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.

History

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.

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 encompassing 5,000 to 10,000 people although outliers exist of calpolli with only a few hundred or as many as 25,000 members. 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 syndicalism sibling. While they are worker-owned, the calpollist firms nevertheless behave in a fundamentally similar manner to a firm in a capitalist economy.

Application

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.