# Postcapitalist finance
Postcapitalism is the economic space (economic network) that comes after capitalism. In postcapitalism, all agents can issue assets to be used as collateral if recognized as valuable by the network. Implicit here is the idea that a postcapitalism framed through finance can be depicted as an economy of continuous creation of new value-forms.

Our first wager is that postcapitalist value-creation will emerge from finance as the frontier of capitalist economic change. Explaining this connection forms the substance of the *[Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression](https://postcapitalist.agency)* book. We start in Chapter 1 by describing the difference between capitalism and postcapitalism as a financial ‘spread’ which is defined by the different answers these questions get in the capitalist and the postcapitalist economic networks:

* What counts as liquidity?
* What counts as collateral?
* What counts as ‘surplus’ and
* Who decides each of these?

ECSA is working on a grammar for postcapitalist economic-organizational expression, i.e. that allows us to formulate the new answers to these questions. The place where this postcapitalist economic network language is spoken and understood is the postcapitalist economic space. It is a place of value creation where qualified values can both be expressed, composed and rendered interoperable. It multiplies denominations, which remain interoperable, because they share the same grammar.

In other words, the postcapitalist grammar is a more expressive medium to describe our economic networks, their participants, the nature of their relations and how they change, what they value, how it is counted and exchanged. Furthermore, it is a media that can make the value of any intangible, relational, informational (expression, care, the biosphere, community) offerable, exchangeable, investable, liquidity creating, leverageable – economically expressible and relatable – without collapsing all its information into “price” and “profitability”.

Our second wager is that a clear spread will open between what the capitalist and the postcapitalist economic space (economic network) make possible – there is a clear difference in their expressive capacity, accessibility, stability, adaptability, scalability, privacy, functional equality and programmability.

The ECSA token is a performance derivative designed to capture a share of the spread: it is a mechanism that rewards early participation and through which contributors can participate in the creation of the postcapitalist economic space. In other words, it offers exposure to the economic performance of the postcapitalist economic network, not ownership of the network infrastructure which remains open to use.