Creditism

The end of debt.The beginning of flow.

Capitalism begins with ownership. Creditism begins with life.

Credit arrives because you exist. More arrives when you contribute. It deletes when you spend it, so it never compounds into a claim on anyone else’s hours.

Questions while you explore?Ask Creditism Sage ↗

Where this starts

The unit is new. The circuit is not.

A community designs a good unit. People use it. Real value circulates, and it does real good. Then the rent falls due in national currency, the wholesaler invoices in it, and the tax is assessed in it.

Shelter

Rent and mortgage are claims held elsewhere.

The landlord and the lender accept one currency, and it is not the community's. Housing is usually the largest line in a household budget, so the largest obligation is the one the local unit cannot settle.

Inputs

The supply chain invoices outward.

Wholesalers, utilities, fuel, equipment, and components are priced in national currency. The loop reaches as far as local production reaches, then it stops.

Tax

Assessment is denominated by the state.

Whatever the community agrees among itself, the tax is levied and paid in the currency the state recognizes. That claim is not negotiable at the local level.

The loop covers whatever is left after those three are paid.

The reason runs deeper than currency. Enclosure came before issuance. Land, housing, water, infrastructure, and productive capital were already enclosed behind ownership claims before people borrowed money to reach them. Change the unit and leave those claims untouched, and the new currency still runs into the old gates.

That is why the Three Reclaims have to move together. Reclaim Credit changes how purchasing power is created and used. Reclaim Commons changes how common capital is held and stewarded. Reclaim Purposes changes what shared capacity is directed toward.

The proving ground

AYU runs the mechanics. Inside the old economy.

Common Planet Foundation is a U.S. 501(c)(4) developing Creditism, an economic architecture, and AYU, the membership and transition network built to test its mechanics.

AYU is not a Creditist economy. It runs Creditism's mechanics inside a capitalist one, at network scale, for a fraction of what members need. It is in its Points phase, building the identity, trust, participation, and governance layer that any real test requires.

AYU Points are a permanent record of verified participation. They are not money, securities, equity, ownership, tradable assets, exchangeable assets, or a promise of financial return. They cannot be bought, sold, or used as payment.

Parallel infrastructure

Build the alternative before asking it to become the default.

Creditism does not begin by waiting for the existing system to redesign itself. AYU builds a parallel layer people can enter voluntarily, then tests the mechanics while the stakes are still small.

People and trust

Build the network first.

Identity, participation, governance, contribution records, and shared inventories turn scattered agreement into coordinated capacity.

Pilots

Test where it breaks.

A pilot is not a demonstration that Creditism is right. It tests contribution, commons stewardship, dispute resolution, privacy, and whether the system produces more trust than it consumes.

Thicker layers

Let useful infrastructure spread.

Co-ops, neighborhoods, towns, and regional networks can add pieces as they become workable. The alternative becomes credible by carrying real activity, not by winning an argument.

Not war. Phase change. The transition succeeds by making more of the old system optional before asking society to make the new rules universal.

Reclaiming the Commons

Mapping is knowledge. Not transfer.

AYU needs to know what exists, who holds it, what is available, and what has actually moved into stewardship. Those are different facts, so four statuses stay separate through the transition.

Mapped

Known.

Recorded in a ledger. Known to exist.

Owned

Still legally held.

Under existing legal title, unchanged.

Available

Offered for use.

Offered by its holder for use, on stated terms.

Stewarded

Governed with obligations.

Moved into stewardship, under duties and limits a community can enforce.

Mapping changes no legal ownership and makes nothing claimable. Commons are reclaimed when assets actually move into governed stewardship, not when somebody maps them.

Transition strategies

A growing field of tactics in motion.

Many groups and strategies will be needed to bring us to a Common Planet, and a lot of excellent folks have been thinking about it for a long time. Acting together on a common game-board lets us leverage our powers together.

Here is an incomplete list of some pieces of the puzzle we’ve noticed.
It is meant to grow.

Tap any tactic to read more.

01National creation of credit for democratically determined purposes

This would promote the conversation that our ability to exchange with one another and engage in solution-making activity should not be determined by whether or not those exchanges are abstractly and privately profitable, but instead whether they are mutually desirable, needful, and collectively beneficial — generators of collective abundance.

If nations create the mass of currency for the enactment of communal projects, then credit creation becomes an expression of the will of the people to pursue communally beneficial goals. There are challenges associated with this piece.

  1. If the political infrastructure for determining what gets funded isn't sufficiently democratic, communities would be subject to the purposes of policy makers who may or may not have the interests of the public and planet at heart and cannot know the unique aspects of those communities and ecosystems at ground level. Crowdsourcing the crafting of solutions through several rounds of refinement could ensure sufficient communal participation in creating solutions suited to local contexts.

  2. Programmable Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC’s) have the functionality for a coercive layer of top-down control undermining our efforts to code the basis for an infinitely scalable and modular bottom-up Collective Intelligence for expression of The Myriad Values of Life instating human beings as self-directed responsible stewards of the Geobiosphere.

  3. Yet other thinkers and their proposals for the binding of top-down and bottom-up powers also attempt to address the concerns of points a. and b. See B.J. Chippendale's Mahinism, and Claire Hartnell’s Project 2029, and others we are as yet unaware of. If such proposals were adopted by various Nation-States, providing safeguards against coercive power, they could ease the transition to a genuinely decentralized bottom-up Common Planet for all.

02User-driven Credit creation on a shared Digital Network Database (The Visible Hand)

Such a system would ensure the purposes for which we work are self- and communally-determined. If the activity of people from the bottom-up creates the mass of currency, then we ensure agency in the production of what a community wants or needs.

There are challenges associated with this piece.

  1. The value of any currency depends on both what it can buy, and the control of the infrastructure necessary to produce what it can buy. That means that we need in a stepwise fashion to begin reclaiming infrastructures and environments as various Commons administered respectively by communities at local, regional, and Global scales. As those reclamations of Commons happen and come online in-network, as various kinds of rents are diminished for people in-network, and as buyable products come online in our network MarketPlace, the utility of our Credit increases.
  2. If nations don't accommodate, or acquiesce to, such a currency-generating structure, then We, The People, from the bottom-up will have to engage in various activities to ensure our collective will is heeded. Instances of that happening are a foregone conclusion. We cannot know beforehand what these will be or from which quarters they come. We will deal with them as they arise in the transparent light of our own solution-making and Creditable networks.
  3. Subjecting Credit to speculative finance and FOMO could create volatility around any external market price. AYU therefore separates external market pricing, if such a market exists, from the reference used for exchange inside the network.
  4. For in-network exchange, AYU Credit is intended to use a diversified reference value based on a basket of leading national currencies rather than a single currency or an external market price. The basket is intended to reduce exposure to the movement of any one currency, but it does not guarantee stable purchasing power. Any external market price may sit above or below that reference.

Integration with other strategies below shows the potential power of this piece.

03The Play For The Commons

Crowdsource populating communal and personal ledgers on The Visible Hand through gamification with a record of all global production, capital, and resources. Picture an app — both your access to and collectively The Visible Hand itself: where you create a private account, confirm identity, sign declarations, and receive Credit for going on quests around your community to gather info about its shape, stuff, and work.

It'd be like Pokémon Go but for the purpose of excellent human and planetary futures — beginning to populate The Visible Hand with quests on the Quest Board, ledgers, and shared ownership of real Commons.

That would allow us to know what we’ve all got and what shape it's in, and what we need and want to do in our communities in terms of reclaiming what should actually be defined as Commons. We would begin taking ownership of our surroundings, in the lovely sense of that term. Enacting its reality further refers to other pieces of the puzzle.

04One-employee-one-share-one-vote

Lifted from Yanis Varoufakis, who took it from the syndicalist movement. Change corporate law so every employee is defined as a voting partner in the firm. They receive one non-transferable share that constitutes their voting identity. Shares would no longer be sellable. This single change would reclaim an enormous portion of our Commons in one fell swoop, but it wouldn't reclaim housing or ecosystems.

05Buy 'Em Out — pension & endowment funds

From David Korten's The New Economy: A Living Earth System Model: as proposed by Tim McDonald and John Fullerton, pension funds, endowments of foundations, and other public-interest endowment funds — responsible for trillions of dollars of financial assets — have the means to buy large corporations, hold them accountable to the public good, and gradually convert them to cooperative forms.

This implementation could circumvent an initial need to change corporate law while providing examples of the results of such a change. In concert with The Visible Hand running Creditist economics, we could onboard those corporations to fast-track their transformations and our Common Planet with one rather satisfying "whack!"

06Houses Are For Living

A change of law making it illegal for businesses to own housing — done carefully and with a means of exit — would establish within the Human Project that houses aren't for profits, they're for people to live in. Prices would fall to more natural levels.

For an exit strategy, this piece can be combined with national or decentralized credit creation (pieces 1 and 2) allowing businesses to cash out residential holdings, or with the power of endowments and foundations (piece 5) transforming real-estate businesses into co-ops that can simply distribute housing to their members and others under Creditist principles.

07Middle-Down Municipal Commons Reclamation

Towns, cities, and counties could reclaim aspects of their local commons by purchasing local assets — land and productive capital — with tax revenues generated from differential taxation of non-local consumers (tourism, vacation houses, non-local businesses).

If local councils catch wind of Creditist principles as a pathway to vibrant local economies, they could preferentially subsidize collective local ownership and production over private non-resident wealth extraction.

The lobbying of local councils for that reclamation strategy can be posted as a Creditable action on The Quest Board within The Visible Hand.

08The Ledger of Life

Any notion of a Common Planet will need to conceptualize and encode returning ownership of the biosphere back to itself — and to all of life — while instantiating human beings as responsible stewards of that sphere. We resolve to move out of the Anthropocene and into The Ayucene (others have called that 'The Ecozoic').

The Ledger of Life would exist on The Visible Hand as a distinct ledger unto itself — consisting of descriptions of every existing water way and body, species, habitat, ecosystem, and biome. Their ecosystemics, weather, climate, and geosystemics. Their states of health and degradation by every conceivable quality measure. What needs to and can be done to improve their biodiversity, regeneration, and antifragility (further populating the quest board), and communally agreed expert assessments of what can be sustainably extracted, at what rates, and with what regenerative measures of 'intraction.'

It would not and we believe must not put a price on nature or any part of it. Instead it tells us what is taken, how it should be done, and what we need to spend in terms of labor activity in order to be responsible stewards of it. It tells us that we belong to Earth, each other, and The Tree Of Life, and begins to rewild us as a species of peculiar talent as we lean into the primeval wisdom's of the natural world and the full scope of Human Being.

09Forcing the Eco-Social Contract

From Álvaro J. De Regil Castilla: Transitioning to “Geocratia” —the People and Planet and Not the Market Paradigm — First Steps – The Jus Semper Global Alliance, May 2020.

“Organization and planning of National Economic Boycott = Labour + Students + Consumption.

How do we materialise the Eco-Social Contract? The [citizen cells] force the new Eco-Social Contract by unleashing the power of the market. It starts by organising permanent consumer boycotts that target specific products and services and companies that exhibit the lowest regard for truly social and environmental sustainability. Once people are well versed in the organisation and execution of consumer boycotts and the national assemblies have agreed that the indispensable tipping point of a critical mass of citizens has been reached, a national boycott is organised to demand the organisation of a Constitutional National Assembly of the citizenry to write a new constitution for a new Eco-Social Contract between people and the planet. This involves a labour, student and consumer strike. People do not go out to demonstrate in the streets. This cancels any possibility of the government unleashing any kind of repression. People stay at home, do not go to work, to school and to stores, until the government agrees to celebrate the Constitutional Assembly. National strikes must be organised to last as long as necessary to force national governments to agree to a Constitutional Assembly. Roughly every week of a calendar is equivalent to 1.92% of a country’s GDP and one month equivalent to 8.3%. If the movement strike has a critical mass of 25% of the population and lasts one month, it would be equivalent to 2.1% of GDP, which would constitute an enormous pressure on the system.”

This fits nicely together with other pieces of the puzzle. In his paper Mr. Castilla discusses prior and ongoing efforts to localize resources and basic supply chains which would create some community resiliency for enacting the civil disobedience he describes. We conceive our network, The Visible Hand, as functioning that way as well.

In the early stages of adoption some local businesses, along with our Credits, can begin to come on line in-network under Creditist economics. We can self-organize as citizen cells through The Visible Hand, and post assemblies on The Quest Board leading up to the grand quests of the National and Global boycotts, and the Constitutional Assemblies. That way we can have coffee and sandwiches as we act ‘en mass to reclaim and evolve ourselves and our Common Planet.

There are also challenges associated with this piece:

  1. Any thing which becomes a legal framework under the power of governments can be modified by those governments.
  2. Economics and the mechanics of a currency function at a more fundamental layer than governance does.
  3. If we are petitioning governments through strikes and constitutional assemblies to acquiesce to our demands for an Ecosocial Contract, and those governments accept it, then we are coding that “contract” at the changeable legal layer in a top-down fashion, thereby giving the power of administration to those top-down entities rather than to ourselves in a bottom up fashion, as would be the case if we coded regenerative activities as incentivized participatory actions at the economic and currency layers.

This is not to say that overarching legal frameworks cannot contribute to more beautiful futures for humanity and life, but that those legalities must be grounded in an economic and currency structure that presupposes them as potential but somewhat unnecessary icing on the cake of our already coded and incentivized pursuits. Otherwise, Humanity is subject again to the whims of a top-down apparatus having only coded a paltry and changeable binding of powers.

10You.

Countless numbers of groups and individuals are working to reclaim our communities, credit, commons, and purposes. What works? Would the potency of your efforts increase combined with others' strategies and tactics on a common game-board?

Each of those strategic pieces are currently available (let us know about other ones) and we can fit them all together. Our organization, Common Planet Foundation, is focused on communicating the conception of the economics of Creditism: an infinite game of mutual rules allowing our Credit, Commons, and Purposes to be permanently reclaimed and uncapturable. Additionally, we are launching the AYU Network where Creditism first begins to become a reality. Others in and out of our developing networks are focused on different pieces of the strategic puzzle, and we believe Creditism is a big enough game-board on which to assemble and deploy them for Mutually Assured Evolution.

The Common Planet we all enact together is vastly bigger than us. We just contribute our bits.

Switch day · the transition

What happens to your stuff.

The honest question everyone asks first. Here is the current transition proposal, designed to protect ordinary security while ending claims that extract from other people's lives.

Working proposal = the current intended design, still subject to modeling, legal design, and democratic adoption.

CARTOOLSINSTRUMENTSCLAIMS ON OTHERS' HOURS

Your things stay yours

Your car. Your tools. Your instruments. Your collections. Private property continues in Creditism. What ends is using ownership to collect other people's hours: rent extraction, not possession.

OLD MONEY1 : 1CREDIT

Your money converts, one for one

Money balances convert at parity: one unit becomes one Credit. Parity is the accounting conversion rate, not a promise about future prices or purchasing power; those depend on real capacity, pricing, and issuance.

MARKET PRICEWHAT YOU PAID → CREDIT

Financial assets convert at purchase price

Working proposal. Stocks, bonds, real estate, and other held assets convert at what was paid rather than the market price on activation day. The monetary claim converts; the control claim does not. In successor cooperatives, governance follows contribution, not prior ownership.

YOU STAYEQUITY → PC

Your home stays your home

You remain in your primary home as its steward. Mortgage, property tax, and insurance costs end. Your equity converts to Personal Credit at market value less the mortgage owed, while the home itself is protected as a place to live rather than a speculative position.

INCOME FOR LIFEBUSINESS OPEN

No pension, because nothing has to be survived.

Working proposal. Pension obligations do not carry forward. Everyone starts with an allocation of Credit set by age, and universal income then flows for life, undiminished by age and unconditional on having worked. Add a home with no rent, mortgage, tax, or insurance, and there is no old-age problem left for a pension to solve. Productive activity continues: shops, farms, studios, and cooperatives keep serving people while rent, interest, and passive ownership claims are restructured.

RENTAL CLAIMOPEN POOL

Rentals wind down, on fair terms

Working proposal. You keep up to three residences and choose which. Everything released converts to Credit under fair, phased legal terms: a rental at the equity you put in at purchase, since tenants paid the mortgage, and a vacation home at your equity plus the principal you paid yourself. Nothing is taken without conversion. The homes move into community stewardship and become available for people to live in. Housing remains useful; absentee rent extraction does not.

Transition is not a sudden confiscation. It requires democratic authority, due process, legal instruments, modeling, and fair terms. A homeowner, a small business, and a speculative fund are different situations; the architecture treats them differently.

Jurisdictional adoption

When Creditism stops being the exception.

AYU can run the Credit circuit at network scale inside capitalism: Credit is issued for contribution, spent in the Marketplace, and deleted at purchase. A jurisdiction adopting Creditism does not add that mechanism. It changes the scope.

Universality

Everyone

Every resident participates, not only people who opted into the network.

Legal recognition

Currency

Credit is recognized in currency law, contracts, courts, and public administration.

Completeness

Life

Housing and the necessities of life move inside the architecture rather than remaining external obligations.

Conversion

Existing value

Eligible money and capital values move through agreed transition rules instead of running as two permanent systems.

Property transition

Stewardship

The rules for commons, housing, productive assets, and rentier claims become law through democratic process.

Phase 3 is when the architecture becomes the default rather than the exception.

Transition architecture · modeling, pilots, legislation, and jurisdictional agreement required

Take part

AYU is where the transition becomes something people can test.

Join the network, participate in the build, and help find what works before anyone asks a society to adopt it.