INTEGRAL ANTI-CAPITALISM cont'd.

[Layman Pascal]

For an introduction to this expanding meta-thread see Integral Anti-Capitalism pt I. We continue here because we have, hilariously, exceeded this website's capacity...

LAYMAN PASCAL

I agree that holacracy should be singled out for special investigation. The provocative notion that we are dramatically over-emphasizing the need for "conscious leadership" pertains very pertinently to this discussion. Robertson, like ourselves, is pointing to the fact that business (organizations) which integrally improve the interiors and cultural
spirit of their participants are still predisposed to certain outcomes as a result of their actual structural habits of communication and their specific decision-making protocols.
His notion of a constantly self-correcting dynamic organization drawing upon the capacity of individuals to act as tension-sensors relative to the "evolutionary purpose" of the organization is compelling and admirable.

More important is simply that he is making a stand and making an attempt to construct a protocol (constitution). I am not fully versed in the 4.0 version of the holacracy constitution but we should get deeper into some of these proposals.  

Given the level of your current knowledge of their protocols, what would you want to change or add in order to ethically and functionally empower this approach even more?

THEURJ

First some housekeeping in providing links in part I to comments on holacracy: their website, comment 1, comment 2, comment 3 (and 3 more on p. 7), and the first 7 comments on p. 8. 

I’m not yet familiar enough with holacracy to know it might need. So for now I’ll ask questions.  From p. 8 there was a blog post on ownership and the model might (but not necessarily) include outside capital investors. I asked:

“One question immediately pops up on outside investors. Are there limits on the amount of outside capital investment? What if their investment is such that without it the company could not financially survive? And/or depends on it for start-up? Then such investment would control the company, like it or not. If you don't do what I say I'm taking my ball and going home. No ball, no ballgame. Not the same as a mortgage or loan company.”

Granted why such investors are included on the Board there are other stake-holders to balance their input. But are there rules about which outside individuals or companies can invest? Do they have to have similar values like triple bottom lines instead of just profit for their investors? Can a Goldman Sachs provide start-up capital? Or Romeny’s ex-firm, Bain? Just wondering, so perhaps it’s time for those out there more familiar with the system to engage us?

LAYMAN PASCAL

I appreciate your inquiry about the potential influence of outside investors in holacratic systems. Perhaps they have a good protocol for that. Or perhaps not. In general, all "smart groups" need to comprehend and anticipate the distortion influence that donors and enablers wield. The psychology of human nature shows that we may believe ourselves to be quite sturdy and impartial while we are really bending in the breeze.

One of the concerns I had while perusing the holacracy constitution was about the voting procedure for filling roles. There are many parts of their approach which impress. In particular I would like to make not of the necessity to place constraints upon discussion. When the mention of a concern is met with the mention of counter-concerns then the intelligence and practical efficacy of discussions drops dramatically. A highly suspicious mind might even supposed that the human hive is encouraged to engage in the constant casual usage of dysfunctional conversation. So their use of controlled phases in both operational and hiring decisions is admirable. However, their actual voting protocol seems (to my naive glance) to be based on a model of transparent majority. A sophisticated "show of hands".

So this may be an area in which holacratic principles can be expanded to include a more thorough use of "secret ballot" and "averaged ranking".

The former often seems like a show of bad faith and an invitation to covert dangers... but these are considerably outweighed by the liberation of individual intelligence from any conscious or unconscious concerns about the social consequences of their input.

The latter evades a primitive "first past the post" approach in which our intelligence is functionally limited to a yes/no determination about each candidate relative to other candidates.

Another thing I admire about holacracy is that it represents a functional procedure and culture in which participants would appear to become better participants by participating. Their capacity and ethical commitment to the good of the organization through its evolving protocols should be an increasing trend. Any smart group needs to be arranged so that even people who try to distort the results will find their capacity and will to do this reducing over time. Replaced by the inspirational efficacy of the group.

This brings me to another issue relative to voting, both in political and economic groups. That is the relative absence of specific instructions about how to translated ones feelings into a vote-mark. This is almost completely unaddressed in terms of popular elections. To discuss it even seems insidious to some people who fear coercion (and/or wish to maintain the current material power structures).

Protocols should have at least a clear suggestion about how to locate both "gut" and "intellectual" data within ourselves and convert that into a numerical value which can be contributed to a group decision. A lack of clarification at this critical junction may act as an invisible source of drag upon an otherwise very functional group organism.

It might even be possible to define an "integral-level organizational set up" for business or politics by simply compiling a list of areas in which intelligence and capacity are distorted. We might recall that most of Wilber's philosophy has emerged in levels correlated to his discovery of "fallacies" or "basic errors". Integral proposals about business and society could be all over the map unless there is a reasonable set of constraints that make sure they fall in the most lucrative zone.

So other than the potential influence of outside "helpers" and "donors" what other sources of distortion or inhibition do you see going mostly unaddressed in otherwise progressive groups?

THEURJ

My next question of holacracy is who came up with it? It seems to be the pet project of Brian Robertson, his own brainchild. I'm wondering if that is so of if it was a community or P2P project? I mean, the structure of holacracy itself calls for distributed decision-making but was the creation of holacracy itself derived from this process or mostly dictated by Robertson? I've yet to find an answer at the site so I posed this question to them via contact info. I'll provide the response if/when received. I think the answer is pivotal in determining if this thing called holacracy arose from its own medicine.

LAYMAN PASCAL

I look forward that answer if it is forthcoming. The notion of self-arising systems is something which haunts the periphery of these discussions. My fantasy is that we can devise a group protocol which so reliably and simply exceeds the cognitive capacity of the individual participants that it would be foolish to predetermine the purpose and nature of the group. Collectively we could a better job of determining what kind of a collective we should be. "Smartgroups" of this kind could then spread through the world in a very radical social uprising. How possible that is remains uncertain...

As I understand holacracy, the different companies making use of it are assumed to engage in their own mutational modifications of the "constitution". So even if Brian wrote the whole thing out in his bathtub it still retains an open source quality. The answer to whether its current forms are or are not the result of distributed decision-making is almost certainly: sort of.

One of the reasons the holacracy approach is so amenable to business organization is that it seems to depend upon the functional axis of a specified purpose. The aim is somewhat pregiven -- our job is to sell widgets or maximize share-holder profit, etc. His use of the metaphor of the sensors on an airplane derives from a mechanism that is assumed to be designed for a well-known purpose.

My question would be whether or not this "aim" is a necessarily functional element in generating enhanced organizational capacity? Or whether it is simply an artifact of the need to make these systems serve a relatively conventional marketplace task?

THEURJ

Your suggestion of a smart group that arises creatively from a continually evolving set of parameters seems to be the intent and practice of holacracy. As to the organizational purpose of Holacracy One, it seems to have multiple bottom lines including but not limited to profit. For example, see this post in the comments where I noted that the top to bottom pay ratio is 3 to 1, and quoted some of those multiple purposes:

"With Holacracy at play, the game is entirely different: with the decentralization of authority, the separation of people and role, and the dynamic evolution of those roles, we end up with a situation that looks more like free agents going about their work with no central planning. There might not even be a single person who knows about everything you do."

This sounds much more like the sort of emerging P2P organizational structure discussed throughout this thread. And also of significance in the post following this article where The Integral Center of Boulder has "voluntarily relinquished their rights to control their company as owners. Instead, they have ceded authority to a purpose-centered governance process called Holacracy, a model that distributes authority across the organization and gives primary power to the organization itself."

These are indeed advances over the kind of conscious capitalism promoted and AQALly packaged for sale at I-I.

LAYMAN PASCAL

(comment pending)

This is an interesting moment. Apparently Amazon.com is experimenting with a version of holacracy as well. It clearly represents a theoretical advance over the typical kind of conscious capitalism which combines advanced sentiments with a potentially dangerous and uninspected ideological allegiance to more primitive routines of social organization and wealth production. Yet we cannot know the results of the experiment in advance.

I have tremendous optimism about emergent p2p organizational structures. Experimentation is utterly necessary and should be strongly encouraged. I am also very hopeful that advances can be made in terms of quantification. This is very central in my thinking lately.

It seems that experimental protocols for advances social organization systems suffer from the lack of a quantifiable evaluation of their respective degrees of "collective intelligence". Most people are drawn to such possibilities by ethical and aesthetic criteria which do no necessarily persuade the world. So I would love to see experimentation supplemented by the attempt to devise a metric for estimating the intelligence of a social organization protocol.

Along similar lines, my "tetrabucks" type notions represent the possibility/necessity to structure our currency at a level that correlates to advanced P2P organizational structures and post-pluralistic consciousness.

The potential of an evil holacracy has hardly been broached. If it works -- it works. Other than simply the tendency of less complex people not to use more complex systems, and the tendency of more complex systems to complexify their participants, there needs to be some inter-organizational structures which incline all organizations int he direction of broad human well-being. It is my assertion that as long as primary areas of value remain outside monetization the actions of groups trying to utilize official social credits will constantly become unstable.

So I am imagining a line leading from pathological capitalism to standard capitalism to conscious capitalism to trans-capitalist network organizations to such organizations bound together by a integrated set of metrics for determining the intelligence of groups and splicing together (at least) four broad domains of human value.

Along these lines -- how will we decide whether holacratic integral business is working better?

THEURJ

As to how we determine whether alternative economic paradigms are 'working,' I'd suggest that even by the standards of typical business democratic workplaces like co-ops are successful. If by that we mean the organization runs smoothly, has low employee turnover, high employee satisfaction, makes a profit or surplus over operating costs, and other such typical measures. Plus they fulfill their stated purposes as expressed in theRochdale principles, like community education, cooperation, democratic control, etc.

I'd say the same applies to holacracy. They also have to accomplish the usual business parameters like above but also meet stated principles like in their constitution. Given Robertson's business acumen I'm sure at the site he has precise and measurable indices to track such progress, though I didn't try to find them as yet.

LAYMAN PASCAL

(comment pending)

[Edward theurj Berge]

Thanks, looks like a good one.

DavidM58 said:

“The Ecology of Law”

[Edward theurj Berge]

Zak Stein on a weak and strong integral stance against corporate capitalism:

[andrew]

What is post-capitalism? The Paleochaotic! 

Buddy, up above goes into Social credit theory. The Christian's in western Canada tried it mid-century and it worked to a point . Said Christian's eventually became Zioniz'd and that was the end of that with the concomitant move to Christian Neoliberalism with its soft Fascist anti-christ values . A deeply cynical view of humans and the earth . This is B.C. today and the chilling part was Trudeau's B.C. commercial where he says in a somewhat subliminal way that this is his new view for Canada . 

So there we have it: a system of governance based on a religion where said  Exodus doesn't have a shred of historical evidence; where Abraham can be traced to Brahma  ( bye bye Judaism and Islam), a new Christology commerce based on those fallacies (especially in western Canada) . Not one of these religious fallacies could care less about pollution or the massive exploitation of the earth ( hey, half a million years left in the kali-yuga) what the hell do we need science for?

But here's the deal : as great a respect that I have for science ; pretty well every day something happens in my life that makes me believe that the scientific view of life is wrong ! There is something extraordinary  happening upon the earth that science isn't accounting for , IMO, and I suspect it's about the Tao that can't be named. Unlike the Exodus, there is evidence of an itinerant jew 2000 years ago and what he taught has probably never come to light on this earth to this point, at least that is my view ....Maybe not a Paleochaotic after all....

[DavidM58]

Brilliant statement by Zak there, though I'm not sure what was said in the last couple of minutes is as supportable as what was said in the first 4. If memory serves, those on the other side of the debate did not address this first part of his presentation.

A key part for me is the brief comment about the unsustainability of compound interest. Physics professor Al Bartlett had a famous presentation called Arithmetic, Population, and Energy.  Well worth checking out. He said "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

theurj said:

Zak Stein on a weak and strong integral stance against corporate capitalism:

[Ambo Suno]

T, that zak stein riff is wonderful. I must admit that I am almost as infatuated with his tidy and elegant, idiosyncratic manner of thinking and speaking as I am with the content, which is also helpful to me.

[andrew]

In light of yesterday : 

stats on murder by terrorism : 

http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/jandk/data_she...

stats on murder by imperial forces: 

http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/unworthy-victims-western-wars-...

stats on automobile related deaths: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._...

Clearly, from any logical analysis, we should be declaring a war on driving! We should be spending trillions fighting this scourge ! Especially when one factors in carbon pollution ! But no, killing up to 4 million muslims since 1990 is proportional revenge for the 40,000 murders committed  by terrorists since H.W. Bush took power . 

Look , says  the Frenchman , " I demand that my civil liberties be taken away and I want a police state to live in so I can be safe from these rampaging muslim hoards who commit crimes of atrocity for no reason whatsoever !"

[andrew]

Maybe this time we should implement policies prior to collapse  rather than waiting until after the next manufactured capitalist bubble implosion : 

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/food-bank-use-in-alberta-soars-year-ov...

Put the bloody personal tax emption at 24,000 and index to inflation and harmonize all the social services into one G.A.I.N. tied into ecological education and living . Please , no right wing capitalist trolls on this one . Come on now ! Be the good kind of conservative! 

[andrew]

This article is proof of my previous post on the numbers of deaths through Imperial terrorism and its inevitable response . 100,000 to 1 is the ratio . Truly we are living in the age of propaganda where what you hear in the media is premised on who owns the source . 

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/17/we_created_islamic_extremism_those_...

The one consistent thing throughout all this sordid subterfuge if the insistence that Capitalism is King! Well, it is in Russia and China now and Islam will have to capitulate . Does anybody really believe this is going to magically end with the overthrow of Syria? 

[andrew]

The de-growth economy: 

https://theconversation.com/life-in-a-degrowth-economy-and-why-you-...

I gave what i owned away in '79. Haven't owned much since although incongruently I did buy an automobile in recent years so I can survive (barely) with a skill I acquired . I've never desired to own property and never looked at someone or something and thought, " I can exploit that for profit". I cannot have an employee for that reason so I do it on my own ( I've lived by the two spiritual protocols of reality)  One could say I was a natural de-growther . I am not jealous and envious of those who are wealthy although I disagree strongly when any of them claim that they didn't get there by exploiting the fuck out of everything and everyone. But, yes, there is a small percentage of the wealthy that own little private property and put their wealth towards the commons ( honestly, less and less of these folks every year) . 

So, i understand the tribal religionists when they react in horror to the ravages and rapine of the global capitalist juggernaut, but disagree strongly with their reactions even though the truth of the matter is not every thing is at it seems there. So here is my recommendation : start withdrawing your consent en masse ! Sell your house and go buy a small piece of land and turn the evil into a good . Don't buy the made in wherever crap that you don't really need and downsize every area of your live . The only thing the globalists understand is money and violence ! Withdraw your consent in these two areas and the whole house of cards will be shown to be the complete charade that it is . 

[andrew]

Hollande has just advised his people to ignore the police on every corner and please go on with the viewing of everything Walt Disney! 

[andrew]

On the dragon: the dragon is a hoarder of wealth and will never give that up . The dragon is also motivated by lizard instincts and can't reason its way out of its nature ( it is lowly developed/the deficient rational ) . Once upon the dragon one will find that you can only go where the dragon wills; it will not be steered . The dragon is neoliberal global-corporate capitalism . Let's take some examples : on homelessness- the very parameters of this dragons flight make it impossible to end homelessness under this system . The best that can be achieved from its basic ideology is to give blankets and at its worst a feral hatred of these people. Environment: this system externalizes all cost onto future generations so that it can hoard its wealth for today. And to those who attempt to hinder the dragons flight from below? A fierce retribution from everything the dragon can throw at it . It might also be come to be known that this particular dragon is blind and ever the more dangerous for it .

[andrew]

Excellent paper on the basic income ( it should be 24,000) today in Canada . Freely given out by direct deposit with no nanny statism . Shut down the nanny state welfare bureaucracy and do this in stead . Apparently, Holland is implementing this now. 

https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-eve...