Community Production

We stand at the threshold of an epochal change in the history of work. The changes now emerging will be as incisive as the leap into the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. One important question will be how we use the possibilities of new technologies for the labor market. Directly connected with the labor market of the future is the production of the future. It is a hybrid of bits and bites. And it will be made by all of us.

The tools we gave out of our hands in the course of industrialization are tools we want to reclaim. With advanced technology we aim at forms of communal self-production. Workshops with high-tech DIY machines can be the factories of the future.

Community Formation

Production capacity in these community workshops is already impressive and advanced in part today. The Grand Garage in the Tabakfabrik Linz is equipped, among other things, with fabricators, laser cutters, computer-controlled milling machines, and robots.

During the industrial age, most work was done with muscle power; it was dull, grinding, exhausting physical labor. In the post-industrial age, this work will be done almost entirely by machines. Two thirds of all work can then be work that makes one stronger, is attuned to oneself, advances one, and serves self-realization. That represents enormous progress, because in the past only small privileged elites – artists, intellectuals, and inventors – could enjoy the hearty elixir of such work. This can now change.

Community Production is green like lucky clover

Community Formation in an alternative economy

NANK wants to create free space for ideas and action that are not yet on the market. The priority is bringing people and cultural techniques together with suitable technologies. Neighborhood centers with autonomous, regional production in small spaces make it possible for everyone, for example, to breed fish themselves or simply make everyday objects themselves and thereby shape part of their own work.

The chance to invest two thirds of one’s own work deliberately in one’s own development may make possible what neither democracy nor education nor prosperity has achieved: we, the people – and this includes the 85 percent who until now had to row the galleys – will finally have the chance to mature into fully developed human beings.

Computers are used at home to burn DVDs, make books, furniture, and spare parts oneself. But this is only the beginning. Technological possibilities are emerging for making a large share of the things we need ourselves – in one’s own workshop, at home, or, even more economically and sustainably, in a kind of community center. The role of producer, distributor, and consumer is thus fundamentally changing.

To escape more easily from the stranglehold of the decaying job system, we need a completely new economy. The backbone of this new economy consists in our moving incessantly, step by step, toward an economic form in which we make our own products and thereby gain resilience. It is not only about producing tomatoes or jam intelligently. It is also about producing our own tools, our own infrastructure, our own capacity to act.

Community Production is a form of local economy in which people produce goods themselves by means of adequate production technology. In particular, fabricators and automated machines that are easy to handle, powerful, and multifunctional make it possible to provide for oneself: “We could develop a series of devices, apparatuses, materials, machines, and methods of production that would enable us, or a not very large group of people, to make 60 to 80 percent of what we need to live ourselves.” (The Era of New Work, interview with Frithjof Bergmann, Focus, No. 24/1999, p. 140).

Local Economy

The application of production technology for an economy based on self-provisioning makes “individual production” possible: “In place of gigantic production halls with many robots come more versatile individual robots that allow individual production. They make chairs and tables according to our designs and ideas, sew clothes, or cut car parts.” (The Era of New Work, interview with Frithjof Bergmann, Focus, No. 24/1999, p. 140).

Individual production means that every person makes what they need for themselves. Production and consumption are therefore determined by the human being. This distinguishes Community Production both from traditional self-provisioning and from the prevailing economy with its industrial mass production.

Traditional self-provisioning is “naturally” limited in scope. It has to orient itself to what can be wrested from nature. Ultimately it is nature that determines what and how much can be produced and consumed. In this respect, traditional self-provisioning always also means a relatively modest material standard of living. Community Production does not know this kind of self-sufficiency. Rather, it is the individual need of the respective person that determines production, meaning it serves to satisfy individual needs. Community Production guarantees production independent of natural production factors. What can be produced does not depend on nature, but on technology. Thanks to technological development, Community Production makes possible a self-provisioning that is incomparably more versatile and demanding than traditional self-provisioning:
• Fabricators and networked computer-machine systems make it possible to produce everyday objects such as clothing, shoes, dishes, household appliances, and furniture, as well as non-everyday things such as jewelry and works of art.
• “Food houses” and procedures such as permaculture make food production possible in the city. People can thereby provide themselves with food in a simple and, above all, inexpensive way.
• New methods of building will make house construction possible for far more people than is currently the case. At present, owning one’s own four walls has become so expensive that fewer and fewer can afford it; whoever does afford it takes on a decades-long financial burden that becomes a millstone around the neck for many. Housing, which is a basic human need, should be affordable for everyone. This will be achieved when one can build simply and on one’s own responsibility.

The use of “high tech” implies that Community Production is not a return to nature and therefore not a return to heavy physical labor or muscle power. Rather, Community Production uses the most modern, advanced technology in such a way that the main burden of work is not borne by human beings but by machines. In contrast to traditional self-provisioning, Community Production is not laborious, exhausting, and draining, but creative, shaping, stimulating, and self-determined. It is not human labor power that is demanded, but the human mind that makes use of technology.

While self-provisioning in earlier times had to manage without much technology, or, by its own self-understanding, did not make technology as much its own as it could have, Community Production positively relies on it. One can put it this way: what labor power is for classical self-provisioning, technology is for Community Production. This leads to another distinction: while traditional self-provisioning was time-consuming and left little time for other things, Community Production wants precisely to limit the time needed to produce what is necessary.

An example to illustrate this is the automatic washing machine. While washing in earlier times was laborious drudgery that often took several days, especially in winter, washing today has become such child’s play that it is hardly perceived as effort anymore. The washing machine has largely taken over the work of washing and freed us from it. It is therefore simply impossible to imagine everyday life without it – even the greatest enemy of technology has one in the basement and no longer wants to do without it. The automatic washing machine shows what matters in technology: namely to ease necessary work for us in a practical, useful, effective, and efficient way, and where possible to take it away from us.

High Tech

The use of “high tech” implies that Community Production is not a return to nature and therefore not a return to heavy physical labor or muscle power. Rather, Community Production uses the most modern, advanced technology in such a way that the main burden of work is not borne by human beings but by machines. In contrast to traditional self-provisioning, Community Production is not laborious, exhausting, and draining, but creative, shaping, stimulating, and self-determined. It is not human labor power that is demanded, but the human mind that makes use of technology. While self-provisioning in earlier times had to manage without much technology, or, by its own self-understanding, did not make technology as much its own as it could have, Community Production positively relies on it. One can put it this way: what labor power is for classical self-provisioning, technology is for Community Production. This leads to another distinction: while traditional self-provisioning was time-consuming and left little time for other things, Community Production wants precisely to limit the time needed to produce what is necessary. An example to illustrate this is the automatic washing machine. While washing in earlier times was laborious drudgery that often took several days, especially in winter, washing today has become such child’s play that it is hardly perceived as effort anymore. The washing machine has largely taken over the work of washing and freed us from it. It is therefore simply impossible to imagine everyday life without it – even the greatest enemy of technology has one in the basement and no longer wants to do without it. The automatic washing machine shows what matters in technology: namely to ease necessary work for us in a practical, useful, effective, and efficient way, and where possible to take it away from us.

The Difference

Community Production and the prevailing economic system differ fundamentally and in every respect:
• Like every form of self-provisioning, Community Production brings about the unity of production and consumption; our economic system, by contrast, separates precisely these two areas, which makes mediation through markets necessary. In such a market economy no one is autarkic; everyone depends on everyone else and especially on the market. Community Production aims at the economic autonomy of the individual. That means dependency on markets is abolished, and with it their dominance and the constraints they impose on us.
• The currently prevailing economic form is a private economy, whereas Community Production represents a “public economy”. In it, the means of production are public or quasi-public goods in corresponding facilities. Only then is it guaranteed that they are accessible to all people and that their use is affordable for everyone. In the private economy, by contrast, the means of production are privately owned. This makes the mass of people who are propertyless in this sense doubly dependent: first, they depend on what is produced for consumption. They themselves cannot decide what is produced and what is not. Second, their work depends on production, which is why one speaks of “dependent employees”. Without production there is no work; without employers there are no employees.
• It goes without saying that work differs essentially in the two economic forms. In the private economy, people work for a third party: for the employer, for the market, for production, for money, and so on. Community Production, by contrast, means working for oneself.
• Community Production takes place in self-provisioning centers that, unlike our present companies or factories, are small. This is partly because these centers do not produce masses, but individual production; and partly because the production technology required for this is multifunctional, so only a few machines are needed.
• Market economy inevitably brings competition with it: just as companies compete with one another for market share, people compete for jobs. The globalization of the economy intensifies this competition, to whose constraints people have to submit. This competition disappears in Community Production, because each person produces their own material basic provision – and in doing so does not stand in competition with others.
• Our current economic system is growth-oriented or growth-driven and therefore boundless. Community Production not only abolishes the separation of production and consumption, it also limits them. While our economy wants to produce the largest possible quantities, “individual production” is oriented toward small quantities, thereby preventing excesses. Self-provisioning knows no overproduction, no bubbles, and no resulting financial and economic crises of the kind that currently shake our economic system.
• Mass production and mass consumption place a considerable burden on the environment; every ecological improvement of a product is neutralized by the increase in production demanded by economic growth; the globalization of the economy wants to spread the Western material lifestyle across the earth, which far exceeds its carrying capacity. Community Production, by contrast, is characterized by limitations of many different kinds that benefit the environment: it replaces industrial mass production with individual production; mass consumption gives way to individual need fulfillment; economic growth is a foreign word for Community Production. It is not the absurdly artificially inflated material lifestyle of the West, not its consumer frenzy, that is carried into the world, but a basic provision that can be individually shaped. Since Community Production is local economy, it decisively reduces the immense global transport of goods, which contributes substantially to environmental pollution. At the same time, it abolishes the now prevailing separation of life and work that spread with the economic and job system. This reduces the disastrous mass commuting to and from work worldwide, which also means less environmental pollution. Apart from that, thousands upon thousands of traffic jams are avoided in which we senselessly waste our time and nerves.

• Community Production starts from individually limited needs; consequently, production and consumption are limited as well. In contrast, the prevailing economic system propagates limitless needs, to be met by constantly increasing production and consumption. The only thing that dampens or limits mass production and mass consumption is money. It is the money available to us that decides what we can buy and therefore consume. Without money we could not satisfy our needs or pay homage to consumption, which would immediately affect production. What is decisive, therefore, is that producers and consumers have sufficient money, or access to additional money in the form of credit; then, monetarily speaking, nothing stands in the way of increasing production and consumption.
• While the prevailing economic system depends entirely on money, Community Production decisively reduces this dependency: the more people provide for themselves, the fewer goods they have to buy; the less money the individual needs in order to make a living. In place of earning and spending money comes self-production. For the sake of contrast, Frithjof Bergmann therefore calls the economy of “New Work” an “economy of minimal buying” as opposed to the prevailing economy, which he characterizes as an “economy of maximal buying” (Frithjof Bergmann, New Work-New Culture, Arbor Verlag, 2004, p. 316).

Incidentally, self-provisioning is cheaper than buying goods. It is often claimed that mass production is cheaper than individual production. But that is a “myth”: a large part of the price of a product often consists not of production costs, but of other costs such as transport, advertising, packaging, storage, distribution structure, intermediaries, and overhead costs of all kinds. All of these disappear in self-production.

Self-production is also advantageous where production costs are high. Anyone who has ever bought a house knows how expensive it is. But whoever can build their house in an effective and efficient way – and that is precisely the concern of Community Production – will massively reduce the costs of home ownership. In any case, the cost reduction, or the value one creates through one’s own work, will amount to more than an average earner could earn in money through employment in the same time. At the same time, the self-provider saves many incidental costs, of which the outrageously high broker fees are the most annoying and unnecessary.

Community Production is an economic approach that can be applied worldwide, especially since it has solutions ready for problems to which conventional economics has no answer: Community Production can counteract the global rural exodus, since such a self-provisioning center can be implemented in every village; it can make basic provision possible in the growing slums of the world, where regular jobs are scarce; and Community Production can give work to the masses who, in view of global population growth, stream onto the labor market and find no jobs there.

Suppose Community Production were to prevail and the world’s population could be materially provided for by it sufficiently; suppose individually definable self-provisioning could be achieved with limited effort: the economy would no longer be an end in itself, but a means to an end. Concretely: its function would be to create the necessary condition for “free work”.