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Supporting Community Trade & NFPs

We Are A Registered Cooperative

The Fractal Economy Co-operative Ltd (FEC) is an Australian registered cooperative whose membership is open to individuals, businesses and incorporated entities in Australia.

Technically, non-individual and incorporated entities are not members but ‘partners’. Members, i.e. individuals, have voting rights. Our policy is that artificial persons or incorporated entities do not have voting rights.

The FEC is originally the creation of Gavin Tang who lives in the Blue Mountains in Australia.  In November 2017 a group of residents from the New South Wales town of Bellingen took up Gavin’s ideas and undertook the task of forming the pioneering group to establish a New Economy. This website reflects the early phase of this co-operative venture.

We are open to membership input in a number of areas including IT and software writing. This might be the most exciting project you’ll ever work on.

As our name suggests, we practice a ‘FRACTAL‘ economy – an economy which, though run at the grassroots level, contains all the key features required of the national new economy. In a FRACTAL, the part exhibits exactly the same features as the whole.

We co-create the systemic changes required in our economy, which some people mistakenly belive to be the reserve of national governments, and rather than try to get them implemented by means of political party pressures, we just do it. Therefore, our prescriptions and practices are not only workable at the grassroots level; they are, without any major changes, workable at the national and international level as our network grows and enables more community inclusion and direct participation.

The Six Core Practices of the Fractal Economy Cooperative include: a democratic form of participation and inclusion of members; a new transactional taxation system; our active support of NFPs and Cooperatives, and eventually the practice of commons ownership and of commons banking which has never been practised by governments or credit unions, mutual banks and the like. Our practices exist to operate synergistically, creating more together than the sum of the parts alone.

The best way to explore potentials is to talk with us

If you contact us via this contact form then we will respond to you promptly.

Transaction Tax

In the national economy, a transaction tax would be a flat rate tax on every monetary transaction with only a few minor exceptions such as transfers within a family unit. No costs or expense s by businesses will be tax deductible. Purchases of things like shares and currencies will also incur this tax (which pretty much wipes out the speculative transfers of capitalism). In the FEC economy we apply this tax to transfers between members so that we as a collective can do very good and powerful things with it. For marketing reasons, we have renamed this tax to ‘community contribution’.

Commons

We at the FEC do not think that the government is the appropriate collective institution to manage things like banking, taxation and land rental. These can all be taken out of the hands of government. Government should be restricted to policy making in the political realm. What we call the commons is an economic collective. This economic collective does not have the argy bargy of the political life. Outside of the capitalist context, it is the principle of cooperation and mutual aid that pervades the economic life, and it will have a very different structure to government. Because the term ‘public’ is often associated with government, we prefer the term ‘commons’ in reference to this economic collective.

Community Contribution

‘Community contribution’ is in fact the same as a transaction tax as described elsewhere [see Article 2 in ‘Further reading’]. The reason we have renamed the tax is for marketing reasons as people recoil from the notion of paying an extra tax. Tax payments is in fact how we as individuals contribute to the community in order to fund things like public transport, welfare and a functional judicial system. So people should be proud in saying that they pay their taxes. The reason that we have an aversion to the word tax is brought about by corporations who have the ability to make their expenses cost deductible. They load up all costs of dubious things into their income-expenditure calculations that they can get away with not paying a lot of the taxes that are their due. The whole scam trickles down to the rest of the economy and tax avoidance/evasion becomes an acceptable sport. In a true transaction tax, no expenses are tax deductible.

What is a fractal?

A fractal is by one definition ‘An object whose parts, at infinitely many levels of magnification, appear geometrically similar to the whole’. Take the fern leaf as shown in this image:

The first image above is a graphic picture of a whole fern leaf. If we take one of the ‘branches’ of the leaf – as depicted in the boxed section – and examine its structure, we find that the ‘branch replicates in full the pattern of the original fern leaf. The boxed section of the first image, rotated and appropriately magnified as in image 2, show an identical pattern to the whole leaf. If we take yet another ‘sub-branch’ out of the fern in image 2 as depicted in the boxed section of Image 2, we find the same leaf pattern replicated again. And so on.

The Fractal Economy Cooperative takes its name from this feature of fractals – that the part replicates the whole. We believe that what needs to be done in the global economy is the same as what needs to be done in the national economies; and that it is what we intend to do in the fractal economy. This means that we policies in a number of places that should also be practised in the national economy in order to make it a socially just and environmentally sustainable economy: direct democracy in the realm of policy making, direct individual participation in the allocation of public/commons spending; all the practices that make up for what we call commons banking, a new taxation system (which we call ‘community contribution’ for marketing reasons); support for cooperatives over share ownership of companies; a return to common ownership of land effected through the banking system.