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Membership at a Glance

The four different types of membership in the Cooperative

  1. Individuals who are not registered as sellers. These are individual members who do not anticipate a need/desire to sell goods and services to other members of the Coop, on the basis of advertising or promoting their Coop membership. They wish to support the Coop only as a buyer from fellow members.
  2. Individuals who are registered sellers. These are individual members who wish to promote their membership to other Coop members in order to sell goods and services to them. (Promotion can take the form of use of our logo on websites, promotional material, and signs; the Coop stickers; etc.) Such members may be sole traders, or just people who might occasionally sell used items etc. Membership in this category obliges a person to register a sale to a Coop member, using the CC (community contribution) app.
  3. Business members or trading partners. These are members which are registered businesses. They have the same right and obligations as members in category 2, except they do not have voting rights. Note that people who have registered their business in this category, have to register separately as an individual member (category 1 or 2) in order to take part as a voting member.
  4. Not-for-profits or gift recipients. These are members which are incorporated entities providing some form of community service, and do not function to make a profit. See our NFP Gifting Criteria for our guidelines on what constitutes a NFP.

How the Coop Works

Members who make a sale to other Coop members register the sale using the Coop’s CC (community contribution) app on their phone or computer.

On registering the sale, the Coop bills the member (the seller) for 3% of the sale’s value as the CC. This CC is not billed immediately but as sum at the end of the month (or periodically). Amounts less than $10are deferred to the next billing period.

The money is transferred to the FEC gift account.

Members (individuals) then vote to allocate the accrued CC revenue as gift money to their preferred Not for Profits.

NFP’s are encouraged to buy and sell from Business members and Individual Seller members. They are also encouraged to ask their members and supporters to become Coop members as well (in order to generate more membership, sales and CC revenue within the Coop).

Look for the FEC logo on your local business window.

Look for the Business members contact details in the FEC Purple Pages.

Become a Member here: https://fractaleconomy.coop

How do I start being active?

If you wish to familiarise yourself with the Fractal Economy through a talk/workshop; and if you can organise a small group of interested people (say ten plus); then contact us at www.fractaleconomy.coop and we can arrange for someone to give a verbal presentation. A zoom meeting could also be arranged if there is enough interest.

If you wish to proceed now, the first thing is to become a member by signing up as an Individual, Individual Seller, or Business Partner. FEC does not have joint individual membership.

If you have a business, register your business separately as an ‘Business’. If you wish to sell goods and services in your own name, tick the appropriate box in the register form that says you wish to sign up as an Individual Seller, and therefore willing to pay the Community Contribution.

After you become a member, you will be automatically allowed to start transactions on your phone, tablet, laptop, and desktop to register sales with us. (Once you are registered as an Individual Seller member, you are obliged to use the transaction site at point of sale if the buyer declares her FEC membership).

Familiarise yourself with how we make policy decisions. If you wish, participate through our Direct Democracy in Action webpage.

Browse our Purple Pages Directory of goods and services to see if any FEC Business or Individual Seller member has anything to sell that you may be interested in. Click the contact button for details.

Look at our Directory of Not-for-Profits gift recipients. As an Individual or Individual Seller member you can start straight away to vote on who you would like funding to be allocated to.

If an organisation that you support is not on the list, let them know why it would be an advantage for them to join up as an NFP member to receive some funding.

Spread the word to your friends and any businesses you trade with.

Retailers can display the FEC logo on their shop front, and perhaps even stock the FEC leaflet in a prominent position. You may use the logo in any of your signs, letterheads, product packaging, etc. Social media and group mailing lists are other ways to spread the word that the new economy is here to help your community become more productive and self-sufficient.

Enjoy the new way of working in our community and build a Fairer and more Participatory Economy.

fecoop.org

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.