History Through a Different Lens

Author's Note: The theory advanced here is painted in extremely broad strokes, since I wanted to tell the story in one easily-digestible blog post. I'll expand on particular issues in future blog posts.

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As part of the exploration of the transition that society is facing, it would be well worth our while to understand how we got into this sorry mess in the first place.

I often wondered how a society founded on innovation, self-reliance, and respect for the individual and individual choice above all else morphed into the society we see around us today. I found one plausible explanation in the pages of The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, by Kevin Carson.

When I first started reading The Homebrew Industrial Revolution (THIR), I was expecting a technical treatise. However, before the author got to that, he embarked on a tour of the evolution of society during the Industrial Revolution that is, to put it mildly, considerably at odds with the one we all learned in public school.

The Underground is Surfacing

So far in this series about the Phoenix Society, we've addressed the massive size and rapid growth of the underground, apolitical economy, the rising decentralization and individual empowerment in response to the ongoing failures of centralized, top-down control, detailed specifics of new technologies that hold the promise of decentralizing production, new tools for and attitudes toward collaboration, and the decentralization of production. But the story of the Phoenix Society is not only in the depth of the changes occuring at the edge of the future, but the breadth of support for these changes, even among those who have yet to realize their depth.

Stories that explore the widespread acceptance of this new decentralized paradigm are everywhere, and a number of those stories have been told here at The Tireless Agorist. In Detroit: America's Greece, we saw examples of residents reclaiming homes taken by banks and government agencies, community gardening projects, voluntary cleanup efforts, neighborhood watches, and new sorts of microbusinesses, all the result of individual initiatives, not government programs.

Accidental Agorists Rebuild A Road tells the story of a community of volunteers repairing a road vital to their well-being because the government couldn't or wouldn't get the job done and they weren't willing to set around and watch their livelihoods destroyed. Meanwhile, Tombstone, Arizona Clings to Life as the citizens still wait after more than a year for permission from the government to repair vital water systems that are in an area protected by the Wilderness Act.

Barefoot College - Electrifying Empowerment

In some of the poorest villages of India and Africa, illiterate grandmothers are bringing the gift of light. This is the amazing story of Barefoot College, responsible not only for training illiterate solar engineers, but also water engineers, designers, communicators, midwives, architects and rural social entrepreneurs.

Barefoot College, established in 1972 by Sanjit "Bunker" Roy, has been championing a bottom-up approach to education and empowering rural poor since 1972. Roy's vision was to educate the local people, who would then be able to use the skills and knowledge to raise themselves from poverty. He initially hired what he describes as "paper-qualified urban professionals," but found they would spend only a few months at the project before leaving for positions in the cities. Beginning in 1977, he began using local people who had attended the college to do the teaching, designing the programs to use simple technology in innovative ways.

Roy's model -- educating local people through peer-to-peer learning -- is transformational in that it relies on the passing on of traditional skills and knowledge rather than an emphasis on outside educators bringing new ideas and influences. Local people are trained as doctors, teachers, engineers, architects, designers, mechanics, communicators and accountants.

Roy has disrupted the model that many NGOs and well-endowed foundations promote in the developing world, namely a top-down approach led by outside, often governmental, institutions.

The Homebrew Production Model

In earlier columns in this series, we've explored technologies that promise to challenge mass production and distribution of goods, much as decentralized arts have begun to challenge the major media outlets and local farming is becoming a nascent threat to factory farming; technology that will soon be as readily available to the local craftsman as farming implements are to the local farmer.

Both an ecological and economic case can be made for the wastefulness of the current production-push model of goods creation. Making cheap, disposable goods centrally and distributing them globally in a never-ending cycle uses considerably more resources and energy than crafting durable, repairable goods for a smaller geographic area. As with produce, the hidden costs of socialized infrastructure account for a considerable portion of the supposed economic advantages of mass production.

The counter-argument can be made that only centralized production lines can produce many goods, such as today's sophisticated electronic consumer goods. To continue down the path toward a more decentralized economy, new models of decentralized production will be necessary. Fortunately, some models have already shown themselves to be viable, and others offer great promise.

Homebrew Production is Coming

Author's Note: The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, by Kevin Carson, goes into great detail about many of the concepts underlying this series of posts. A number of columns will focus on information gleaned from there. Well worth the time to read. Highly recommended.

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In the first column in this series, The Apolitical Economic Superpower, we discussed the rapid growth of the untaxed, unregulated economy that currently provides 50% of the world's jobs, and is expected to provide two-thirds of the world's jobs by 2020, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

In The Rising Phoenix Society, we learned of David Obi, who brought electricity to the masses in Nigeria by working an underground distribution deal with a Chinese manufacturer. We looked at local and urban farming as an example of the growth of apolitical employment in the US, and touched on regulation and infrastructure costs as two reasons that smaller-scale production may prove increasingly more competitive with factory farming in the future.

We also noted the great changes in the creation and marketing of literature, music, photography and other arts over the last few years, thanks to the largely unregulated and tax-free internet. We mentioned the grassroots effort that arose in opposition to the corporate-driven attempt by government to squash that great blossoming of creativity. We also observed that education (as opposed to government managed and financed "schooling") is on the cusp of a similar great transformation.

However, there's one major element of society that has and always probably will remain within the Domain of the Dinosaurs; the holy trinity of mass production, mass marketing, and mass distribution. Like it or not, that model is a keystone of the modern economy. The current assumption is that centralized mass production, with its requirements for massive capital investments, high energy and transportation costs, reliance on nation-wide infrastructure, considerable administrative overhead, and reliance on a production-driven throwaway consumption model is the only viable model for production.

Can that model be challenged by one without all those drawbacks? By the process of negation, that model would include low capital requirements, low overhead, local distribution, and build-to-demand production of durable, repairable goods. Unless goods can be economically produced in much smaller batches on much less expensive equipment, that model is a non-starter. But innovations on the horizon suggest a strong possibility that those conditions will be met in the not-too-distant future.

The Rise of the Phoenix Society

In the first column in this series, The Apolitical Economic Superpower, we discussed the rapid growth of the untaxed, unregulated economy. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), it already provides an estimated 50% of the world's jobs. And in only eight short years, they estimate that two out of three workers world-wide will be employed in jobs outside the control of government, in the apolitical economy that this article from Foreign Policy refers to as System D.

By 2020, the OECD projects, two-thirds of the workers of the world will be employed in System D. There's no multinational, no Daddy Warbucks or Bill Gates, no government that can rival that level of job creation. Given its size, it makes no sense to talk of development, growth, sustainability, or globalization without reckoning with System D.

If You Build It, They Will Come

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street, If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat, If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.

Don't ask me what I want it for If you don't want to pay some more
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman

- The Beatles -
Seven-year-old Carter King likes to fish with his dad. He likes it so much that he and his dad built a fourteen-foot wooden boat in the garage together so they could go fishing more often. Being good citizens, (or knowing they'd get nabbed by the state if they didn't have a bunch of ugly letters and numbers painted on the side) they properly registered the boat, paying the appropriate fees.

Not long after, Mr. King began receiving letters from the Tennessee Department of Revenue, informing him that because he was a boat dealer and manufacturer, he owed an additional $539 in taxes on the boat.

Of course, Mr. King assumed it was a mistake, so he contacted the auditor assigned to his case. Nope, there was no mistake. The state knew the boat was built by Carter and his dad in their garage, for their own use. Indeed, the state doubled down, warning that the family could face injunctions or misdemeanor charges if they don't pay up.

The Department of Revenue isn't talking. Requests for interviews are rejected, not only for this particular case, but about the issue in general.

When you have the guns and cuffs, own the courts and hold the keys to the jail cells, why be reasonable about $539?

Mr. King, instead of focusing on the piddling $539, should be preparing his operation for an onslaught of other government agencies, now that he's been declared a boat dealer and manufacturer.

The Apolitical Economic Superpower

Christiane Amanpour of ABC News is the latest to grasp the significance of the world's off-the-books, untaxed, unregulated marketplace. This surprising economic superpower was featured in her Around the World segment on February 1^st.

This market is most often referred to by government spokesmen everywhere as the "black market," in the hopes that people will equate dodging the taxman and bureaucratic busybodies with slavery, child trafficing for pornography, murder for hire, heroin sales, and other, such unsavory pursuits. But people are waking up to the reality behind the hype. When a market is the second-largest in the world, topping 10 trillion dollars, second only to the United States $14.26 trillion, and currently provides approximately half the world's jobs, it becomes increasingly hard to conceive of it as fundamentally evil.¹

The future holds only increased respectibility, as estimates indicate that by 2020, 8 years away, fully two-thirds of the world's workforce will find themselves employed outside of officially-approved channels. This is occurring in an official world-wide economic slump where every new job is considered reason for celebration and pontification. It becomes ever more obvious that the biggest contributor to the growth of the global standard of living is not government programs, but avoiding government involvement in the economic realm to the greatest extent possible.

As Christiane puts it, "far from the canyons of Wall Street, far from the banking capitals of the world, the economy of the streets is booming." The same can hardly be said for the listless, if not moribund, state of the officially-recognized economies. Even in the United States, where avoiding political class meddling in the economy grows more difficult every day, $1.2 trillion, or about 8.3 percent of the economy, is off-the-books -- although the US is among those countries with the smallest percentage of such activity.