A repost from Living Systems Institute

Permaculture Analysis

Production for the market is limited by what is relatively scarce to someone else who has the money to pay for it. If you have the capacity to fulfill such a niche, you can convert your capacity into money, and the incentive is to produce as much as you can for as little cost as you can. Those are incentives to economies of scale, maximizing one time capital investments in tools in order to minimize the on going cost of labor.

If you have the capacity to produce for yourself, the incentive is to produce exactly what you need . . . a sufficiency. That is an incentive to make the best use of available resources. It is an incentive to integrate the function of those resources. When we integrate the needs and products of more people and more species, realizing the biological potential within the range of our ability to influence, we increase the flows of goods and services by maximizing participation. Our quest to increase the quantity of interactions is balanced by the limitation that interactions do not take place unless they fulfill a need of both parties to the transaction. That is a qualitative limit to participation that leads in the direction of balance in the system.

If each human begins to consciously choose which things they will purchase in the market and which things they will produce in conjunction with their neighbors, we open up new opportunities for people who have limited marketable skills and for species that do not have a market, to participate in producing a healthy habitat. That will tend to stabilize the system, including the economic system, the social system and the ecosystem within the habitat. That is how we will heal nature and end poverty.

Anthony Prichard asks:

The growing team pays into it or shares into it? How do they keep track? ie. you will get one bucket of pears at harvest for one hour of mechanics work.

And I responded:

This is probably the hardest concept to get across. We are so used to first converting to money . . . to determine value . . . and then distributing based on monetary value.

First, think of growing team members as partners in the business. So long as all the partners are working, they share the profits. That divorces the value of what is contributed from the value of what is distributed. If the business is a failure there are no profits . . . no matter the value you contributed. If the business is a success there could be huge profits . . . even if you really didn’t do much.

Second, think of producing for your own consumption. We don’t have to convert things to money before we distribute them . . . and it does not matter what the market value is . . . the team decided to produce it because the team members value it. We call that use value which does not change as opposed to market value which is a function of scarcity. When something becomes abundant it loses market value . . . the use value remains the same.

Third, think of these partners producing for their own consumption. They decide how much work will go into each product (not just the growing also the car fixing, carpentry, baby sitting . . . ) and to the best of their ability they produce enough for the group . . . a sufficiency.

So say we have a cold spell just after you planted the tomatoes. Now we don’t have as many tomatoes as the team could use. How will they be distributed? In my experience the team will share them fairly . . . without resort to measuring the monetary value of each contribution. Those who have contributed least want to be fair . . . sometimes even more than those who have contributed most . . . who are willing to give away their share.

The bottom line is, if someone thinks they are not getting fair value for their contribution, they will stop contributing.