Trade Control is an Open Source business control system first released on 24 September 2019. It is an empirical implementation of the ideas I communicate here. Each stage of development has been accompanied by a tutorial that you can freely work through yourself to test for correctness.
The project embodies two key aspects associated with trade: the functional modelling of technological production and the conceptual implementation of commercial imperatives. Therefore, I present my theory of production as it is embodied in the schema design. I then follow that up with various articles relating to the commercial dimensions of the application. These were initially written and published in my own repo during the 2020-21 pandemic lockdown, but are now deleted. The original publication incorporated historical references and poetic outros that have been removed.
Trade Control models the financial and physical workflows of a business, and this has both a functional and conceptual dimension. For example, if your business manufactures a physical product there are certain things you will have to do; whatever your culture, your materials must be acquired and transformed into the required output by production. However, there is no functional reason why, in so doing, you must pay tax, incorporate as a legal entity and issue employment contracts. Tax, contract law and property are concepts. You engage with them because it is a commercial framework provided by a State with coercive powers and you believe in them, not because there is a functional imperative. In the following article on the functional dimensions of technological production, I concentrate solely on the nature of those imperatives. I describe how our technology is engineered and present a new intelligence test wherein I include production in the assessment of AI.
Trade Control is a nascent production system with the implemented capacity to replace an accounting system. It could therefore be the cornerstone for a true 21st Century ERP solution presented in free software. A production system is the opposite of an accounting system. The former relates to the orchestration of real transactions that transform inputs into outputs at higher levels of abstraction or abstract potential. The latter relates to the recording of financial transactions as assets to report their value to owners. Nevertheless, I have been able to replicate the necessary accounting outputs for legal compliance. The following articles on the two components of statutory Company Accounts explain how.
Company Accounts report the asset value of a business entity to external owners. In the article on balance sheets I explain how I was able to derive the capital calculation from the production system, determining a business entity’s asset value. The article on Profit and Loss explains how to calculate the amount of money that can be extracted from a productive entity without killing it off. At the same time, the Trade Control code demonstrates how the legal obligation of asset reporting is not required for the manufacture and sale of goods. So what is it for and where does it come from?
So far, I have only explored the external impact of capitalism on the system design. In the next article I show how capital influences production, through the instruments of investment and cost accounting.
Capitalism was crystalised during the Industrial Revolution, where capital drove industrial production. Today, capital drives asset acquisition. This is perfectly reflected in the technological interfaces to bitcoin. My interface is to production, whereas all other interfaces are to assets. Here I explain why that is.
I have described the mechanism by which polarity shifts occur between production and assets, but why is it accepted? Commercial Law is how the polarity shift is enforced. Commercial lawyers draw up their contracts to define the trading relation between two parties. There are millions of these contracts that glue the whole thing together. Without them all trading relations would instantaneously fall apart.
The procedural translation of productive resources into assets through accounting techniques and the legislative framework of commercial law provide the foundation for the collection of State taxes. This article on tax presents how that works.
Licenced by Ian Monnox under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
