Technocracy

The unique aspect of technocracy is that it is an ideology adapted to a post-industrial society. As you know, the history of industrialism and the increasing amount of production has been a history of technologic development.

Just 200 years ago, society could not acquire such a large surplus, since labor still was directly associated with human sweat and toil, and the extension of technology in the shape of primitive machinery and animals were not able to increase the surplus much beyond the basic sustenance of the population. Most of the population lived in destitution and poverty not unlike that of contemporary Africa.

Today, we are able to produce nutrients, products and services by using machinery which are hundreds of times more efficient than a human laborer, and industrial workers in most western countries are today becoming more and more of machine maintainers and programmers rather than direct toilers.

Thus, we could imagine that a post-capitalist system would actually also be a post-industrial system in the sense that there would be very little direct work that would be needed to be done by people.

The problem is that capitalism - wary of the prospects of unemployment, unable to introduce some sort of amendments to increase consumption, and likewise unable to replace industrial labor with works that are comparable - cannot accept such a development since it naturally would render capitalism totally obsolete.

Therefore, waste and destruction goes hand in hand. In a study in 1990, the Wuppertal Institute in western Germany made two studies, Factor 4 and Factor 10, which showed that Europe for example could double its prosperity while halving its production. And when you know that the yearly production of food is enough to supply 12 billion people with a western standard of life, and that about 1,8 billion people are not adequately nourished in the world, you automatically realise that something is quite wrong with the price system.

Technocracy offers an alternative way to administrate an advanced infrastructure.

Firstly, to eliminate waste and effectivise production, all of the infrastructure and land should be put under the administration of one service, referred to as the technate.

Then, to eliminate bottlenecks and replace the price system with a more efficient system, we imagine that energy accounting should be introduced as a mean to move the control over the economy to the hands of the people.

Energy accounting means that the total amount of production capacity is divided equally between all people living on the area of the technate, and that each individual is given an energy certifikate containing information about how much of her share she has used. The energy certifikate will monitor the available amount of production capacity during a specific production cycle. The "costs" of all products and services under a technate are directly correspondent to their production cost in energy.

One note: The individual production capacity cannot work unless we have an integrated industrial infrastructure which has an ability to produce which is larger than the human ability to consume. The technate must therefore be of a quite large size.

Moreover, the specific units in the energy certifikate, the energy credits are not able to be saved, traded or given away, since they are expiring and reloaded when each production cycle has passed. They are not accumulated in the technate either, as they ceases to exist when the information of what the individual has ordered has been notified to the factories involved in production of a specific combination of products. Thus, they cannot be accumulated and reinvested - they do not represent debt, but available capacity to produce during a time.

Since technocracy is not dependent upon taxation, it could be defined as a form of government over machines and not people. The technate is not responsible for legislation, and the social issues are handled outside of the sphere of responsibilities of the technate.

Thus, technocracy is possible to combine with various different forms of socialism.

If you want to know more about technocracy, look in: http://en.technocracynet.eu

why should such energy credits not be able to be saved or given away ?

it should be obvious that its unlikely that someone will always manage to "spend" all of his credits now if we take those wasted credits from all of the population then that would be an enormous waste of production capacity.

to me such a system is not flexible enough because afterall there might be months where i dont need to spend much credits at all and then all of a sudden my pc is fried my fridge gets broken and my car needs to be replaced would i have to go without credits for the rest of the month then ?

When it comes to technical equipment, you do not pay for their cost to be produced but the cost of continuous usage.