The Homebrew Industrial Revolution

(From the Preface): Running throughout this book, as a central theme, has been the superior efficiency of the alternative economy: its lower burdens of overhead, its more intensive use of inputs, and its avoidance of idle capacity.

Two economies are fighting to the death: one of them a highly-capitalized, high-overhead, and bureaucratically ossified conventional economy, the subsidized and protected product of one and a half century's collusion between big government and big business; the other a low capital, low-overhead, agile and resilient alternative economy, outperforming the state capitalist economy despite being hobbled and driven underground.

The alternative economy is developing within the interstices of the old one, preparing to supplant it. The Wobbly phrase "building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old" is one of the most fitting phrases ever conceived for summing up the concept.