We as a society are in need of a reorganization of our social resources and I don’t think we need to leave it to the government to perform this reorg. Don’t get me wrong, the government did a decent job with the New Deal in the 1930’s. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created programs which pulled the country out of a debilitating depression. He created many of the social programs we know today, Social Security being one of the major programs he established. We are now, in my opinion, dealing with a new group of robber barons who want to reduce our government to a fascist dictatorship, stealing all the money from the social programs created by FDR and giving tax breaks to the rich. We of course have to stop the steal here, but I believe the 21st century’s “New Deal” needs to be owned by the people directly. Yes the people are taxed by the government and the government is then expected to fairly utilize people’s taxed funds to produce social programs that enable social stability. And I’m not proposing we release the government from performing this required social function, but I think we should start to think of how to build a new economy of our own, with our own vision for society as a whole, controlled by the people directly!
Social Essential Resources
Us humans need food,clothing and shelter. These are essential social resources. In our capitalist economy, businesses provide these resources on a profit/loss basis. If it doesn’t make money then it is not sustainable. If it doesn’t make cents, then it doesn’t make sense. We need food to eat regardless of if someone earns a healthy profit on the sale of a food product. We as a society need to produce crops like rice, corn and fruit for consumption to physically sustain our existence on earth. We can have all the money we want, but if we don’t have the mechanisms in place to repeatedly create, produce, deliver and prepare food for consumption we either get it from somewhere else or we perish. We need clothing and shelter to protect us from the elements. We can also perish if we don’t manage to engineer the mechanisms that orchestrate the creation of these social essential resources.
Energy is also a social essential resource that is often left out of these types of discussions. But I’m not leaving it out. We need energy to protect us from the elements as well and to produce the other three social essential resources. Cheap fossil fuel has been the backbone of our modern industrialized society. Without it, or some other form of energy, I’m not able to write this blog post on my laptop. Without energy we can’t move electrons over the Internet for this blog post to reach millions.
We need energy, but we definitely need to find greener ways to obtain it. That’s for another blog post, here I just want to make sure it is included as one of the essential social resources modern day men and women need to keep our lives comfortable and sustainable.
These four resources, food, clothing, shelter and energy form life’s foundational building blocks.
I have not forgotten about our obvious need for education and healthcare, I simply want to focus on the most basic life sustaining building blocks. But to be sure, we have limited ability to advance life without education and healthcare. These are the very next major life elements to address once we have established a means to produce the most basic life support system components.
A New Economy
We can build a new economy only after we truly decide the old one is not working. These major types of changes to society seem to depend on major social events. With the current Trump regime in office I think we will have ample major social pressure to do something different. This is not political, because I support these changes regardless of what party is in office; however, the current occupant of the White House clearly intends to send the country through his version of the authoritarian meat grinder. We will serve ourselves very well to figure out how to take care of our own social needs. He is clearly doing all he can to remove any safety net, all the while producing as much economic chaos as possible.
That being said a new economy needs to be run by the local citizens such that we can be sure to have what we need and determine a means to produce essential resources with what is locally available. Food can be produced with vertical farming. We can find buildings unused and create automated vertical farming solutions producing food that doesn’t need to be shipped in reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Aquaponics is a form of vertical farming which uses fish as a form of nutrients for vegetables grown in the vertical farm. The fish waste is full of nitrogen which is very useful for growing crops. The fish could sustainably be farmed as well to provide a source of meat to the community.
Making money is not the goal of the vertical farm, we can’t eat money. We need to produce food regardless of making money. We need a means to create the equipment that supports vertical farming. Vertical farms can be automated. There are automated vertical farms on the market today.
Recycling is highly likely the most reasonable means to change old materials into new materials for use in a 3D printing process to produce components for automated machinery. Useful for vertical farms but also for manufacturing clothing and shelter.
Solar energy is a clean means for energy. We need something renewable. Hydrogen is also another source of clean renewable energy. We may want to make one or both our first major investment towards a new economy. We could use solar energy for electrolysis to separate hydrogen from water molecules. Both hydrogen and solar are great sources of green energy. They could power our automated manufacturing.
The goal for a new economy is to create a closed loop or cycle such that we can manufacture all components needed to produce all major essential social resources. Recycling bottles can be used to make threading for clothing. Recycle bottles can also be used to engineer a new material called graphene. Further details on graphene, warrant another blog post,but suffice it to say graphene is the material of the future. Graphyne can be used to make bendable wearable electronic clothing. Graphene produced from recycled plastic is now used by the military to engineer next-generation batteries. Recycled steel output from washing machines and refrigerators surpassed the mining of raw steel already. Recycling is also a local solution.
Initial investments will need to be made, of course, and if we pool our resources together in a shared democratic, systematic manner we could utilize shared resources to efficiently acquire the required buildings and other materials needed to get started.
Worker Cooperatives To Engineer Essential Resources
Worker cooperatives (I already have another blog post on this topic), are a best fit for a new economy based on greater shared power amongst the many and not the few. Capitalism is operated and managed by the few and profits only the few. Worker cooperatives on the other hand aim to empower the workers who do the actual work to benefit from the fruits of their own labor. The name is often shortened to worker co-ops, these organizations are not new. The workers decide what to produce, how to produce it and how the profits are to be split up. Our new economy needs to create as many worker co-ops as possible as a means to transition from being wage slaves to producers of our own reality.
It’s time to go technical because it is very much needed here. Blockchain technology, the tech behind bitcoin and the like, highly lends itself to worker co-ops. A DAO or Decentralized Autonomous Organization is a structured organization which uses blockchain technology to enable members to vote on organization issues and decide collectively how the organization is to be run. Worker co-ops are based on one member one vote and are basically how DAOs already run. If using say the Solana network, which is my recommendation, to run a worker co-op as a DAO you get a very well built system with low fees. Visa has plans to use it as one of their buildouts for future digital currencies. Which is the other reason to run worker co-ops on the blockchain: funds can easily be pooled together and then collectively decided on how to distribute them. From employees paying themselves to acquiring buildings for vertical farming or recycling.
At the core of blockchain technology is a trust infrastructure based on cryptographic keys. A block is a set of data that can’t be changed without being noticed. A crypto key is used to encrypt a data block. The blockchain is a long collection of these cryptographic trusted data blocks.
All financial transaction and voting data are stored in the blockchain, maintaining trust amongst the users that their financial funds and voting decisions are robustly stored. DAO automation handles the voting decisions via something called a smart contract. An agreed and voted upon action triggers the execution of a smart contract’s coded actions stored on the blockchain.
We could greatly benefit from worker co-ops individually, just think about how much CEOs and stock holders bring in with doing very little to no work at all. The profits earned on our backs as wage slaves doesn’t even compare to the wages we receive. With worker co-ops we decide how to split up the profits of our own labor, not just a few people at the top of a system purposely built to keep the largest value of the workers’ work in the hands of the few.
We need to create a new economy purposely built to enrich us all, not just the one percent of society.
Automation Of Essential Resource Production
Automating the manufacturing of our essential resources should be done to remove as much burden of human effort as possible. The capitalist corporation has used automation to reduce its need for human workers, why shouldn’t human workers use automation to do the same?
Automated life support machinery can put in all the required work needed to produce essential social resources, while humans only make sure the life support systems are functioning well with minimum effort required to do so. Humans can go on about enjoying as much of life and leisure as the newly automated economy allows.
Education To Build And Maintain Automation Machinery
What are the most important skills to pass on to new humans? We humans are completely void of previous knowledge that existed before our entrance into the world. We all need someone else when we are born. To me, that fact alone, is enough to guide the design of all human social structures. All humans need someone else to provide the sustenance of life until we can do so on our own.
All education should provide the necessary knowledge to obtain and/or manufacture essential life resources. Not going to go into a long winded critic of America’s educational system, I simply want to say it clearly doesn’t prepare us to fend for ourselves. That is easy to prove given we must beg for a job from someone else after finishing all our formal education.
In our new economy, children must learn the necessary skills in say STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) that enable proficiency in each to maintain automated manufacturing of essential resources. How to engineer these automated machines should guide all education from K-12th grades. As soon as a student can start on their path of learning these skills, they should do so. Worker co-ops can own the automated machinery and by making worker co-ops the center piece of our economy youth could enter worker co-op training programs automatically during regular grade school. The training prepares for individual sub-system tasks and ultimately how to run the entire worker co-op’s enterprise. Via rotations each student would learn how to utilize various STEM techniques and education on the job. On-goingly, schooling throughout the youth’s upbringing exposes him or her to the many different job positions needed to operate the worker co-op. There by exposing them to skills they will need as an adult to be individually self-sufficient as well as supporting a self-sufficient society.
By the end of their formal education they would have a proven track record of the skills possessed. They could choose to work for any worker co-op that needs their skills.
Conclusion
We can and should form new worker cooperatives as the basis of a new economy. An economy in which we own all means of production of our basic essential resources. An economy where we decide what we produce, how we will produce it and how we will split up the share of profits in equally fair proportions. Every participant gets the same vote, it doesn’t matter how much you put into the worker co-op, one person one vote. Let’s democratize the enterprise. A saying coined by the economist Richard Wolff.
I propose using DAO blockchain technology to administer these new worker cooperatives. This technology guarantees trust in trading and automating the execution of predetermined tasks. Since crypto-currency is based on this technology it also can provide the financial instrument to bring disparate people together to decide how to pool their funds and spend collectively. I propose the Solana network for its strong engineering, speed, low fees and great developer community.
We should focus on how to build a new economy not only based on profit, some functionality simply must exist for the continued existence of humankind. We need basic essential resources regardless of if we were able to sell it to a customer or not. We need to think in terms of what we would do if money was not an object, because it very well isn’t. We can’t eat money, we can’t wear money and money won’t provide shelter for us. We humans tend to equate money to physical objects, like food or a house, but it is the transformation of various raw resources into finished products or services of which money is used to barter and trade. If established in an automated way to manufacture products and provide services, money or crypto-currency could simply be used to capture the accounting for the transaction. With worker co-ops we could all share in the profits of a new economic system.