Make it visible
Living human energy, knowledge, and human energy accumulated in machines.
Economics · Anthropology · Democracy · Knowledge
Beyond capitalism and communism
The Joule Model proposes an economy grounded in human energy: producing without domination, guaranteeing life, and making value legible.
Work, machines, knowledge, prices, information and democracy: one line of inquiry into who produces power, who benefits from it, and how it can be organized in the service of life.
Three ways in
Enter the argument without having to read everything at once
Understand the history
From plunder to wage labour: how domination changes form without disappearing.
Explore 7,000 years →See the invisible loop
Capital, wages, prices, levies, consumption, turnover and the return to capital.
Follow the circuit →Discover the Joule Model
Make human and machine power a means of financing life.
Discover the model →
A long history of power
About 7,000 years of the same underlying organization
As human societies gradually moved from village activity toward cities and structured political organizations, they developed durable ways of organizing access to resources and to the energy of others.
Plunder→Slavery→Serfdom→Wage labour
Physical domination was progressively relayed by property, law, money, institutions, business and accounting. Capitalism is the modern and legally most softened form of this long development: the individual is legally free, yet access to the means of living still depends primarily on income obtained through work.
The accounting framework is one of the spearheads of this organization.
It measures the assets, liabilities, expenses and result of the economic entity with great precision,
but not the civilization capital accumulated by the population and mobilized by the enterprise.
From the energy of others to machine power
1Plunder & tributeEnergy mobilized: conquered population
2SlaveryEnergy mobilized: slave
3SerfdomEnergy mobilized: serf
4Wage labourEnergy mobilized: wage earner
5Capitalist machineryMachine + accumulated knowledge
6Joule ModelMachine + civilization capital for the population
The machine can save everyone's energy. The question is who benefits from that liberation.
A different existential approach
Change the economic relationship, not the human being
The Joule Model preserves private property, enterprise, initiative and innovation. Nor does it require individuals to become selfless.
01
The entrepreneur remains an entrepreneur
They imagine, organize, innovate, take initiatives and must be able to benefit from what they create.
02
But they inherit civilization capital
Language, science, techniques, infrastructure, education and knowledge accumulated over centuries.
03
The wage earner becomes an economic partner
Subsistence is no longer conditional on employment; each person contributes capacities to a shared undertaking.
“From each person against the others to each person with the others — not through sacrifice, but because shared knowledge increases the power available to everyone.”
Interdependent self-interested solidarity
The current economic loop
What the price makes invisible
Capital advances the means needed for the cycle. The price incorporates what must be recovered through sales, and consumption turns the product into turnover.
1Capital / means of production
→
2Work / wage
→
3Pricelevies · taxes · costs · margins
→
4Consumption / turnover
→
5Return to capital ↻
The customer is not buying only the product.
Out of €100 paid, the price also carries the entire economic organization surrounding that product.
An estimate developed within the Joule Model.
≈ 14%real production cost
≈ 86%economic organization surrounding the product
The Joule Model
When machines save human energy, who receives the power that has been freed?
The Joule Model proposes another way of measuring productive power and allocating part of it to the continuity of life, without abolishing enterprise or private initiative.
Current organization
Capital → wage → price → consumption → capital
Access to life remains tied primarily to income from employment.
→
Joule Model
Human energy + knowledge + machines → Reserve → continuity of life
Machine power contributes to human continuity and to individual initiatives.
Build the Reserve
A share of productive power is dedicated to ensuring human continuity.
Finance life
Economic partner income, learning, health, retirement, disability and collective needs.
Free the relationship
The entrepreneur brings partners together; they no longer hold the means of conditioning the others’ existence.
The essays
Three texts, one underlying question
Understanding human power, how it is financed, the risks it creates, and how it might be governed.
01Learning
Paying People to Learn
Learning, understanding, transmitting and creating as recognized contributions to common wealth.
French presentation →02Economics
The Republic of Human Energy
The development of the Joule Model and of a Reserve of human energy subsistence capital.
Read the working English edition →03Civilization
How Can a Species Capable of Destroying Everything Be Prevented from Turning Its Power Against Itself?
Lived world, factual world, transmitted world, democracy, fear, crime and a change of paradigm.
Read the French essay →
The principal essay is now available in English.
This is a working English edition. The French original remains the reference text while the latest additions are incorporated.
A filter for reality
We do not live in a single world
Factual world
Measurable facts, probabilities, data and observable phenomena.
Lived world
What each person encounters directly and turns into personal experience.
Transmitted world
What reaches us through media, networks, institutions and other people’s narratives.
Before judging, measure. Before asking where money can be found, look at where wealth is actually produced.
Visible
Events · behaviour · statements
Less visible
Beliefs · values · fears · interests · power relations · inherited structures · economic organization
Thinking differently
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Our problem is no longer simply to produce power.
It is to understand who produces it, who controls it, and how we decide to use it.