for the valuation of currency in the present.

In a society which is facing net energy loss and steep declines in non-renewable resources, this would be an extremely stable, strong, treasured, desired, sacrosanct and entirely non-marketized value. Instead of looking at productivity indices, commodity market rates, price inflation or unemployment indicators, monetary economists really ought to be turning their attention to the long-term carrying capacity of the planet’s non-renewables and their sustainability rates. I am in no way suggesting that the world should return to a gold standard; but to generate a system in which currency values are fixed to a meaningful measure of non-renewable resources, similar in some ways to the way that gold used to function. If this is done, the correlation of ecological sustainability with monetary sustainability will become a primary way of steering the world’s economy on a middle path between exponential growth and arithmetic growth, ensuring the sustenance and safely of society during a period of economic decline (originally posted to Facebook, August 2017).

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-Lewis Mumford, In the Name of Sanity

In two books, “The Book of Abundance” and “The Book of Community” and in Manifesto, Las Indias outline a model of organizing society that could start with the development of intentional communities. A new model of the economy based on the concept of abundance can be already implemented at the group level. On the other hand, the examples of group-level organizing can enrich our understanding of this desired future model. This paper uses empirical data to give some substance to the concept of abundance within an intentional community. The following is an invitation to further reflection and dreaming together. Using the stages from Dragon Dreaming method, one can consider the Utopian writings such as these by Las Indias as a stage of dreaming and the real life experiences as the stages of implementation. This analysis is a stage of celebrating and evaluation to help clarifying the goals in more practical terms.

I will use findings from my research on Acorn community to see what questions the practice raises. Communities are changing over time and their membership fluctuates, therefore it should be noted that the empirical content reflects the interviews conducted in August 2014. More details about this egalitarian community can be found in a series of three articles analyzing how Acorn’s experience can enrich the understanding of peer production model and an article on the personal experience of living in this community – see references below the text.

Making more with less

Acorn community has managed to generate more affluence thanks to sharing resources and living together. Life is cheaper there in comparison to individual living in an urban setting. In this way, communards can enjoy more with less while pursuing a meaningful work. The 42-hour labor quota includes also tasks not related to enterprise directly.

These are some examples of saving money and time thanks to collective living:

1) No one possesses one’s own car, which reduces the costs of insurance. Thanks to the skills within community, maintenance of electronics can be assured without hiring specialists.

2) Buying in bulk, dumpster diving, or exchanging products with other communities, reduces costs of food. One of the communards estimated that they spend about 1,200 dollars per person, per year on food.

3) Time is better used by mutualizing some tasks such as cooking, shopping, or declaring income for taxes.

4) By sharing tools and objects, there is less need of buying them: clothes, books, computers, kitchen tools, bikes, cars, and other stuff.

Furthermore, the communards enjoy some advantages of both city and rural living. Being surrounded by like-minded people within the community and communards from neighboring communities gives an occasion to meet people and undertake common activities. The atmosphere is different than in typical rural settings. On the other hand, they enjoy the advantages of rural living such as access to organic self-produced food, being close to nature, and no need to commute to work.

One of my interviewees reduced considerably the use of antidepressants, another one stopped drinking alcohol because they experienced less stress living in the community than in their previous lives.

The complexities of defining abundance

Las Indias defines abundance as the absence of the necessity “to work out what is produced and what not, and above all, how much access to a given product this or that person will have.” (The Book of Abundance, p.22) One of the criteria for evaluation whether a consumption choice is necessary would be its contribution to “genuine enjoyment of each.” Furthermore, trying to limit the consumption of others goes against the logic of abundance: “A life oriented to the construction of abundance, an interesting life, cannot be based on deprivation or the desire to deprive others.” (Idem, p. 71) The examples below illustrate that this definition of abundance does not take into account other aspects of produced goods. There are many nuances regarding the products: their quality, individual preferences, the environmental impact, ethical considerations, values inherent in a specific consumption pattern.

Consumption is not only about scarcity. Values are expressed by spending community money. One of Acorn’s principles in spending collective resources is that alcohol and cigarettes are bought with personal pocket money – a monthly allowance (so members can buy limited amount of these goods). An interviewee did not like the fact that once alcohol was bought with collective money to celebrate the completion of a project. Another example of this sort of reflection expressed by one of the interviewees is the proposition to count biking instead of using a car as part of labor quota. This would incite using less fuel, which is motivated by environmental considerations and not by saving money.

Food is also an issue of clashing values. Some members are vegan and the rest eats animal products. Both groups have broader reflection beyond the costs of food that are behind their choices. Vegans are motivated by the protection of animals. The carnivore camp envisions that with their diet community could gain a complete food autonomy. The community would not need to buy industrial products to replace animal products. This implies a withdrawal from the money system and the mainstream food system to counter socio-economic power relations. When aggregated, our food choices define the way the system of production is organized.

Spending collective resources to construct a new building or make similar major investment can also be a challenge to the concept of abundance. In Acorn, there were different opinions about what is the most cost-effective and the best way to construct a building. Certain individuals were more successful at getting their opinion implemented. Similar example was an investment into a machine. Some members consider machines as an additional cost with the need for maintenance that does not exceed much the gains of productivity. They are also afraid of being dependent because of the automation of work.

The definition of abundance could be also expanded to the availability of interesting work. One of the interviewees observed the scarcity of enjoyable jobs, not everyone gets to do the cool tasks such as those requiring creativity. Certainly, one could argue that if one wants to pursue some fulfilling activity, one is free to do so. However, usefulness and recognition constitutes part of work satisfaction. In Acorn, there are still some jobs that are necessary but much less attractive. For example, bringing garbage to the landfill is such a job. A person doing it found a way to make it more bearable by being accompanied by another communard. However, still this job is not the first choice. The sense of responsibility for less interesting jobs is different among members. Everyone has a different definition of what an interesting and meaningful activity is. Each activity is accompanied by an individual narrative and interpretation. For example, one of the members considered cleaning as his spiritual practice. Once more, abundance appears as something subjective.

Diverging preferences do not prevent Acorners from living together peacefully. In case of disagreements, many that I have interviewed work on themselves – trying to see the bigger picture like the advantages of staying together.

Abundance and personal development: what role is there for the community to play?

The perception of abundance evolves and can be learned or unlearned. One of the interviewees, originating from US middle class family, shared how her experiences of traveling to developing countries and living in Acorn community transformed her thinking about what one really needs in life in terms of material goods and comfort. Intentional communities in their present forms, namely with a very basic standard of living, can be venues of personal experimentation with abundance. Such an experimentation can be already undertaken in everyday life as the path of inner transformation and getting rid of compulsions that keep us in the current economic system.

If we agree that the perception of abundance is a result of inner work and learning processes, how would this translate into communal or societal practice? Let’s imagine such a situation: someone feels that to be happy, this particular thing is needed. Should the community agree and let the individual pursue it assuming that it takes time for someone to unlearn consumerist wants or rather establish conditions to re-think the want. This question is about the threshold. It is obvious that with the transformation of work, needs, conditioning and cultural context will change too.

Consumption can be chosen and changed but some consumption patterns require healing to be changed. Addictions can have many different forms that are related to consumption and patterns of behavior. Often omitted in the debates on addictions, even sugar or sweetness can be a powerful addiction leading to tooth decay, which results in the demand for dentistry (it defines what is produced). There are different theories about the causes of addictions. Bruce Anderson sees the causes of addictions in destruction of community and human connections caused by the capitalist system. Anne Wilson Schaef describes in her book “When Society Becomes an Addict” that the underlying cause of substance or behavioral addictions is the addiction to powerlessness and nonliving. Addictions serve the addicted to avoid confronting certain problems or shut down certain feelings. These are just two theories that illustrate how addictions reflect a deeper social problem rather than being an individual weakness or a matter of choice.

Acorn community’s way of dealing with addiction seems to be preventive exclusion. An interviewee mentioned that an alcoholic has been rejected in membership application. Living together with an addicted person may be challenging. It seems like this is one of the issues that communal initiatives need to study and prepare for.

The above examples illustrate defining abundance is difficult. There is no objective state of abundance. It is partly a result of inner work. The way to measure whether a community has reached the state of abundance would be to make a survey and prove that there is no frustration or lack in anybody. However, is it the aim of the society or community to never feel frustration? And if yes, what measures of working on our inner world or on our outer world would this involve?

Other articles on Acorn

Gajewska, Katarzyna (September 2016):  Egalitarian alternative to the US mainstream: study of Acorn community in Virginia, US. Bronislaw Magazine

Gajewska, Katarzyna (21 July 2016): An intentional egalitarian community as a small-scale implementation of Post-Capitalism, P2P Foundation Blog.

Gajewska, Katarzyna (10 January 2016): Case study: Creating use value while making a living in egalitarian communities. P2P Foundation Blog.

Gajewska, Katarzyna (27 December 2014): An intentional egalitarian community as a small-scale implementation of postcapitalist, peer production model of economy. Part I : Work as a spontanous, voluntary contribution. P2P Foundation Blog.

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A holistic understanding of modern evolutionary biology suggests that life evolves by a process of diversification and subsequent integration of diversity through collaboration (John Stewart in BioSystems, 2014). As our focus shifts from individuals and individual species as the unit of survival to the collective of life — its complex dynamic interactions and relationships — we begin to see that collaborative and symbiotic patterns and interactions are of more fundamental importance than competition as a driving force of evolution. Life’s key strategy to create conditions conducive to life is to optimize the system as a whole rather than maximizes only some parameters of the system for a few at the detriment of many (Wahl, 2016).

The patterns of evolution show a general trend of diversification and subsequent or parallel integration at a higher level of systemic complexity. This integration tends to happen predominantly through the creation of more complex organismic or social entities, primarily by collaboration and symbiosis. John Stewart suggests that this is moving us towards a ‘global entity’ (2014). Maybe this entity already exists in the life-sustaining processes of the biosphere?

The biologist Peter Corning, former president of the International Society for Systems Science and director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems, suggests that “one aspect of this more complex view of evolution is that both competition and cooperation may coexist at different levels of organization, or in different aspects related to the survival enterprise. There may be a delicately balanced interplay between these supposedly polar relationships” (Corning, 2005; p.38). He emphasizes that collaboration has been a key factor in the evolution of our own species. The socio-economic payoffs of collaboration in response to ecological pressures and opportunities among early humans have shaped the evolution of languages and cultures, both require and enable complex patterns of collaboration.

If a society is viewed merely as an aggregate of individuals who have no common interests, and no stake in the social order, then why should they care? But of society is viewed […] as an interdependent collective survival enterprise,’ then each of us has a vital, life-and-death stake in its viability and effective functioning, whether we recognize it or not.” — Peter Corning, 2005, p.392

If we want to re-design economics based on what we know about life’s strategy to create conditions conducive to life, we need to question some basic assumptions upon which the narrative underlying our current economic systems is built. The narrative of separation has predisposed us to focus on scarcity, competition, and the short-term maximization of individual benefit as the basis on which to create an economic system. Life’s evolutionary story shows that systemic abundance can be unlocked through collaboratively structured symbiotic networks that optimize the whole system so human communities and the rest of life can thrive.

We are not the masters of life’s diversity, and have the potential to become a regenerative presence in ecosystems and the biosphere.

Both collaboration and competition contribute to how life creates conditions conducive to life. The biologist Andreas Weber explains: “The biosphere is not cooperative in a simple, straight-forward way, but paradoxically cooperative. Symbiotic relationships emerge out of antagonistic, incompatible processes” (Weber, 2013: 32). Weber stresses that we have to understand how the works of the economist Adam Smith and the political economist Robert Malthus influenced Charles Darwin in his attempt to construct a theory of evolution.

Example of collaboration in leaf-cutter ants.

The limited narrative of separation, with its exclusively competition- and scarcity-focused understanding of life, is supported by outdated biological and economic theories. Weber calls this an “economic ideology of nature” and suggests that an ideologically biased perspective “reigns supreme over our understanding of human culture and world. It defines our embodied dimension (Homo sapiens as a gene-governed survival machine) as well as our social identity (Homo economicus as an egoistic maximizer of utility). The idea of universal competition unifies the two realms, the natural and the socio-economic. It validates the notion of rivalry and predatory self-interest as inexorable facts of life” (pp.25–26).

The optimization of resource-sharing and processing in order to (re)generate and share abundance and systemic health, rather than competition for scarce resources, is the basis of life’s way of doing economics! In attempting to create a life-friendly economy, we need to understand the profound implications that the emerging ‘systems view of life’ has for our undertaking. Here is a 7min video of Fritjof Capra presenting the book with explicit reference to economics.

Fritjof Capra on ‘The Systems View of Life — A Unifying Vision’, Capra & Luisi 2014 (7 minutes)

As the twenty-first century unfolds, a new scientific conception is emerging. It is a unified view that integrates, for the first time, life’s biological, cognitive, social, and economic dimensions. At the forefront of contemporary science, the universe is no longer seen as a machine composed of elementary building blocks. We have discovered that the material world, ultimately, is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships; that the planet as a whole is a living, self-regulating system. […] Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence, but rather a cooperative dance in which creativity and constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces. And with the new emphasis on complexity, networks, and patterns of organization, a new science of qualities is slowly emerging.” Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi (2014b)

Integrating economy and ecology with wisdom

The evolutionary biologist and futurist Elisabet Sathouris describes how in the evolution of complex communities of diverse organisms a ‘maturation point’ is reached when the system realizes that “it is cheaper to feed your ‘enemies’ than to kill them” (personal comment). Having successfully populated six continents and diversified into the mosaic of value systems, worldviews, identities (national, cultural, ethnic, professional, political, etc.) and ways of living that make up humanity, we are now challenged to integrate this precious diversity into a globally and locally collaborative civilization acting wisely to create conditions conducive to life.

We have now reached a new tipping point where enmities are more expensive in all respects than friendly collaboration; where planetary limits of exploiting nature have been reached. It is high time for us to cross this new tipping point into our global communal maturity — an integration of the economy and ecology we have put into conflict with each other, to evolve an ecosophy.” –Elisabet Sathouris (2014)

The challenge of a fundamental re-design of how we do business, of our patterns of production and consumption, of the types of resources and energy we use, goes hand in hand with the structural redesign of our economic systems. We have to challenge economic orthodoxies and basic assumptions, and find ways to integrate multiple perspectives if we hope to redesign economies at multiple scales and learn how to manage our household with wisdom (oikos + sophia).

If our Homo sapiens sapiens wants to continue its fascinating yet so far relatively short evolutionary success story we have to evolve wise societies characterized by empathy, solidarity and collaboration. Wise cultures are regenerative and protect bio-cultural diversity as a source of wealth and resilience (Wahl, 2016).

[In the remainder of this module on Economic Design of Gaia Education’s course Design for Sustainability] we will take a closer look at the social and ecological impacts of the current economic and monetary system, and will explore why the globalized economy behaves as it does before we explore strategies for re-design and inspiring examples of best processes and practices in the transition towards sustainable and regenerative economic patterns at multiples scales. By revisiting basic assumptions about economics we can begin to integrate ecology and economy in full reconnection of the interbeing of nature and culture. We need wisdom to re-design an economic system fit for life. Here are some insights that can help us:

• The rules of our current economic and monetary system have been designed by people and we can therefore re-design them.
• We have to question the role of scarcity, competition, and the maximization of individual benefit has cornerstones of our competitive economy.
• In redesigning economic systems at local, regional and global scale we should pay special attention to how the system incentivises regenerative practices, increases bio-productivity sustainably, restores healthy ecosystem functioning, while nurturing thriving communities.
• Modern evolutionary biology transcends and includes Darwinian justifications of competition as ‘human nature’, as it acknowledges that complex patterns of collaboration have enabled the evolution of our species and the continued evolution of consciousness towards planetary awareness.
• Our ability to cooperate has shaped who we are in equal and possibly more profound ways than competitive behaviour, hence we need to re-design economic systems to establish a healthy balance between the way competition and collaboration are incentivised in the system.
• Rather than maximizing isolated parameters or the benefit of a select few, a re-design of our economic system to serve all of humanity and all life will have to optimize the health and resilience of the system as a whole (understanding humanity as nature; and the economy as a sub-system of society and nature in interconnected eco-social systems).
• The dominant narrative of separation creates a focus on scarcity, competition and individual advantage, while the emerging narrative of interbeing challenges us to create a win-win-win economy based on the understanding that it is in our enlightened self-interest to unlock shared abundances through collaboration.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is an excerpt from the Economic Design Dimension of Gaia Education’s online course in Design for Sustainability, which I recently revised and re-wrote on the basis of an earlier version by Jonathan Dawson (now head of economics at Schumacher College). The 400 hour on-line course offers a whole systems design approach to taking part in the transition towards thriving communities, vibrant regional economies and diverse regenerative cultures everywhere. The Economic Design Dimension starts on March 6th, and runs for 8 weeks (80 study hours). The above is a little preview of the nearly 140 pages of text, links and videos, that participants explore under the guidance of experience tutors and as part of a global community of learners. For more information take a look at the content of this on-line training for global-local change agents in economic design. Much of the material I used in authoring the curriculum content for this course is based on the years of research I did for my recently published book Designing Regenerative Cultures.

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The path towards abundance is no longer a proposal or a utopian dream. It is a real path, an economic and social movement taking place in parallel to the decomposition of the old ways, and which offers us a new promise to overcome scarcity, war and collapse.

For two decades now, it’s a rare month that newspapers don’t surprise us with a multi-million-dollar valuation of some enterprise, website or mobile app. The famous “rounds of financing” of start-ups, media hype when someone announces a public offering, and the eternal discussions about their “lossifits” have become part of business folklore and media hubbub. They’re really an obscene example of the growing difficulties of capital to find a place in real production. They are one more symptom of the overscaling of financial capital which is really one side of a process whose other side is that we have never been so close to abundance. But that deserves an explanation.

The shortcut that failed

At the end of the nineteenth century, two states, Prussia and Japan, discovered a shortcut to development: authoritarian State planning. At first, it worked, and worked so well that the progressive political forces of the time—social democracy, a large part of liberalism, nationalism, and even sectors of conservatism?built their economic models on it. At the limit, the Soviet State born of the ruins of Russia and its empire after the civil war, for the first time, attempted the “total nationalization” of production: a system planned and oriented to maximize the training and activation of the large masses of capital needed to create the modern infrastructure of a continent, to teach a population to read, and satisfy its basic needs.

And at first, it worked. So much so that it became the path to follow for most of the European colonies that achieved statehood, and the magic formula to develop regions of the central countries that had been left behind. Recent examples outside the socialist States would include the industry developed by Francoism in Asturias or Peron’s five-year plans. Everything was based on quickly reaching large scales in use of capital, and no one better than the State, through public or nationalized enterprises, to reach it.

In reality, as theoreticians of bureaucracy in Europe or Galbraith in the US would soon point out, State businesses were not that different from what big businesses had become in economies where the market called the shots. Success consisted of having large-scale businesses, with lots of capital, able to import or create new technologies, hire tens of thousands of people, and of produce the industrial goods that would make it possible to increase the general productivity of the economic system.

Business over-scaling and crisis

The problem, as would become clear to economists like Boulding as early as the ’50s, is that to try to reach development, and ultimately abundance, with hyper-scaled productive units is like trying to reach heaven by climbing a tree. At the beginning, it looks like you’ll go very quickly, but as you go higher, the branches are more fragile, and finally, all your effort—still very far away from the objective—ends up focusing on not falling.

Every era has an optimum size of scale that depends on technology and the dimension of the market. The better the technology, the smaller the optimum size for a given dimension. Beyond that size, the inefficiencies created by the form of organization itself make every increase in capital or in people hired counterproductive, and the value produced is reduced.

In the first stages of capitalism in each place, with all the large basic infrastructure to make—highways, telephone lines, railways, sewers, etc.—the optimum size was gigantic for the levels of resource accumulation allowed by the pre-capitalist agrarian economy. It seemed that “the greater the scale, the greater the growth”… but precisely because it worked, the first symptoms of crisis would soon come.

The first great collapse

In 1955, when the USSR starts to talk about “peaceful co-existence” with the American bloc, it’s really talking about “peaceful competition.” At that time, the accelerated development of the USSR, the extension of its model first to Eastern Europe and soon to a good part of the decolonized countries of Asia and Africa, and even Cuba, create the impression that the most centralized forms of state capitalism are the owners of the future. But soon, by the beginning of the 60s, the numbers start to not work out. Political and cultural factors were blamed, but the fact is that gigantism is beginning to fail… on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

In the West, the market will prioritize a change in technological orientation: information technology grow to become an industry. It is clearly oriented towards improving management, which is to say, to reducing inefficiencies of scale. But it’s not enough. Markets must expand to justify the sizes already reached: the “European Community” progressively becomes a “Common Market,” and in 1973, Great Britain is integrated, once the preferential market in its former colonies is no longer enough.

Beginning with the crisis of ’73, the numbers of the Western nations and the results of their big businesses don’t give any reason to be optimistic, either. By the ’80s, the inviability of the industrial businesses on the largest scale, the public scale, is obvious. Industrial overscaling has become a danger to the survival of the State itself. This is the time of “reconversion” in regions like Asturias or Flanders, and the moment when the numbers of eastern Europe—but also Cuba—really begin to break down.

In the US and Great Britain the first political response to the crisis of scale emerges: neoliberalism. Basically, it consists of racing forward: finance is deregulated and financialization appears as a way of homogenizing, and therefore expanding, the market for capital, the speculative use of which is growing more and more as it becomes more difficult use it in capital-intensive big businesses. The State restructures its relationship with big businesses: the rents they receive actually increase, but on a new basis: legislation on intellectual property becomes hardened. Management and informatization become a true “cult” in the attempt to reduce inefficiencies.

When the Soviet bloc finally collapses, “globalize” becomes the new mantra. The neoliberal strategy looks to the East and see the volume of extension of markets that has been made possible as a triumph: it has reformed the world to rationalize the over-scaled sizes of its companies.

Globalization and the globalization of the small

Along the way, in the ’90s, technological development had accelerated, and with it, the optimum size of enterprise had been reduced even more. The Internet and large cell-phone networks appear, liberalization drastically reduces the costs of transportation both of cargo and of people, and we start to see the first glimpses of abundance.

But in the first phase, the dismantling of trade barriers looks like it’s going to basically favor multinationals by allowing them reduce size, gaining back at least part of the efficiency lost to overscaling. It’s a time for “breaking value chains“: production is divided into phases that are subcontracted to SMEs in peripheral countries. From the viewpoint of the developed countries, it’s a “dislocation” of production, and a real threat to industrial salaries. Unions abound with the idea that businesses change production sites to be able reduce salaries. The fact is that what makes that salaries are low in subcontracted businesses in these countries is that their productivity is, initially, lower than that of Europe, and therefore they have to compensate for their lack of knowledge and technologies by reducing other costs.

But that changes in two ways: the first is that peripheral SMEs learn to coordinate their own chains, without depending on brands from the central countries, by taking advantage of the reduction of transportation costs and the new accessibility of central markets. The second is that, especially in the consumer-goods market, they benefit from one of the first products of emerging abundance: free software. In less than five years, the volume of this movement exceeds the sum total of all aid to developed countries since World War II.

The result, which is known as “globalization of the small” when seen as a whole, is an unprecedented rise in world trade and a way out of extreme poverty for hundreds of millions of people, most of them in Asia. In quantitative terms, it is the greatest leap towards abundance in the history of humanity. With it, the productivity of the industrialized nations will grow steadily, also increasing salaries and improving living conditions.

The crisis of the center and the P2P mode of production

But for capital, times are hard. The scale of the leaders of the change is too small, and that of the great financial centers too big, for capital to be invested efficiently in the new productive economy. The result is a speculative rush towards anything “commodifiable,” which hits a ceiling in 2007. It is no coincidence that the fall of Enron, the company that did business by turning things like bandwidth or electricity into “commodities,” shortly precedes the collapse of the financial system in the developed countries, which was tangled up in financial products whose complexity was nothing more than the result of try to homogenize risks beyond what’s reasonable.

The longest crisis in the history of capitalism, however, showed the path of abundance. While the financial system collapsed, the business model that had leading the globalization of the small was developed and universalized into what John Robb called the direct economy. The direct economy is the meeting point of the vectors of change of the moment: it basically means the substitution, to the highest degree possible, of necessary financial capital with the free and communal use of knowledge and the capital needed to pay everyday costs through advance sales that often times take the form of “crowdfunding” on virtual platforms.

The intensive use of free software also turns the cycle of P2P production into a model to follow for a whole set of industries in which the reduction of optimal scales is made evident by the impact of the direct economy. The appearance of 3D printers, the rudiments of free multipurpose hardware (like Arduino), and the evolution of good part of the hacker movement into the “maker” movement describe a situation today in which, more than ever, we can talk of the path towards abundance not only in the world of the immaterial, but also in traditional industrial production.

Conclusions

Beyond the crisis, we’re living in a fascinating historical moment. Before our eyes, technological development has reduced the optimum size of businesses to a level that in more and more occupations can be carried out efficiently in a local setting or community, and can even be distributed globally. Many of them are supported to a greater or lesser extent by the result of a productive cycle of a new kind in which capital and market are being redefined, dissipating rents and creating abundance.

The path towards abundance is no longer a proposal or a utopian dream. It is a real course, an economic and social movement happening in parallel to the decomposition of the old ways and which offers us a new promise of overcoming scarcity, war and collapse.

But like every promise of every historical age, isn’t destined to become reality, and has no existence outside of the willpower and actions of people and real communities who must make it present. It’s only a possible result, a horizon to move towards and to struggle for. The question that we will try to respond in the following installations is how.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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