The Quartermaster

Terms of Requisition, Distribution & Non-Extractive Transfer

Adopted by Consensus Circle. Amended fourteen times. Ratified never.

Preamble: on the impossibility of selling you a shirt

The garment above is not for sale. It cannot be for sale. To place a price upon it in the currency of the imperial core would be to render it a commodity — to strip it of its use-value, abstract it into exchange-value, and re-inscribe upon a perfectly innocent piece of cotton the entire alienating logic of the wage relation. We will not do this to a shirt. The shirt has done nothing.

Nor will we accept the United States Dollar, an instrument of empire bearing the faces of dead enslavers, issued by a central bank accountable to no assembly, and accepted only because a navy says so. Several of us have read Graeber. One of us finished it.

Provisioning is therefore administered through the Mutual Aid Voucher (MAV), denominated in Socially Necessary Labour Hours (SNLH), a unit which cannot be accumulated, speculated upon, or inherited, and which has to date been issued zero times.

Article I — Establishing standing

1.1 The requisitioner shall obtain Form CCL-1, Declaration of Non-Extractive Intent, in triplicate. The form may not be printed, printing being an extractive process reliant on the petrochemical supply chain; it must be hand-copied from an existing copy held by a comrade in good standing. No such copy currently exists. The Circle is aware of the recursion and has struck a working group.

1.2 The requisitioner shall secure two witnesses, being members unrelated to the requisitioner by blood, marriage, or landlordship. A comrade holding a second property may not witness, but may observe the witnessing, provided they disclose the second property at the top of the meeting and again at the end.

1.3 Standing may not be purchased, transferred, gifted, or earned through labour, as each of these would constitute a market in standing.

Article II — Valuation

2.1 Form CCL-2, Labour Equivalency Assessment, converts the desired garment into Socially Necessary Labour Hours by reference to the current conversion table.

2.2 The conversion table is under revision. It has been under revision since 2021. The difficulty is that establishing the socially necessary labour time embodied in a t-shirt requires first establishing the socially necessary labour time embodied in establishing it, and the working group has been unable to exit this loop without recourse to a price signal, which is precisely the thing the table exists to abolish.

2.3 Interim valuations shown above are provisional, non-binding, and were arrived at by someone guessing.

Article III — Consensus

3.1 Requisitions are determined by the Consensus Circle, meeting fortnightly. Quorum is nine. Quorum has been achieved twice, both times in 2023, and on the second occasion the agenda was the quorum threshold.

3.2 The Circle operates modified-Quaker consensus. Any single member may block. A block is not a veto, because a veto implies hierarchy; it is a permanent and unappealable halt, arrived at horizontally.

3.3 One member has blocked every requisition since 2019, on the grounds that merchandise reproduces commodity fetishism and that a movement which sells its own iconography has already conceded the terrain. He is correct. This is the difficulty. Nobody has been able to argue against him without arguing for capitalism, and so the shirts remain unissued, and he remains, in the fullest sense, undefeated.

Article IV — Distribution

4.1 Vouchers are strictly non-transferable. Transfer would constitute a secondary market. A secondary market would constitute finance. Finance is how they got us the first time.

4.2 Vouchers expire after ninety days. The Circle has satisfied itself that expiry is not extractive, on the basis that nothing of value is extracted, nothing of value having been issued.

4.3 Delivery is by bicycle, undertaken by a comrade already travelling in that direction. Where no comrade is travelling in that direction, the requisitioner is held not to be, in any materially meaningful sense, on the way.

4.4 Postage was considered and rejected. Postage requires stamps; stamps are issued by the federal government; the matter was tabled in March pending further discussion and remains tabled. It will be raised again once the conversion table is settled.

Article V — Returns

5.1 There are no refunds. A refund presupposes a transaction. No transaction has occurred. What occurred was a redistribution, and redistributions do not run backwards; that direction is called accumulation and we have a position on it.

Article VI — Efficacy

6.1 The process set out above is fully minuted, democratically constituted, procedurally impeccable, and has never produced a shirt.

6.2 The Circle notes, without drawing further conclusions, that this is also true of the campaign.

The Quartermaster thanks you for your patience. Your requisition matters to the Circle and will be reached in the order it was blocked.