Leo Eddie Riveron via The Zeitgeist Movement Global Yesterday at 5:03pm · Goals, Myths & Overview: All economic systems have structural goals and often times these goals are not exactly apparent in the theories set forward in principle. The market system and a NLRBE have very different structural goals. -Market capitalisms structural goal is growth and maintaining rates of consumption high enough to keep enough people employed at any given time. Likewise, employment itself requires a culture of real or perceived inefficiency and that often means the preservation of scarcity in one form or another. -A NLRBEs goal is to optimize technical efficiency and create the highest level of abundance possible, within the bounds of Earthly sustainability, seeking to meet human needs directly. That noted, there are a number of assumptions, myths and confusions that have arisen over time that are worth addressing upfront. The first is the idea that this model is “centrally planned”. What this assumes, based on historical precedent, is that an elite group of people will make the economic decisions for the society. A NLRBE is not centrally planned. It is a Collaborative Design System (CDS). It is based entirely upon public interaction, facilitated by programmed, open-access systems, that enable a constant, dynamic feedback exchange that can literally allow for the input of the public on any given industrial matter, whether personal or social. Given this, another outcry is “but who programs the system?”, which once again assumes that an elitist interest could exist behind the mediating software programs themselves (as will be expanded upon more so in this essay). The answer, as odd as it may sound, is everyone and no one. The tangible rules of the laws of nature, as they apply to environmental sustainability and engineering efficiency, are an objective frame of reference. The nuances may change to some degree over time, but the general principles of efficiency and sustainability remain, as they have been deduced by basic physics, along with several thousand years of recorded history by which we have been able to recognize basic, yet critical patterns in nature. Moreover, the actual programming utilized by this interactive system would be available in an open source platform for public input and review. In fact, the system is predicated entirely upon the intelligence of the “group mind” and the open source/open access sharing virtue will help bring all viable interests to the surface for public consideration, in an absolutely transparent manner. Another confusion surrounds a concept that has, to many, become, the defining difference between capitalism and most all other historically proposed social models. That has to do with whether the “means of production” is privately owned or not. In short, the means of production refers to the non-human assets that create goods, such as machinery, tools, factories, offices and the like. In capitalism, the capitalist owns the means of production, by historical definition. There has been an ongoing argument for a century that any system that does not have its means of production owned as a form of private property, using currency as the information mechanism, is not going to be as economically efficient as one that does. This, as the argument goes, is because of the use of the price mechanism. Price, to its credit, has the ability to create exchange value amongst virtually any set of goods due to its divisibility. This creates a feedback mechanism that connects the entire market system in a certain, narrow way. Price, property and money work together to translate subjective demand preferences into semi-objective exchange values. The notion of “semi” is employed here because it is a culturally relative measure only, absent almost every factor that gives true technical quality to a given material, good or process. Arguably, the only tangible technical data price that embodies, crudely, relates to a resources scarcity and the labor energy/complexity put into the creation of a given good. Keep this in mind, as these two value variables will also be addressed again later in this essay with respect to non-price oriented calculation. That all noted, the reasonable question becomes: is it possible to create a system that can more efficiently facilitate feedback with respect to consumer preference, demand, labor value and resource or component scarcity, without the price system, subjective property values or market exchange? The answer is yes. The modern solution is to completely eliminate exchange and create a direct control and feedback link between the consumer and the means of production itself. The consumer actually becomes part of the means of production and the industrial complex as a whole becomes a tool that is accessed by the public, at will, to generate goods. To illustrate this, most today likely own a simple paper printer connected to a home computer. When a file is sent to print from the computer, the user is in control of a miniature version of a means of production. Likewise, in some cities today, there are now 3D printing labs, where people in the community can send their 3D design and use these machines to print what they need in physical form. The model being presented here is a similar idea. The next step in this scaling process is the creation of a strategically automated industrial complex, localized as much as possible, which is designed to produce, through automated means, the average of everything any given region has found demand for. As will be described, this is very feasible given the current state of technology and the ephemeralization trends at hand. Imagine, for example, a clothing store except that is not organized like a store as is currently understood. It is a multi-purpose textile-printing house. You find the design you are interested in online, along with the materials you prefer and other customizations, and you print that article of clothing “on-demand” at that facility. Consider for a moment how much storage space, transport energy, and overrun waste is eliminated by this approach if virtually everything could be created on-demand, done by automated systems which can continually produce a greater variety of goods, from increasingly smaller manufacturing configurations. In truth, the real fallacy of this “private ownership of the means of production” objection is its culture lag. Today, industry is witnessing a merger of capital goods, consumer goods and labor power. Machines are taking over human labor power, becoming capital goods, while also ever reducing in size to become consumer goods. The result is an increasingly smaller and more optimized industrial complex that can do more and more with less and less. It is also worth mentioning that labor automation is now making the historically notable labor theory of value 793 increasingly moot as well. Today, the labor energy that goes into a given good, while still a factor for process recognition, does not have much of a quantifiable correlation anymore. Today, machines now make and design machines. While the initial creation of a machine might require a good deal of human planning and initial construction at this time, once set in motion, there is a constant decrease in that labor value transference over time. More: thezeitgeistmovement/orientation
Posted on: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 00:47:02 +0000
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