ECODEMA Welcomes you to a New America

We welcome you to an America where access to capital on both a beneficial, capital ownership and usufruct basis is universal, where the means of production are falling steadily in price, and where the word 'job' may become an anachronism. In the midst of the chaos of our homegrown global financial crisis, and seemingly unnoticed by Washington D.C. and Wall Street alike, America's Main Street is wading right toward the middle of this new economic world. It is a world where tools once available for hundreds of thousands of dollars are now matched in capability by tools costing a few thousand dollars of capital expenditure. Along with the collapsing cost of capital will be the corollary (and hopefully orderly) retirement of the monetary and creditary systems of the world as we presently know it. Networks of empowered producing firms and households will create credit instruments on their own peer-to-peer platforms.

The nature of manufacturing has changed rapidly. There are a number of scenarios entertained about what shape manufacturing will take. [site Michel Piore and Charles Sabel] We believe the era of mass production manufacturing is near its definitive end, and an era of DIY manufacturing is dawning. We believe our prototypes demonstrate the power and desirability of peer-to-peer individual and household access to manufacturing tools.

We are interested in a coherent architecture of financing peer-to-peer production and finance drawing upon these prototypes, including a system of finance that countervails the need to fully amortize fixed costs through mass production. We feel a countervailing economy with such a capability to do free of debt will be at a business advantage in that marketing and production will be freed to respond to real consumer needs as their prime directive rather than be driven to pay for fast depreciating specialized machinery that must be kept running at capacity in order to amortize its cost, with an additional costs generated in terms of inventory and a burden on the ecology.

In a world where the realities of peak oil and peak credit is converging we need an order driven system, lean production being a prime example, to minimize inventories, locate production facilities close to marketplaces and scale capital expenditure to the flow of production, a mighty miracle made possible by the lathe. We are well into a 30 year trend of shifting from mass production with specialized machinery to small shop production using general purpose machinery. Even now the volume of goods manufactured in independent and highly networked job shops like those existing in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna and 'Shan Zhai' shops in Shenzhen Province exceeds that produced using mass production technology.  

 We can't afford to wait for what is left of the mass production infrastructure to be fully paid for to begin the process of empowered civil marketplaces of America's free and open social economy taking the power of production into its own hands. We describe our marketplace framework here in this paper. We also describe an orderly "migration zone" for the economic refugees, namely workers, investors and their communities that will surely be fleeing the old industrial system for the new.   

This new world is an increasingly peer-to-peer setting where the traditional walled distinctions between business principals, workers and investors no longer apply in the ways they once did.   In the peer-to-peer world the relevant decision makers will be entrepreneurs and households who are working for themselves in cooperative partnerships and collaborative arrangements of various kinds. It will be a better world for investors as well, since assets can be placed in safe harbours and investors can take their slice of revenues before commercial banks and management do so.  

We believe that the era of purchasing power being attached almost wholly to employment contracts may also be coming to a merciful end, and that economic conditions much like that which existed at the time of the American Revolution are at our doors. Since in a peer-to-peer world of enterprise collaboration capital, labour, and consumers end their estrangement, access to capital goods will be universal and the American economy will return to the revolutionary ideas of Scottish enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson where workers and households employed themselves in production, largely for household use. Liberation from the necessity of making large capital expenditures is accelerating this process as we speak.

The necessity of employing a bureaucratic corporate management class and commercial banks as intermediaries between investors and those directly involved in the direct art and act of production is also fast coming to an end as well. Their relevant skill and knowledge sets will be made available to business and communities on a disintermediated , consultative and educational basis.

Households and skilled labor talent in socially-organized communities will take advantage of the low cost of capital to supply their local marketplaces and neighborhoods with their own goods and services. They will trade their locally-produced goods on their own regionally-scaled commercial exchange platforms, taking exchange credit for their production and in turn buying the necessary means of subsistence with those exchange credits, necessaries such as locally-grown produce, bread, cheese, butter, clothing, haircuts etc. As likely as not households and businesses alike will be able to pay their local and state taxes with their earned trade credits.

[Discuss the jobless recovery for a paragraph.]

[Refer to overinvestment and underconsumption thesis of Sweezy, Magdoff and the TME theorists. Tie down with David Ricardo and Adam Smith's insights on the 'vehicular nature of money' to segway to the prototypes section with insights drawn from Henry CK Liu and Chris Cook concerning the unvirtuous cycle of overinvestment, underconsumption, asset-price inflation and deflation ]