An Ambiarchy is confederalist, consent-oriented, and voluntary. It is anarchist, panarchist, and voluntaryist. It is mutualist, Georgist, and distributist. It is communalist, agorist, syndicalist, and platformist. It is meritocratic, democratic, republican, constitutional, and parliamentary. It is Austrian, Marxist, monetarist, neo-Keynesian, corporatist, and chartalist. It is folkish, traditional, conservative, liberal, progressive, radical, and revolutionary. Among other things.
Let’s have a look.
An Ambiarchy is a voluntary confederation of various self-governing collectivities. These can range from private communities to communes and beyond.
The law system of Ambiarchy rests upon a recognition of the sacred Law of the Jungle and its associated Spinoza-style natural rights. The Ambiarchy is not a nanny-state, but an association of mutual aid. As such, Jungle Law is forever preserved and grandfathered as an option for members of the Ambiarchy. But more formally and actively, the system of Ambiarchist law is called Henocentric Law. It has elements of collective, directly-democratic civil law, met with the personal law of the individual.
The Henocentric system of law works like a confederal millet system of sorts, wherein diverse member-communities can express their own preferences within their own territories, but share power and compromise on federal matters, without the federal body ever encroaching on the members (outside of some social and environmental protections, like Pigovian taxes and regulations on behalf of ecology).
The details and philosophy of Ambiarchy should be laid out in an Ambiarchist Manifesto, Platform, Constitution, and Statement of Principles. Such documents would present a Marxist philosophy of class struggle alongside Austrian arguments for free banking and pricing– among the other outlooks mentioned–, but would be finally balanced by mutualist, Georgist, and other worthy, more-balanced views. The Platform would provide a general vision for a loose plan of action. The Constitution would outline the structural form of the Ambiarchy. Finally, the Statement of Principles would outline principles for judicial reference, and on which Principled Objections, or blocks to consensus, can be made. These would include principles such as cost-the-limit-of-price, the Non-Aggression or Harm Principle, the Principle of Fair Regard, Subsidiarity, something clearly stating Collective Land/Individual Work, and the Law of Equal Liberty.
The activities of the Ambiarchy are governed by Executive Consensus, in which Formal Consensus is used to check for Principled Objections to decisions, before being objectively analyzed and/or directly-democratically point-rated.
The practice of direct-democracy within the Ambiarchy is meritocratic, because good deeds and positive peer-review lead to an increase of merit, which itself gives weight to one’s vote, such that those with higher merit have more voting power (keep in mind that Principled Objections can pose blocks to consensus from any associated member in good standing, regardless of merit). This does for direct-democracy what electoral colleges do for republics.
The Ambiarchy has a general mutual credit clearing house, which gives interest-free loans to member associations, and a central bank, which spends funds into existence in a neo-Keynesian fashion (later taxed), as ratified by consent of the general membership. The clearing house or bank may take interest in leveling market competition between scale-oriented institutions, such as by enabling bilateral monopoly competition through loans or subsidies to balancing monopolies or monopsonies, or encouraging combination of consumer and producer interests, and mutualization of the firm in question.
The Ambiarchy has a land trust, in which members lease common land from the trust for personal use (which can be internally private or communal, as the member-community sees fit). Members buy the improvements, however, and rent the land beneath them. Lease-rights are exchangeable, along with the improvements.
The lease to rent the land takes the form of a self-assessed land-value tax. Members can wage economic warfare on one another, and expropriate land from each other, by entering into tax bid-battles.* Homesteads searching for security can more safely establish themselves on the free marginal lands, which do not currently pay a land-value tax.
Rent from the leased land is used to fund the operations of the Ambiarchy, with any remainder going towards a citizen’s dividend, so as to provide a basic income to members.
Pigovian taxes are levied on member-associations for environmental and social externalities. They are applied to all who benefit from exclusive licensing, subsidies, or other favors or privileges granted by the Ambiarchy.
Environmental regulations are set by federal and then from macro-bioregional to micro-bioregional bodies, from the top, down, so as to preserve and conserve, and to default inaction on the land (while upholding the right to act on your leasehold and where else you are invited).
Social services– including education, security, and health care– are made available through democratic mutual associations operating on the free market.
Economic bodies within the confederation are organized into compartments, then into departments, and finally by industry, in the style of industrial unionism. Compartments include Owner Alliances, for the middle class, Renter Syndicates for the lower class, and Rentier Containments for the owning or upper-managing class. Departments include those of Production, Consumption, Trust, and Tenure.
Owner Alliances put cooperativism and dual power agorism to practice, Renter Syndicates put syndicalism to practice, Rentier Containments put socialism with Chinese characteristics to practice.
Voluntary communities and free municipalities put communalism to practice, and families and churches put distributism to practice.
To become a member, one must graduate from a proper academy, associated with the confederation.
That’s what Ambiarchy looks like. A highly-organized, meritocratic, free market, confederal, industrial democracy.
*This was inspired by the AFFEERCE system of Jeff Graubart.
As long as it is still a territorial organisation, it is not a consistently voluntary, consensual and tolerant one, i.e. all too little panarchistic in the meaning of P. E. de Puydt. – John Zube, john.zube@bigpond.com
It would not be territorial,except so far as connected properties of voluntary subscribers may considered to be so. It would be a voluntary confederation which utilizes a civil registry and has a range of service in which voluntary subscribers may partake.
“The Ambiarchy has a land trust, in which members lease common land from the trust for personal use (which can be internally private or communal, as the member-community sees fit). Members buy the improvements, however, and rent the land beneath them. Lease-rights are exchangeable, along with the improvements.”
You are forcing a very specific land tenure system, by the constitution. It may not be optimal. Without any form of land tenure policy competition, there is neither a mechanism to discover the optimal system, nor a means to bring about the optimal system if it were known.
Ambiarchy is not about a Slave Morality where we refrain from using our power where uncomfortable to others. Ambiarchy recognizes that anarchy is a state of Nature, and one that can never be nullified. If you don’t like Ambiarchy, it’s your responsibility to come up with an alternative.