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]

International corporations with their speculative financial instruments also live in the virtual world. And that has had a tremendous impact on real people in real jobs with real hunger. Remember credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations? Go see The Big Short for a reminder.

[Edward theurj Berge]

So-called post-capitalism is just another crappy capitalist snowjob. Excerpts:

"Academics, content-providers and the staffs of nonprofits [...] offer reassuring-sounding it-won’t-be-that-bad schemes like 'cradle to cradle, 'conscious capitalism,' 'social entrepreneurship, and 'green capitalism.' But these are quickly revealed to be the same old crap in prettier packaging. Then they decry capitalism’s 'excesses' by defining the problem not a capitalism itself, but as errors within an otherwise acceptable economic system. They add qualifiers: crony capitalism, disaster capitalism, corporate capitalism, blah blah blah. They build stellar careers as public intellectuals by offering the comforting thought that if we could simply eliminate its worst elements, the system might yet be saved. But this formula sounds increasingly hollow, as people figure out that the worst aspects of capitalism aren’t a mistake. They’re inherent to it."

"Let’s see what remedies many of them point to: 'collaborative commons,' 'workplace democracy,' 'workers’ co-ops,' 'mutual aid,' the 'sharing economy.' These sound good, and indeed some of them may be positive and necessary steps toward a non-capitalist mode of production. But they are just that—steps—and it’s a mistake to confuse them with the path as a whole. Unless the framework of capitalism is broken entirely, they circle back to the beginning every time. Capitalism is not damaged simply because we engage in activity that is cooperative, non-hierarchical, collaborative or 'socialistic.' It can and often does assimilate this activity, monetize it to generate new revenue streams. At the same time it helps manage and metabolize our discontent."

"To get beyond capitalism, we cannot wait or hope or engineer an upgrade. There is no easy way out. We need to emancipate ourselves from it through struggle; we need to destroy it."

[Edward theurj Berge]

Some excerpts of Douglas Rushkoff's blog post "Fork the economy" follow:

"We have to stop looking at our economy as a broken system, but one that is working absolutely true to its original design. It’s time to be progressive — and this means initiating systemic changes. [...] We are not witnessing capitalism gone wrong — an otherwise egalitarian currency system has not been corrupted by greedy bankers — but, rather, capitalism doing exactly what it was programmed to do from the beginning. To fix it, we would have to dig down to its most fundamental code, and rewrite it to serve people instead of power."

"We are moving toward an economic plateau; but, while a steady state economy of slow or no growth is good for people and planet, it is utterly incompatible with the money system on which our economy is still based. [...] As I’ve argued in my upcoming book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, we are running a 21st Century digital economy on a 13th Century printing press-era operating system. The opportunity of a digital age and the sensibilities it brings is to reprogram money to favor transaction over accumulation — flow over growth."

"That’s why, as we embark on another election year, we must stop looking toward candidates to tweak one knob or the other on our existing economy or monetary system.[...] What those who hope to rein in the banking industry must do instead is break its monopoly over value creation and exchange by fostering competitive currencies, alternative corporate structures, worker-ownership, and restored respect for land and labor instead of just capital."

[DavidM58]

Also from the above referenced article:

"Making matters worse, central currency requires an economy to grow -- and to do so faster and faster. If, for every $100,000 lent into circulation, $200,000 has to eventually be paid back, then where does the other $100,000 come from? Someone has to borrow or earn it.

Now this scheme works fine as long as the economy is growing -- as the colonial powers were through their conquest of the world, and even America managed to do through corporate expansion in the decades following WWII. But our ability to grow has reached its limits. There are no more regions to conquer or developing nations to exploit. Efforts to escape into outer space notwithstanding, our planet has been stretched beyond its carrying capacity for additional extraction and growth."

"...This means experimenting with new, frictionless forms of exchange -- from local currencies that increase circulation 10-fold over bank-issued money to Bitcoin, which verifies transactions without the need for an expensive central authority. Already, we see successful implementations of alternative monetary systems not only in progressive coastal cities, but also former industrial cities of the steel belt. Online "favor banks" energize the exchange of goods and services in communities from austerity-paralyzed Greece to recession-devastated Lansing, Michigan. New, investor-proof co-ops -- from window manufacturers in Chicago to software developers in New Zealand -- consciously optimize for the flow of value through a network, rather than the extraction of value from it."

[Edward theurj Berge]

There are countless examples of the emerging new economy in this thread. And yet not a peep from the kennilinguists about any of it. They're still stuck in so-called conscious capitalism, which should tell us something not only about their blind bubble but about their overall level of consciousness.

[Edward theurj Berge]

This article responds to this earlier linked one. It criticizes the earlier article for conflating the capitalistic appropriation of the emerging sharing economy with its true forms. An excerpt:

"As Nick Dyer-Witheford argued in Cyber-Marx, there are two broad groups, sometimes using superficially similar rhetoric but in fact fundamentally opposed, that celebrate the emergence of a new kind of society based on current technological trends. One such group, whose material interests center on putting new wine in old bottles, enclosing the new liberatory technologies of abundance within a corporate framework of artificial scarcity for the sake of rent extraction, are trying to pass off a counterfeit of the real thing. Another group is promoting the real thing — among them autonomists like Dyer-Witheford, Hardt and Negri, groups like Oekonux that see peer-production and free and open-source software as kernels of a future communist society, and thinkers like Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation who envision a system incorporating non-capitalist markets along with cooperative production based on the natural resource and information commons. Mason, I think, falls unmistakably in the latter category. The false prophets of corporate information capitalism do a great deal of harm in passing themselves off as the real thing. But deluded figures on the Left like McMillan, who pretend that the two groups are the same, arguably do even more damage by discrediting our best hope for a post-capitalist society."

[Edward theurj Berge]

Michel Bauwens: The Matrix of Economic Evolution.

[DavidM58]

Very interesting stage conception from Bauwens.  Quite similar in many ways to Peter Pogany's Global Systems framework (more about that in this thread), with Bauwens "1.0" correlating to Pogany's "GS0," "2.0" correlating to Pogany's "GS1," "3.0" to Pogany's "GS2" and "4.0" to Pogany's "GS3."  Except Pogany doesn't have as much insight into the Commons that Bauwens does, and Bauwens doesn't have as much insight as Pogany in regards to the shortcomings and limitations of Technology.  Also, Pogany insists that there will be a deeply felt chaotic transition in between these relatively steady state systems (as there was between the "Free Market" and "Social Market" periods in Bauwens framework.

At some point soon I'll try to scan or recreate Pogany's comparable matrix. 

Yesterday I posted a fairly hefty web page dedicated to Peter Pogany and his integral economics here. 

FYI, I just found this p2pfoundation page on Peter Pogany's "Fifth Structure Emergence" here. 

[Edward theurj Berge]

Note that the Bauwens' post references The Presencing Institute article, which is based on Scharmer's Theory U. Also recall my earlier rationale about why economics is 'spiritual.' To further support that thesis here (and following) is a previous post in the Scharmer thread.

In #1 there are 3 areas where the self is divided from primary sources of life: ecological, social and spiritual. We are divided from nature, culture and ourselves. The first two list the usual suspects, but our spiritual divide is not from God, the origin, or reality as such but "between the current self [...] and the emerging future self." Interesting definition of the spiritual akin to some thread ruminations.

In figure 1 he correlates the spiritual divide with our current governance systems not giving voice to the people (aka fascist oligarchy) and private property rights. That's right, these are his spiritual issues. And that all of the above disconnects originate in our economic paradigms.

We'll see ahead that the solutions, like with Rifkin, are in Scharmer's emerging commons era and eco-system awareness.

[DavidM58]

Cool. I need to find time to delve into these links a little more. 

In the Scharmer thread, you make this point:

"#4 makes a point consistent in with Rifkin's holistic/ecological thinking, in that we cannot solve current problems with the kind of thinking that silos information into specialized boxes, i.e., typical analytical thinking with its incessant classification. We must uncover the ecological relations between specializations and classes. In other words, we must move from false (purely abstract) to real (embodied) reasoning."

Richard Heinberg has a new article on "Climate Holism and Climate Reductionsism."  I would have thought that the integral community, with the idea of integral as a kind of "super holism" would have made this argument already, but Heinberg creates a clear distinction between the kind of holism we need to employ vs. the reductionist thought that is so prevalent even among so many trying to respond to climate and other ecological issues. 

[Edward theurj Berge]

Good one, thanks.

[Edward theurj Berge]

See this Chris Hedges article. It's a similar argument used for conscious capitalism. An excerpt:

"The self-identified religious institutions that thrive preach the perverted 'prosperity gospel,' the message that magic Jesus will make you rich, respected and powerful if you believe in him. Jesus, they claim, is an American capitalist, bigot and ardent imperialist. These sects selectively lift passages from the Bible to justify the unjustifiable, including homophobia, war, racism against Muslims, and the death penalty."

"The doctrine these sects preach is Christian heresy. The Christian faith—as in the 1930s under Germany’s pro-Nazi Christian church—is being distorted to sanctify nationalism, unregulated capitalism and militarism. The mainstream church, which refuses to denounce these heretics as heretics, a decision made in the name of tolerance, tacitly gives these sects credibility and squanders the prophetic voice of the church."

"Kevin Kruse in his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, details how industrialists in the 1930s and 1940s poured money and resources into an effort to silence the social witness of the mainstream church, which was home to many radicals, socialists and proponents of the New Deal. These corporatists promoted and funded a brand of Christianity—which is today dominant—that conflates faith with free enterprise and American exceptionalism. The rich are rich, this creed goes, not because they are greedy or privileged, not because they use their power to their own advantage, not because they oppress the poor and the vulnerable, but because they are blessed. And if we have enough faith, this heretical form of Christianity claims, God will bless the rest of us too. It is an inversion of the central message of the Gospel. You don’t need to spend three years at Harvard Divinity School as I did to figure that out."