Self-Employment Without Money: How Commicracy Organises Work in a Non-Monetary Economy
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
One of the most persistent myths of modern political economy is that self-employment can only function under monetised, deregulated, and class administered systems. Bureaucracy has conditioned societies to believe that once individuals are left outside wage employment, order collapses into tax evasion, exploitation, fraud, and uneven access to work.
Commicracy rejects this assumption entirely. Rather than disciplining self-employment through money and hierarchy, it reorganises labour through commissioning, coordination, and subsistence guarantees.
In a commicratic society—particularly one structured for a non-monetary economy—self-employment does not disappear. It is instead absorbed into a horizontal, project-based architecture that preserves autonomy while removing the risks inherent in market anarchy.
1. From Vertical Autonomy to Horizontal Commissioning
Under bureaucratic capitalism, self-employed workers operate autonomously: they advertise themselves, negotiate fees, file their own taxes, and interact with customers directly. This arrangement is often romanticised as freedom, yet in reality it is structurally precarious. Customers bear the risk of fraud and poor workmanship; governments struggle to regulate compliance; and workers themselves oscillate between feast and famine depending on market fluctuations.
Commicracy inverts this logic. Work is no longer organised around individual market competition but around projects commissioned through public institutions. The horizontal work pattern of commicracy treats labour as a shared civic function rather than a private gamble. Instead of isolated contractors, workers are organised into coordinated clusters under public commissioning offices.
2. The Secretariat-Ministry of Labour & Industry as a Corporate Entity
At the core of this system is the Secretariat-Ministry of Labour & Industry, which functions not as a distant regulator but as a corporate organising body. It provides multiple pathways for participation:
- Individuals may join existing organisations and occupy defined roles within either supervisory departments or employee departments.
- Self-employed shop-owners may integrate both roles—supervisory and performative—into a single institutional participation.
- Independent tradespeople (electricians, plumbers, roofers, gardeners, technicians, and similar vocations) are organised regionally under a Placement-Service framework.
This ministry does not eliminate self-employment; it re-houses it within a public organisational structure.
3. Regional Organisation and the Placement-Service Model
Self-employed workers are organised geographically and registered within their local Regional Work & Pension Commission Office. Registration is not a licensing tax mechanism but an access gateway. It allows workers to receive work, be coordinated with others, and remain integrated into the non-monetary subsistence system.
Each region maintains skills-specific departments within the Work & Pension Commission. These departments assemble workers of compatible competencies so that each becomes a specialised cluster capable of responding efficiently to citizen requests.
This arrangement is deliberately equalitarian. There are no private line managers, no internal hierarchies, and no superior–subordinate chains. Instruction and reporting flow directly between the worker and the commissioning office.
A. Open-Role Allocation for Low-Skill Work
For work classified as low-skill or general labour, commicracy operates on an Open-Role Principle. Tasks are shared openly among registered workers within a regional cluster. A departmental skills coordinator-supervisor assigns tasks on a rotational or availability basis rather than through competitive bidding.
Once a task is completed, the worker submits a completion form directly to the regional office. There is no managerial filtration, no corporate ladder, and no middle-class administrative overhead. The worker is accountable, visible, and directly recognised by the commissioning authority.
B. Closed-Specialty Allocation for Skilled Trades
Highly skilled self-employed workers—such as specialised electricians, structural engineers, gardeners, chefs, or master craftsmen—are organised under Closed-Specialty Allocation Orders. Tasks are assigned strictly according to certified skill sets and demonstrated expertise.
This ensures precision, safety, and professional integrity without inflating status hierarchies. Specialisation is respected without transforming expertise into dominance.
An essential distinction of commicracy—particularly under Closed-Speciality Allocation Orders—is its recognition that expertise does not always align with constant demand. Highly specialised self-employed workers may not receive task assignments for extended periods, sometimes for a year or more. In bureaucratic or market systems, such intervals would translate into economic insecurity, skill atrophy, or forced exit from the profession. Commicracy resolves this structurally.
Once a worker is registered on the government work register as certified, available, and commission-eligible, their economic survival is no longer contingent upon the frequency of assignments. Subsistence is guaranteed by the State not as welfare dependency, but as recognition of standing civic readiness. Availability itself constitutes contribution.
4. The Idle-Time Assessment and Deployment Departments
To prevent prolonged idleness from eroding expertise or social participation, the Work & Pension Commission maintains dedicated departments for idle-time assessment and deployment. These departments continuously monitor the duration of non-assignment among registered workers and intervene once a defined threshold is reached—commonly 6 months or a year in some cases.
At this point, the objective is not punishment or reassignment by coercion, but productive circulation. Workers may be:
- Temporarily placed within existing public or cooperative enterprises to perform functional roles.
- Commissioned into educational institutions to assist in training students, apprentices, or vocational learners.
- Assigned to mentorship, inspection, or advisory capacities related to their field.
- Deployed into general labour or unrelated service roles where employee scarcity exists.
Such placements typically span a limited period—often one to three months—after which the worker returns to the closed-speciality pool with renewed exposure and experience.
A. Expertise Through Circulation, Not Hoarding
This mechanism recognises a fundamental principle of commicracy: expertise is preserved through use, not isolation. Skill is not treated as a private possession to be hoarded until the market calls for it, but as a social capacity that must remain exercised, tested, and transmitted.
By circulating specialists through auxiliary roles, educational environments, or high-need sectors, commicracy ensures that even periods of low demand contribute to professional refinement. Workers often emerge with broader competence, improved adaptability, and deeper communal integration.
B. Adaptive Reassignment Without Status Loss
Importantly, reassignment to unrelated work does not diminish status or professional standing. There is no hierarchy of dignity between skilled and general labour. Temporary deployment outside one’s speciality is understood as civic balancing rather than occupational demotion.
This flexibility also strengthens systemic resilience. Labour shortages are addressed rapidly without creating a permanent underclass of “unskilled” workers or an elite class of untouchable specialists.
C. Beyond Work Allocation: A Living Labour System
The function of these departments extends beyond assigning tasks. They actively manage labour continuity, skill vitality, and social equilibrium. Idleness is neither ignored nor stigmatised. It is treated as a logistical condition requiring intelligent redistribution.
Through this architecture, commicracy transforms labour from a competitive marketplace into a living, adaptive system—one where contribution is measured not by constant output, but by readiness, participation, and collective balance.
D. The Regional Work & Pension Commission as Central Coordinator
The Regional Work & Pension Commission serves as the central interface between citizens requesting services and workers executing them. It receives service requests, verifies eligibility, and allocates tasks to appropriate workers within the region. Where shortages exist, it may commission workers from neighbouring regions.
For complex projects spanning multiple skills, the commission coordinates across departments, ensuring seamless integration. This creates a clean, direct channel between the supervisory division of government and the actual performers of contracted work.
E. Why Commicracy Eliminates the Risks of Self-Employment
In bureaucratic societies, self-employment is inherently risky. Customers can be scammed. Work can be botched. Taxes can be evaded. Policing becomes reactive, expensive, and uneven.
Commicracy resolves these problems structurally rather than punitively. Self-employed workers no longer advertise independently or negotiate private contracts. All work is commissioned through public offices. All workers are verified. All outputs are supervised and documented.
Trust is not assumed; it is engineered.
F. Integration with Welfare, Identity, and Utilities
The Work & Pension Commission operates in coordination with the Basic Utilities Commission and the Identity & Social-Welfare Commission. Together, they vet both service recipients and workers who are assigned. This ensures that labour allocation, subsistence access, and civic identity are synchronised.
Because the economy is non-monetary, workers are not paid wages in exchange for labour. Instead, participation in work guarantees access to a government-backed entitlement-based free-trade CSP card system—housing, food, utilities, healthcare, and social security are secured through civic contribution rather than cash exchange.
5. Commicracy in Practice: The Recruitment Prototype Already Among Us
Commicracy is not an abstract invention awaiting its first experiment. It is already being practised—informally, imperfectly, and without constitutional protection—within the very heart of modern capitalist societies. What bureaucratic States continue to struggle to conceptualise, the recruitment and placement industry has already solved in practice: how to organise human labour horizontally without hierarchy, coercion, or permanent managerial control.
Modern recruitment agencies and digital labour platforms function as proto-commicratic systems. They do not own workers. They do not manage them through line-authority. They do not embed them in rigid hierarchies. Instead, they register availability, verify competence, match demand to skill, assign work, and withdraw once the task is complete. This is commissioning-rule in its rawest contemporary form.
Across the gig economy and freelance labour markets, millions of workers already operate this way: kitchen porters, cleaners, drivers, chefs, electricians, engineers, accountants, software developers, clerical staff, professional drivers, architects, project managers, technical specialists, and more. These workers are not employees in the classical bureaucratic sense, nor are they autonomous entrepreneurs in any meaningful protective sense. They are commissioned workers—activated when needed, released when not.
6. The Unacknowledged Contradiction of Bureaucratic States
Here lies the contradiction bureaucratic societies refuse to confront: they already rely on commicratic labour structures, yet deny them institutional legitimacy.
Recruitment agencies coordinate labour more efficiently than most State employment ministries. They maintain skill registries, availability schedules, performance histories, and compliance checks. They assign work without needing hierarchical supervision. And they do so without pretending that workers must be permanently subordinated to an employer to be productive.
Yet under capitalism, this system is stripped of moral responsibility. Workers registered with recruitment platforms often receive:
- no job security,
- no income continuity,
- no sickness cover,
- no holiday protection in some jurisdictions,
- no pension guarantees,
- no subsistence floor during idle periods.
The platform solves the coordination problem but abandons the human problem. Bureaucratic States tolerate this arrangement because it preserves capital flexibility while externalising risk onto the worker.
7. Ethno-Corporatism as Institutional Completion
Commicracy completes what recruitment platforms begin.
Under ethnocorporatism organised through commicracy, recruitment is no longer a private intermediary extracting fees from insecurity. It becomes a State institution with civic obligation. The same horizontal logic—registration, skill verification, task matching, and commissioning—is retained, but the economic precarity is removed.
In a commicratic system:
- Workers remain non-hierarchical and non-subordinated.
- No permanent employer owns the labour of workers.
- Skills are mobilised on-demand through public commissioning.
- Idle time does not mean economic abandonment.
- Job security is replaced by availability security.
- Income insecurity is replaced by subsistence guarantees.
The State does not employ everyone; it organises everyone.
This is the decisive distinction. Bureaucracy requires control to function. Commicracy requires coordination. Recruitment agencies already prove that coordination works—what they lack is State-centred constitutional responsibility.
8. From Market Precarity to Civic Security
By institutionalising recruitment platforms into Work & Pension Commissions, commicracy transforms a precarious market mechanism into a civic infrastructure. The same kitchen porter who today waits for sporadic calls from an agency would, under commicracy, remain continuously registered, economically secured, and socially accounted for. The same engineer cycling between contracts would not fear unemployment between projects. The same electrician would not depend on self-advertising or personal networks to survive.
Thus, commicracy does not invent a new labour logic—it rescues an existing one from exploitation. What capitalism uses to extract flexibility without responsibility, commicracy reclaims as a public good. What bureaucracy ignores because it does not fit hierarchical doctrine, commicracy recognises as the future architecture of human work.
In this sense, the world is already rehearsing commicracy—it simply lacks the courage to name it, protect it, and govern through it.
Conclusion: An Ethno-Corporatist Model for Post-Monetary Society
This is not collectivism, nor is it market libertarianism. It is ethnocorporatism under commicracy—a system where labour is socially organised, culturally grounded, and institutionally coordinated. Self-employed workers remain autonomous in craft and identity, yet integrated in responsibility and provision.
In this model, work is no longer a private struggle for survival. It becomes a shared civic function, commissioned for the common good, and sustained by a non-monetary architecture of collective sufficiency.
Commicracy does not abolish self-employment. It redeems it.
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