This is the first portfolio of our team.
The land remembers everything buried within its body, while those who live close to this land measure it endlessly with their footprints. A long-standing agricultural civilisation and rural ethics have nurtured an economic intuition that transcends the framework of supply and demand:
The value created by the labour of workers forms an inseparable unity with the means of production and the fruits of labour, and is not a mechanical response to market signals.
Spring ploughing, autumn harvest; rising at dawn, returning at dusk, man conversates directly with the earth — Farmers sow seeds and witness the ripening of the grain; craftsmen hone skills and beholds creations becoming fine vessels.
This integrity of the production process and the direct ownership of the fruits of labour formed the cornerstone of economic ethics in the pre-industrial era, preceding ‘supply’ and independent of ‘demand’, and revealing another simple truth:
Only when people participate in the production process and directly enjoy its fruits can labour retains its authentic, human nature.
It is precisely the political upheavals triggered by several massive capital transfers within the modern economic system, or the cyclical nature of economic fluctuations, alongside the enduring economic insights through millennia from agrarian cultures that still maintain extraordinary resilience in modern times, that compel a cautious re-examination of the contemporary economic paradigm centred on the employment relationship and capital accumulation, with the supply-demand model as its bedrock.
The modern economy, through the system of ‘employment,’ creates a social division of labour that systematically separating the unity of workers' labour, means of production, and labour outcomes, and reducing economic activity to abstract intersections on a graph, thus obscuring crucial facts:
- Specific, skilled, and experienced labor is compressed into abstract, quantifiable ‘labour time’ or ‘factors of production’.
- Through the ‘employment’ system, the labour of workers and the outcomes of their labour are artificially separated, making wages a formal equivalent of labour value.
This systematically conceals the transfer path of surplus value, the portion exceeding wages, in the production and distribution process. Surplus value is thus institutionally transferred to the owners of the means of production.
In this transformation, the Attendance Device supplants natural rhythms, the payrolls obscure the ownership of outcomes, and legally sanctioned employment contracts legitimise the surplus value extraction, which forces workers to be separated from their labour's outcomes, losing their ownership.
Under this logic, labour's intrinsic purpose is dissolved, becoming merely a means of satisfying market demands or securing subsistence.
Let's question the prevailing economic logic:
Must production necessarily be based on the separation of workers' labour, means of production and the outcomes of their labour?
Is it reasonable for the means of production to become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a minority who neither engage directly in production nor participate in it at all?
On what basis does the legal system consider this right to extract surplus value from others' labour through employment contracts as a legitimate and inviolable 'property right'?
Must production necessarily commence as a response to market demand?
Can value only be realised through exchange?
Does economic rationality inevitably point towards utility maximisation?
Drawing inspiration from agrarian culture's principle of 'the unity of labourer and labour outcomes', we are conducting an ongoing experiment to embed an alternative logic within existing production relations, which is not a simple rejection of the market, but rather an exploration of forging another possibility outside the mainstream framework.
Navigating the crevice between ancient agrarian economic culture and modern economic models, we try 'collaborative alliance of free people' built on project-based consensus.
It seeks to challenge the seemingly entrenched rules of the game between supply and demand, commodities and money, value and exchange value, and socially necessary labor time and individual labor time; abandoning the capitalist logic of 'Income - Cost = Profit', and replacing it with 'Differentiated Total Labour Value Approach': direct pricing and remuneration based on the intrinsic characteristics of the labour process itself, the density of collaboration, and specific labour contributions. This means:
- Collaboration need not rely on corporate wage contracts to form goal-oriented teams, but instead operates through professional project consensus and shared responsibility agreements;
- Pricing and remuneration eschew marginal utility calculations, referencing but not blindly following market equilibrium prices. Pricing adopts a differentiated compensation for aggregate labour, while remuneration is directly allocated based on the proportion of labour contribution to the whole;
- Labor becomes a practice of freely chosen practice and the objectification of individual capabilities.
This approach entirely circumvents capital's role as a pricing intermediary, whilst ensuring no portion of the surplus value generated by differentiated labour is transferred to any individual or institution.
This practice does not seek to replace the entire system, nor does it create demand or passively respond to demand, but rather represents a gradual path towards achieving partial liberation within the existing economic order.
Much like selecting crops in traditional farming based on soil conditions and seasonal timing, we undertake upstream demands according to our inherent skills and potential for cooperation within the existing market economy that precisely match our 'labour formula', one that naturally resonates with our labour ethics and collaborative approach.
We believe that through repeated instances of concrete and direct collaboration and exchange of value, actively testing, adjusting, and optimising the 'formula for labour', it becomes possible for workers to gain control over the economic aspects of their labour's integrity, and to maintain their freedom.