Associate! began life in May 1980 as 'New Economy, the newsletter of the Land and Capital Exchange'. This expression sums up a fundamental theme that has ever since underlied the journal's concern, namely, the need to create a new economy by using the increased value of real estate as collateral for investing in new initiatives. Hence, land and capital exchange. This idea is fundamental to associative economics, especially because it aims to bridge between the importance of favouring personal over real credit and the reality today where the opposite principle prevails.

To think in this way is to swim against the current, of course. And yet, neither utopian nor quixotic, such a stance is predicated on the conviction, as expressed in the first editorial, “that however formed modern social institutions may appear to be, they had their origins in the minds of men, where they developed as concepts with which to name their experiences.” 

The implication is that the main task facing associative economics is to beget the experience that when real credit crowds out personal credit economic life as a whole goes awry. Unless people experience this, they will not understand the point of associating, for the simple reason that real credit is intimately related to the idea that the individual can exist unto himself.

The main editorial image of this journal, therefore, has been to chip away at the certainty of today's intense individualism, to seek out and even to suggest instances of its overcoming. Not in order to kill excess egoism, but to tame it.

This is hardly a great rallying cry, let alone a vote-getter. Despite the many critiques and complaints made of modern economic life, few people accept that much of its malaise derives from so simple a problem as allowing surplus capital to pass into real estate instead of into the paths of individuals as they unfold their contributions to society. Most people prefer to lay the blame at the door of elites, some class or other, politicians – anywhere in fact than at their own feet. Most also play the real estate game, especially those of an Anglo-Saxon bent, quite unaware that to do so results in the falsifying of all prices and thus creates a general state of economic dysfunction that no one can fix.

Preferring real to personal credit is a particular kind of problem because it gives rise to a way of behaving that does not see itself as culpable. It is also the result of a problem that is, again, typically Anglo-Saxon: over identification with matter. 

In that modern economic life is largely an Anglo-Saxon creation, it is intimately linked to the fact that to attain the self-awareness of which we are so proud today the individual has to separate himself off and this he does by coming into close relationship with the material plane. However, there is a subtle point at which this connection takes one from being within to becoming of the material plane. It is in the crossing of this line that everything that is 'wrong' with modern economic life has its origins. And not once only, but as a daily proclivity. The point of the land and capital exchange idea, as of associative economics generally, is to provide not only a daily reminder of this problem, but also the means to overcome it, to 'not go there'.

Whether over 30 years this publication has been able to contribute to meeting this challenge is not for us to say. There can be little doubt, however, that the challenge has not lessened in any way. So the need remains to sound the tone, to point to examples and to develop ideas that in their various ways clarify what is at stake. Hopefully, this will help foster the resolve on the part of more and more people to address the core economic issue of our times: true prices can never arise if surplus capital, rather than providing the ground for new values born of fresh initiative, passes instead into real estate or, worse, into abstract financial markets.

One thing that has changed in the last 30 years is that the pathways into the new economy have largely been identified, both in terms of argumentation and technical possibility. What matters now is the degree to which and the regularity with which these paths become trodden. On, therefore, to the next 30 years! 

Christopher Houghton Budd