Linchpins

In Linchpins, Seth Godin makes a very revolutionary statement:

Understanding that your job is to make something happen changes what you do all day. If you can only cajole, not force, if you can only lead, not push, then you make different choices. (p. 221)

Italics in original

I am beginning to think that Godin is a crypto-communist despite his avowals of faithful capitalist thought. What amazed me about this book was Godin's favourable treatment of Marxism. This is extremely unusual for writers of business books. They are usually content to bad-mouth Marxism and Communism without much thought.

On p. 240, Godin writes the following about The Communist Manifesto:

This book isn't about what you think it's about. And it's certainly not about the USSR. The key argument here is that small experiments in communism don't work, because they are corrupted by the temptation to defect and engage in trade with neighbors that exploit their workers (so you can benefit). Only worldwide revolution and grabbed power by farmers and factory workers can upend their unfair bargain that kings and capitalists have put in place. At one profound level they are right: as long as the workers don't own the means of production, the exchange will be inherently unfair. A lot of what they pessimistically predicted has occurred to the workers at the bottom of the ladder.

Emphasis Mine

This is a much deeper analysis of the Communist Manifesto that is normally done by capitalist writers. They focus on the ten point plan if they bother to read the book at all. And yet I think Godin misses some of the other key points in the manifesto. And these points reinforces his argument about workers taking control of their lives in order to be creative individuals.

Godin does correctly analyse the source of profit in Capitalism:

The difference between what an employee is paid and how much value she produces leads to profit. If the worker captures all the value in her salary, there's no profit. (p. 12)

What Marx explains in Volume 1 of Capital, Godin does in a paragraph. Yet Marx was developing the Labour Theory of Value. Again, Godin separates himself from the received knowledge that this theory is bunk. It is the labour-power of the worker that adds value not the ideas of the Capitalist.

And on p. 22, I am astounded that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels are quoted directly. No more hidden references and allusions. A direct quotation! This is in a business book!

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote, "By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life." They went onto argue that what we do all day, the way money is made, drives our schooling, our politics, and our community.

This schooling, politics, and community form the superstructure of control. The critical superstructure that maintains the status quo is the education system whose real aim, Godin says, is:

We train the factory workers of tomorrow. Our graduates are very good at following instructions. And we teach the power of consumption as an aid to social approval. (p.42)

This superstructure is now threatened by the very success of Capitalism. Now the production of capital goods has become so cheap that workers can really start their factories. Godin goes onto to claim that:

Now, though, the proletariat owns the means of production. Now, the workers are self-organized online. Now, access to capital and the ability to find one another are no longer problems. (p. 22)

Italics in original

This control of production now threatens the class division in society. Godin says that Karl Marx and Adam Smith agreed that we were divided into two (2) teams: management and labour. Godin poses his thesis:

What if there were no longer only two sides? Not just capital versus labour, but a third team, one that straddled elements of both? I think there is a huge opportunity for a third kind of particioant, a linchpin, and now an opportunity to change all the rules that we've lived with all our lives. (p. 23)

I agree with Godin that workers need to make conscious choices to take charge of our working lives in order to improve society. I disagree with him that Communists cannot simply become a third class in society.

A truly Communist society is classless. There are no class divisions. All workers are owners. A Communist living in a Capitalist society gets corrupted by it as they are part of the process to exploit workers.

And yet Godin is correct in saying that the great mass of workers are not prepared to become linchpins. They would rather wait for orders. We are pushing against an ideological system that is creating compliance among the workers.

Into this model, Godin says that severe cracks are appearing. The need for Department I workers is where the productivity growth is coming from. There is no more to be gained from the exploitation of Department II workers.

In this crisis of Capitalism, we have an opportunity to show a better way.

Read more!

The Leader Who Had No Title

I was interested in the book, The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life, because I thought it might have some interesting ideas for a Communist society. Overall, I found the book to be an essentially American book with its emphasis on worship of military service and acquisition of the trappings of success.

All five (5) teachers in this fable thank the protaganist (Blake) for his military service in Iraq (45, 89, 132, 159). This I find to be a feature of current US literature. Military service is to be respected by everyone. This positions the book towards the right wing of US politics. This alone makes the book intriguing enough to read about how a Communist ideal of leadership among the workers can be accommodated in a Capitalist enterprise.

The first teacher, Tommy Flinn, appears as a hobo (8) but who is really a star employee at the bookshop chain for which Blake works (8). First appearances leads me to believe that Tommy is in only in this gig for the joy of working. Yet, two of the teachers have trappings of wealth: Tommy with his "shiny new black Porsche 911S" (29); and Jet's lecture on aesthetics versus possession (163-5).

Jet's thesis is that it is the appreciation of the finer things rather than the possession of material wealth (165). This development of aesthetics is seen as essential to the development of an inner life which is important for leaders. Wealth is a necessary thing for acquisition of the finer things which leads to an improved inner life which produces a better leader. Sounds awfully like an aristocrat arguing why the feudal lords should be in charge on the eve of the French Revolution.

All in all, I found this book to be directed at the labour aristocracy (people like me) in spite of Anna's intervention as a housekeeper. There was not one example of someone working in a factory or on a farm. The examples were all in the service sector: bookshop; hotel; ski shop; public library; and massage parlour. And two (2) of the teachers were self-employed: Ty and Jet.

It is members of the labour aristocracy who are able to do:

• Innovation (60) is really the province of the Department I worker. The thesis of the book is that our jobs now are more and more in Department I rather than Department II.
• Mastery (64) of the skills in a job is again for the Department I worker. A Department II has to maintain flexibility to change jobs and skills quickly in response to 'market' demands.
• Authenticity (74) is difficult for all workers because we have to mould ourselves to fit the requirements of our employers. We have to become what they pay us to be. Authenticity is tolerated in Department I workers as long as we deliver on innovation.

I find most of the aphorisms to be really relevant to trusted workers in the labour aristocracy. These are the privileges of membership.

A quandry for the Capitalist evangelist is require that revolutionary change to be done in a slow, evolutionary manner (62). Reform is preferred over Revolution.

This book continues on the trend within the intellectual circles of how to get the workers more engaged and therefore productive without ceding any power to the workers. We now have an economic system that requires worker democracy on the shop floor in order to implement increases in productivity while maintaining power in the offices upstairs. At best, we are entering a period of dual power where workers are becoming more confident in their decision making skills while managers are losing control slowly as workers are making better decisions faster.

Bibliography

Sharma, Robin. The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life, Simon & Schuster, 2010, UK.

Read more!

Mike Tyson Vegan now is

Mickey Z gives the astounding news that Mike Tyson is now a vegan!

If anyone thinks vegans are whimps, they can tell Mr. Tyson face to face. The good news is that he will not bite their ears off.

Read more!

Possible Responses to Peak Oil: Some Lessons from the Past

Joerg Friedrichs posits that the Cuban model of surviving the collapse of oil supplies is the best model for surviving peak oil in Possible Responses to Peak Oil: Some Lessons from the Past.

Countries with a strong community ethos may embark on Cuban-style socioeconomic adaptation,relying on their people to mitigate the effects of peak oil.

This is a polite way of saying that countries that are not Capitalist are most likely to survive. A Capitalist economy requires individuals to look after their own interests, first and foremost. Community has been destroyed in order to extract as much profit as possible.

Barry Healy is not so reticient about the secret of Cuba's success when he reviewed The Power of Community, How Cuba Survived Peak Oil:

Directed as it is at a US audience, the word "socialism" doesn't get a mention but the message is perfectly clear: there is a future for humanity — an alternative to capitalism.

Zoe Kenny stresses that it is the democratic nature of Cuba's Communism that allowed Cuba to make this adjustment to Peak Oil in a substainable way:

Through the country's system of participatory democracy, or People's Power, each Cuban citizen had a say in the development of the solutions to the crisis of the post-Soviet "special period" and understood the role that they needed to play in this — for example, riding a bicycle to work or setting up an urban garden.

Cuba's example shows that the major change the world needs to make in the face of the coming peak oil crisis is possible — but only if the world's working people are actively involved in creating and implementing the solutions, rather than relying on the profit-driven capitalist corporations for answers.

The Capitalist model of pricing to control allocation of resources is inadequate to confront a crisis of the magnitude of Peak Oil. Resource allocation has to return to democratic control. This means that the critical resources have to be under public ownership.

Private ownership means that the use of the resources is for the benefit of that individual or corporation. They only need to consider their own interests as they perceive them.

The idea of stakeholders seeks to expand the interests that a corporation has but the final decision of how to dispose of a resource resides with the owner.

To survive the hard times ahead, we need active, participatory democracy with public ownership of critical resources, means of production, and infrastructure. We are all in this together. We need each other to survive. Individualism is lethal.

Bibliography

Friedrichs, J., Global energy crunch: How different parts of the world would react to a peak oil scenario. Energy Policy (2010), doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2010.04.011

Healy, Barry. How Cuba survived its oil shock, GreenLeft Weekly, Wednesday, November 17, 1993 - 11:00, http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/34885, viewed 8 May 2010.

Kenny, Zoe. Peak oil: Is the oil running out?, GreenLeft Weekly, Friday, October 6, 2006 - 10:00, http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/36306, viewed 8 May 2010.

Read more!

It's easier to teach compliance than initiative

Seth Godin ponders why It's easier to teach compliance than initiative while noting:

...The economy has rewritten the rules, and smart organizations seek out intelligent problem solvers. Everything is different now. Except the part about how much easier it is to teach compliance.

The rules of the economy have not been rewritten. This is still a Capitalist economy. What has changed is the distribution of workers between Department I and Department II.

Department II workers are needed to perform rote jobs that can be easily taught and measured. These are the production workers whether they work in a factory or an office. The capitalist profit arises from the exploitation of these workers.

Department I workers are those who create, maintain, build, and improve the machines that the Department I workers use. These workers need initiative and creativity for problem-solving. Their work is not easily taught or measured.

Education not only teaches workers skills for use in the economy but also modes of thinking for political control. Compliance is a vital output of the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) that is the education system.

As Godin notes, we are seeing a clash between the economic needs of initiative and the compliance that is the primary product of the education system. I would interpret this as a rift between the economic reality and the political superstructure which is based on compliance.

Read more!

Edge of Darkness

Mel Gibson's latest movie, Edge of Darkness examines the link between activism and terrorism. The movie also covers the link between the economic base of a society and the resulting offical terrorism even against the state. The movie fails to follow through on its logic about the collusion between economic and political forces.

Jedburgh, who is the fixer for national security, explains to Thomas Craven (played by Gibson) that his slain daughter, Emma Craven, was flagged as a terrorist in one of the national security databases, but she was not a terrorist. Jedburgh is careful to reiterate this.

I find this exchange to be interesting because it challenges the nexus between activism and terrorism. And it opens up the question of who decides whether someone is a terrorist or not. This question is not explored further in the movie.

Another theme throughout the movie is that Emma turned to activism once she had exhausted all legal avenues for exposing the illegal activities of her employer, Northmoor. The security requirements of her job meant there were none. But this theme also explains her father's actions in uncovering the mystery for he does illegal entry, impedes police investigations, destroys evidence, break and enter, vandalism, property damage, assault, murder.

The wry comment made several times throughout the movie is that everything is illegal in Massachusetts. This comment seems justified the extraordinary actions of the main characters. The reasoning appears to that, if the law is so restrictive that one cannot be a decent human being, then one must choose to be a decent human being over the law.

The setting of the movie in Massachusetts is significant from several perspectives. The origins of the American Revolution in Boston, Massachusetts, is referred to at one point in the movie as Thomas tries to understand how Emma provided material aid to a group of anarchists who tried to break into the Northmoor facility. Another perspective is the existence of the high-technology industries, of which Northmoor is a part, that provide a significant number of jobs to the economy of Massachusetts.

Another interesting theme I find is the distinction between private and public employment. Public employment is held in higher esteem because the civil servant attempts to live up to a code of ethics, whereas the private employee does anything for money. There are several references in the movie to the private security at Nortmoor being out of control.

The economic rationale for letting Northmoor have a free reign is that the company brings jobs into the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This is really an expression of the idea of dictatorship of the corporation - whatever the corporation needs, it gets. But also it expresses the implicit contract between the population and the corporation: you let us do what we want and you get to eat through having a job.

However, the movie fails to consider that media outlets, such as Fox News, are also corporations who follow the same logic. The movie assumes that the corporate press is a truly free press that pursues the public interest. In the battle between corporation and the people, the corporations stick together to defend their monopoly on power.

In reality, Thomas Craven and Jedburgh are anarchists for they do not abide by the laws of the state or rely on the state as an intermediary in their quest for justice. Both of them justify this defiance of the supremacy of the state by holding themselves accountable to their codes of honour. The law that they obey is internal not external. This is a symmetry with the opening of the movie with the death of three anarchists as they tried to enter the Northmoor facility.

Another symmetry in the movie is between the betrayal of the three anarchists by their mentor, and Thomas' betrayal by his boss. Both betrayals are driven by economic self-interest: the mentor to keep his comfortable liberal life-style; and the police captain's desire to provide for his family. Here economic power is one face of state (or corporate) terror: Obey and you eat; Disobey and you starve.

Read more!