Calpollism
This article is for the Ajax canon Calpollism. For the Artemis canon, see Calpullism
Calpollism is a socioeconomic system of Zacapine origin related to communalism and mutualism emerging from the ancient calpolli, a unit of social organization in pre-modern Zacapican. The Calpollist economy is one based on the principle of worker ownership and self-management at level of the factory, power plant, or other productive institution. Although in concept calpollism espouses the free market ideal, the implementation of the calpollist economy has followed a dirigiste trend far exceeding simple market regulation as the economic role of the state has transcended the level of market failure correction and taken on the role of meticulously coordinating the functions of many thousands of calpolli and their corresponding economic products and demands to ensure the general health and wellbeing of the overall economy. In the Zacapine economy, the state has also assumed the role of planning and commissioning the establishment of new calpolli through the construction of new factories, workplaces, housing and other related infrastructure. Today, versions of the calpolli system exist across the regions of former Aztapaman hegemony including Zacapican and Pulacan.
History
.jpg)
In pre-modern times, the term calpolli referred to the ward of a city or an outlying town within the orbit of a city state. The early calpolli system, a version of which is still practiced in rural Zacapican, was based on the common ownership of the land by the local community on a small scale. Such calpolli consisted of a handful of familial clans, the members of which had a right to use and profit from the common lands of the calpolli. The calpolli residents possessed personal property but did not own the land or buildings, which were constructed and maintained by the community. These calpolli were the basic building blocks of society, in particular the Nahua-dominated society of Aztapamatlan which reorganized the territories it conquered into city-states subdivided into a number of urban and rural calpolli. This older form of the calpolli-based economy would experience great upheaval with the turn of the century. During the 24 year rule of Tepachoani Xolotecatl Acuixoc beginning in 1914, the old calpolli which existed within the urban areas saw their communal lands seized for the construction of new factories and workshops, with the dispossessed as well as the numerous internally displaced refugees form the civil wars of the turn of the century becoming the workforce for these new establishments. The demographic upheaval which accompanied the early industrial calpolli as well as the nature of these workplaces saw a far less clan-based internal politic of the calpolli and relatively free transference in and out of the calpolli units by individual workers. It was this new system which accompanied the mass immigration of foreign born peoples to Zacapican to work in the new calpolli factories of the the great cities of the south.
Pulacan
Traditional Tswana economic practices saw numerous familial groups co-habiting in readily identifiable, self-contained units. These groups would often be linked by familial ties, with leadership being determined by hierarchies of patrilineal descent; ultimate oversight fell to the patriarch of the most senior family. Any governing actions taken in these groups would be first placed before the other adult men of the ward for consideration and deliberation. These groups, often known today as wards, were the basic building blocks of pre-colonization Tswana society. A clan could be made up of anywhere from one to a handful of these wards, with tribes and tribal nations being constituted of multiple clans. Wards would often be responsible for the land and economic output. Ownership of land was in theory tied to the patrilineal line of the senior family, but due to the nature of consesus rule and collective work, the other families had free reign to use and profit. When Itzcoatl arrived in southern Pulacan in 1476, the tribal system as it existed was extremely similar to the contemporary rural calpolli clan system to be found in Oxidentale. As such, as part of his rise to regional dominance, Itzcoatl declined to radically reform the extant economic system of his tributary kingdoms, instead choosing to merely standardize and codify the practices using Nahuanized calpolli terminology. Thanks to this relatively hands-off approach, the ward and tribe system continued uninterrupted under its own auspices until the beginning of the Industrial Revolutions.
Structure
The structure of the calpolli entity has developed over time, particularly in the tumultuous era of rapid modernization, industrialization and social upheaval that has occurred in Zacapican since 1900. In the modern calpollist economy, the older agricultural forms of the calpolli co-exist with the more modern industrial calpolli entities. Recent decades have seen the ultimate deconstruction of the old calpolli structure, with the small worker-owned firms of the nascent tertiary sector with only a handful of members becoming the latest structural evolution of the ancient calpolli. The predominance of the calpolli system in protected by the commercial and property laws of the state which restrict private ownership of lands and real estate as well as the personal ownership of commercial enterprises, which both protects the worker ownership and internal governance of calpolli businesses from being undermined and ensures that new businesses which are established within calpollist economies are structured according to some variation of the calpolli model.
Agricultural Calpolli
The original form of the calpolli is that of the agricultural community consisting of a number of extended families who hold in common an area of productive lands. Each family or rights holder cultivates crops, harvests wood and tends to animals on a plot of land over which they hold usufruct rights but not direct ownership. The sizes of plots are varied based on the condition of the land, its use and the nature of the usufruct right imparted on the cultivator. Many types of cultivation fall under the category of milli, moderately large fields typically held by the larger families of the calpolli. During the medieval era under the rule of Aztapamatlan, a land distribution system was established in which the governing authorities bestowed usufruct rights over small agricultural plots known as miltontli to the urban poor as a means of stimulating agricultural production and removing dependents from the state's grain dole, an early form of welfare which existed in Aztapaman cities. This custom has remained largely in place through the modern era with usufruct rights to unused land in agricultural calpolli being distributed to the poor, although the frequency of this practice has declined as agriculture becomes an increasingly small part of the Zacapine economy over time. Rights to use the land of the agricultural calpolli are often hereditary, complimenting the clan-based nature of rural Zacapine society with some lineages holding on to their assigned milli for hundreds of years in an uninterrupted chain of heredity.
The land returns to the control of the calpolli in the event of the deaths of the rights holders without an heir, or more commonly in the case that the land is no longer being cultivated by the rights holder either through negligence or voluntary surrender of the granted rights, at which point the plot can be re-assigned to new rights holders. Open fields for grazing animals as well as forests for the harvesting of wood are typically not assigned to an individual rights holder and are instead held in common for the use of the calpolli members. These rural calpolli are typically governed by a council of the families which make up the calpolli's population, who administer the common lands and the assignment of rights to the lands of the calpolli. In the past, this type of social organization was ubiquitous, with Zacapine cities simply consisting of more densely packed districts which nevertheless administered agriculture within the city and in its immediate environs. This restricted the growth of many cities during this era, with the ring of cultivated fields around the urban core effectively restricting the expansion of the city beyond a certain point. In the modern day, agricultural calpolli exist only in the countryside and make up the majority of the rural towns and villages. Under the tax system in Zacapican, only sales of agricultural products from the calpolli are taxed, allowing those who live in the community and cultivate its lands to grow food for their own sustenance on their plots without paying a rent or tax of any kind for the use of the land itself.
Industrial Calpolli
Industrial Calpollism was a creation of the Xolotecate as part of the state-driven initiative to rapidly industrialize the largely agrarian Zacapine economy. An industrial calpolli is an evolution of the ancestral calpolli-based system of economic organization based on substitution of cultivated land with other means of production, enabling the ancient socioeconomic structure to adapt to the technological and organizational innovations required in a modern economy. In industrial calpollism, the calpolli entity is transformed from a largely political and administrative body into a formal corporation which controls a factory, industrial plant, mine, or other workplace. The working members of the calpolli that make up the labor force of that particular workplace serve as the stakeholders of the corporation, a status which devolves legal authority over the calpolli corporation to its entire workforce, forming the mechanism of calpollist workplace democracy. Calpolli workers either elect calpolli administrators to oversee the operations of the corporation or vote directly on matters of corporate governance. Workers of an industrial calpolli are not paid a set wage or salary, instead receiving a portion of the profits of the whole enterprise after overhead for the operation has been deducted.
As a result of the manner in which industrial calpolli corporations pay their worker-stakeholders, groups of the calpolli's workers began to pool their shares of the profits to build and maintain housing, temples, clinics, schools and other infrastructure to serve the various needs of the calpolli community. It is now a nearly-universal practice for calpolli corporations to include housing and education costs as well as some transportation and medical expenses of its residents as part of the overhead of the commercial enterprise at the core of the calpolli entity, effectively providing these services as a common good with the cost borne equally by all members of the community. Taken together with the profit distribution model of the calpolli system, this displacement of costs to the calpolli level has resulted in relatively small personal incomes for the individual workers compared to comparable workers in other developed economies.
The land occupied by an industrial calpolli remains the property of the state, with land typically being allocated to the calpolli before the construction of its central productive enterprise. Additional space for added infrastructure must then be acquired by the calpolli to enable the expansion of its business and the services it provides to its worker-stakeholders. Older industrial calpolli, especially those of the Xolotecate era, often have the housing and community areas of the calpolli directly adjacent or close at hand to the central factory. A common urban structure of Xolotecate era industrial towns known as the Tequixochitl or "Industrial Flower" was a nucleaus of several factories, plants, rail yards and other industrial infrastructure, with the associated calpolli worker's villages radiating outward in a linear structure built along radial streets originating in the places of work extending into the countryside as far as was needed. However, when new factories were being established inside of already existing urban structures this form was not always possible. Many industrial calpolli of the major urban centers therefore posses a disjointed physical structure, with space for housing, clinics, community centers and places of worship being secured wherever it can be found. In some cases, particularly with office-based and clerical work, a calpolli might occupy floors of several buildings across the city for it enterprise, and likewise a single building may provide spaces for multiple calpolli entities under a collective tenancy agreement in which use rights are purchased from the title holder of the building, usually the United Republics Housing Authority in the case of residential buildings and the United Republics Industrial Construction Administration in the case of working spaces.
Calpolli Associations
Conglomerates of several calpolli working together are a consequence of market forces, particularly economies of scale, which make it more efficient to produce at a large scale exceeding the administrative capacity of a single calpolli. Typical industrial calpolli may consist of hundreds or at times one or two thousand workers and their families, with a total population of workers and dependents in the low thousands. Certain enterprises, such as the large shipbuilding industries of Zacapican, have need for tens or even hundreds of thousands of workers with multiple work sites with great geographical separation from one another. This necessitated the evolution of a unit of economic organization larger than the individual calpolli which would flexibly associate with various calpolli units to meet the needs of the enterprise. These originated as informal agreements between calpolli, but would quickly see codification in the form of the calpolli association, a group of multiple calpolli entities bound together in a sort of economic confederation.
Calpolli associations exist in two types, one of a single industry and the other of mixed industry calpolli. The first variety of association is one in which the member calpolli corporations all do the same kind of work, such as mining coal or operating freight trains. These calpolli associate together for the purposes of greater efficiency and cost reductions by sharing facilities and expertise through collective administration. The second form of calpolli association is made of calpolli which specialize in different forms of work which are all needed for a particular enterprise. This is more common in complex manufacturing, where factories producing different components as well as the assembly plant where the final product is manufactured may associate together to increase the efficiency of their internal supply chain and prevent disputes between the key calpolli factories which would seriously disrupt the business of all of the calpolli corporations involved. These typically take the form of agreements for exclusivity, with a particular calpolli only serving the other calpolli of its association as clients unless given dispensation by the association council, in exchange for profit sharing across the whole of the association which serves to distribute the profits of the end-stage calpolli where the highest profits are found more equitably across all the calpolli involved in the enterprise.
Corporate Structure
The fundamental structure and organization of business entities in the calpollist system is very different from that which is found elsewhere. In actuality, there are generally two types of firms in a calpollist business operation, sometimes termed the "head" and the "body". The body firm is the productive calpolli firm which handles the manufacturing and actual production associated with an economic activity, be it agriculture, manufacturing, or even non-physical production such as entertainment and or software development. The head firm is typically a non-calpolli entity and handles all non-productive activities of the business, such as marketing, distribution and development of new products. The two components of the business are held together by contracts which stipulate everything from the specifications of the product, the length of a production run, and how the profits are to be divided between the two firms. Any productive firm is able to enter into a production contract with any number of head firms so long as they have the capacity to fill the contracts they take on, and likewise a commercial head firm may enter into multiple relationships with different producers. Many manufacturers of complex machinery follow this system by having a single head firm establish contracts with a long list of specific factory calpolli in order to produce and assemble the wide array of specific components needed for their product. This system allows for commercial firms to enter into relationships with manufacturers at relatively low risk and investment by removing the barrier to entry of having to establish their own production facilities, while also allowing these production facilities and their workforces to survive and persist more easily in the case of poor business decisions at the commercial end of the business as all but the most hyper-specialized of calpolli factories will generally be able to strike up new contracts with other sellers should their current head firm go out of business. In such a system, only an economy-wide decline in demand for a type of product result in the mass closure of calpolli factories requiring a costly investment to transition to other productive activities.
It may be noted that not all calpolli industries are subject to the bi-partite organizational paradigm. Producers of the so called "common industrial goods", the basic industrial commodities such as coal, iron, steel, alluminum and copper, need neither marketing not research and development for their product, and are able in most cases to contract with third party logistical services to distribute their goods to buyers. This is also the case with the infrastructural calpolli of dockworkers, power plant workers, rail and road maintenance workers and especially the workforce of the defense industries under the Zacapine state owned conglomerated calpolli association Cuauhquetztia. As their sole client is the state, none of the typical business services offered by a head firm are required by such calpolli firms.
Comparison with Syndicalism
Many of the features of the calpollist model, such as the democratic self government of the workers, the collective ownership of the means of production and the reorganization of society according to the workplace, are shared with the Syndicalist model of which Talahara is an example. These two economic systems are based on a fundamentally similar premise which rejects the capitalist worker-employee relationship characterized by wage labor, offering an alternative proposition of a system which guarantees employment and which compensates work through a dividend of the value generated by that work rather than a wage or salary determined by the forces of supply and demand in the labor market. This has been attributed to a case of convergent evolution, as Calpollism emerged in a nation in which trade unions were essentially non-existent and so could not serve as the basis for such an economic re-organization, with the old calpolli wards instead assuming this role as the vehicle for the organization of the workforce.
Calpollism differs from Syndicalism in the application of its principles. Because of the differing modes of organization, the worker owned enterprises in the calpollist system are smaller on average yet also much more uniform in size, with the average calpolli consisting of a few hundred to a few thousand workers and their dependents although outliers exist of calpolli with fewer than 100 or as many as 10,000 residents. Although calpolli associations combine multiple calpolli preforming the same type of work in order to exploit economies of scale and increase the efficiency of the industrial processes, even the largest of these is generally smaller than the industry-wide organizations found not only in syndicalist economies but in most nations with a trade union presence. The most important distinction is that the calpollist economy operates on a commercial principle not found in its syndicalist sibling. While they are worker-owned, the calpollist firms nevertheless behave in a fundamentally similar manner to a firm in a capitalist economy as they respond to the dynamics of the market.