Alfred North Whitehead, Pt. 11

The next two chapters of our book deal with Whitehead’s metaphysics. Since this blog has been developing a metaphysics for a post-capitalist world and its problems, The interests of time efficiency require me to to skip to his chapter, “Religion And Science.”

Whitehead returns to the point he had made in the preface about the “provincialism in time” that limits modern intellectual life. He lists “two great facts” of the historical relationship between religion and science – first, that there has always been a conflict between them; second, that they both “have always been in a state of continual development.” He cites the work of Catholic historians Father Petavius and Cardinal Newman for examples of religious development, adding that science “is even more changeable than theology. No man of science could subscribe without qualification to Galileo’s beliefs, or to Newton’s beliefs, or to all his own scientific beliefs of ten years ago.”

Our author gives a couple reasons for the turn against religion and toward science, a bias against “free imaginative speculation” that has been growing since the early 17^th century.

Whitehead sets out the difference between the two and the need for both: “Science is concerned with the general conditions which are observed to regulate physical phenomena; whereas religion is wholly wrapped up in the contemplation of moral and aesthetic values.” Moreover, he asserts, “The clash is a sign that there are wider truths and finer perspectives within which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science will be found.”

Our author notes that it “belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment. If you check that impulse, you will get no religion and no science from an awakened thoughtfulness.” He further emphasizes that “A clash of doctrines is not a disaster—it is an opportunity.”

Indicating its necessity for both cognition and action, Whitehead advocates the development of religion to have the same respect towards change as does science.

He expresses the paradoxes of religion. It is …

...the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

Our author concludes: “The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.”

The Esoteric Philosophy of Alchemy from markosun.wordpress.com

Alfred North Whitehead, Pt. 10

I wrote earlier¹ about how I developed my metaphysics:

In the ‘90’s, when fairly vulnerable to her kind of thought, I read Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae2. I had been fascinated by the idea of “the four elements” (earth, air, fire and water) since childhood. Although I later learned that these had long been scientifically obsolete, I still consider them useful as mnemonic categories. Paglia’s claim that these ideas roughly correspond to the four forces (as I understand it, gravity, electro-magnetism, weak nuclear and strong nuclear, respectively) still seems reasonable to me.

Reading the “Science And Philosophy” chapter of our book, I sense that Whitehead is talking about these forces in much the way I have on this blog. Here, the author counters “the moderns’” efforts to check “any attempt to harmonise the ultimate concepts of science with ideas drawn from a more concrete survey of the whole of reality.” He summarizes the division that arose between science and philosophy:

The objective world of science was confined to mere spatial material with simple location in space and time, and subjected to definite rules as to its locomotion. The subjective world of philosophy annexed the colours, sounds, scents, tastes, touches, bodily feelings, as forming the subjective content of the cogitations of the individual minds.

He credits the advances in biochemistry for creating a space to regain this harmony – an advancement coming from the discovery of “the delicate adjustment of the chemical composition of the parts to the preservation of the whole organism…”

He then expands on the parallels between physics and organic (even sentient) interactions that I described in the last part of this series.

As I mentioned in Part 8, Whitehead writes in a “code” that makes it difficult to quote him to support my claims, but I’ll set out our correspondences as I understand them. Although I wrote on many of these correspondences throughout this blog, this entry gives me the opportunity to set them all out together in an organized way:

Force/Fundamental Interaction	Gravity	Weak Nuclear	Strong Nuclear	Electro-magnetism
Organic Process	Attraction	Sex/Violence/ Domination	Fertilization/ Gestation	Birth
The Four	The Potential	The Shadow /Sensual	The Integral	The Temporal
Elements	Earth	Fire	Water	Air
Times Dominant3	Yule to Litha	Samhain to Beltane	Beltane to Samhain	Litha to Yule
Agriculture	Plowing	Planting	Growth	Harvest
Place in Trialectic	Thesis	Antithesis	Synthesis	Hypothesis
Fundamental 19th-C Scientific Ideas (Per Chapter 6)	Atomicity	Evolution	Conservation	Continuity
Prehension	Power	Frustration	Loneliness	Boredom
Psychology	Will to Pleasure (Freud)	Will to Power (Adler)	Will to Understand (Frankl)	Will to Discover (Jung)

¹This link is to a message board. If you do a “Find on Page” search with the name, “Paglia,” you will reach the quote.

² This link goes to a pdf of the book. I’m not sure if it is likely to stay on line, but if it gets removed there is a Wikipedia article here.

³ Note that these overlap: The Potential/Temporal pair get opposite sides of the year, as do The Sensual/The Integral. These roughly correspond to the mythological pairs “The Oak King”/“The Holly King” and the Cailleach/Brigid. Note also that the holidays I picked for the Four do not perfectly match these times of year, since I assigned each deity 2 holidays – one at each half-year mark.

Source: Cailleach Beur Storm Bringer

Kim Domenico/The Power of the Integral, Revisited, Pt. 2

Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations represents a Vulcan belief that
beauty, growth, progress — all result from the union of the unlike.
– IDIC, Gene Roddenberry

In my “Kabbalah Reimagined” series I allude to, and, later, I examine, personality types similar to those discussed in the William James essay I brought up in my last entry.

In the aforementioned examination, I write of Viktor Frankl’s methods for responding to issues that make it difficult to say “yes” to life. One method, the one which Kim Domenico so eloquently promotes…

…is best suited for those more at home in the right side of the analysts’ desire path (I call this the “art sector.”) This sector is “inhabited” by those for which empathy is the most developed of the “gauges” I discussed in my “Cultivation” posts...

I then describe those who inhabit the left side of the analysts’ desire path “… (which I call the ‘science sector,’)” who “more easily develop their critical thinking skills,” saying that they express their true selves best in text.

Thoth Tarot Deck
From “Kabbalah Reimagined Part 3”

When speaking of people and “texts,” we can replace the word “art” with “fiction,” and the space in between becomes “science-fiction.” The interesting aspect of fractals is that they precisely fit this space – Look at Wikipedia’s sections on areas in which this study is being used. Even just under the “technology” section, we find applications as various as antennas, generation of music, medicine, and archeology. Thus, this study can bring a great diversity of minds together without, in James’ words, one side driving the other “to the wall.”

Such a joining, which includes both macro-and microscopic levels, could well make fractals the study of The Integral themself.

Another aspect of this study that hit me was that cancer cells, having a more unruly fractal pattern than healthy ones (as I recall, the documentary I mentioned in my last entry compared the cancer cells to mistletoe,) can thus be discovered earlier. Could we see cancer as another manifestation of The Shadow/The Sensual?

As for The Temporal…

Time is the substance I am made of.
Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river;
it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger;
it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.
– Jorge Luis Borges

The Potential, of course, is all of these and more.

“The goddess and patron saint of Axolotls?” Posted by  Xenodimensional in Fractal Forums

Kim Domenico/The Power of the Integral, Revisited

“The universe is eternally prehensive*.” – Anonymous

I recently watched a documentary on fractals. Around the same time, I read this Kim Domenico article. Putting them together with the Prosperity Gospel series I finished last month led me to some thoughts about The Four, especially The Integral.

The aforementioned series featured the ambiguous mind of William James, whom one of my inspirations, Alfred North Whitehead, referred to as “that adorable genius.” James identified two personality types that could be used to check each other to avoid either of them seriously threatening the decaying system of capitalism. His work, which I believe was heavily influenced by his shadowy brother, Henry, Gave this destructive system the resilience to survive over a century past when it would have naturally crumbled. Now, seeing this system finally tear itself apart, we might use his insights for one that will get humanity working together to heal each other and our planet.

This is a big topic, and putting together a coherent theory for it might take a while, so I’ll stop here. I’ll pull fractals into the equation in our next entry.

* Prehension is a term coined by Alfred North Whitehead. According to his entry in Wikipedia:

­Since Whitehead's metaphysics described a universe in which all entities experience, he needed a new way of describing perception that was not limited to living, self-conscious beings. The term he coined was "prehension," which comes from the Latin prehensio, meaning "to seize". The term is meant to indicate a kind of perception that can be conscious or unconscious, applying to people as well as electrons.

(Scholarly citations removed)

Third Yule

In partnership with the goddess Brìghde, the Cailleach is seen as a seasonal deity or spirit, ruling the winter months between Samhainn (1 November or first day of winter) and Bealltainn (1 May or first day of summer), while Brìghde rules the summer months between Bealltainn and Samhainn. Some interpretations have the Cailleach and Brìghde as two faces of the same goddess, while others describe the Cailleach as turning to stone on Bealltainn and reverting to humanoid form on Samhainn in time to rule over the winter months…

According to folklorist Donald Alexander Mackenzie, the longest night of the year marked the end of her reign as Queen of Winter, at which time she visited the Well of Youth and, after drinking its magic water, grew younger day by day.

- Wikipedia (Scholarly citations removed.)

I recently learned about the Celtic goddess, Cailleach and her relation to the change of seasons. Since last years’ entry discussed The Oak King (counterpart of/antagonist to the Holly King,) I thought it appropriate for this years’ to link to the feminine version of this mythological tradition. I think we can identify the Oak King and Holly King as The Potential and Temporal, and the Calleach and Brìghde as the Sensual and Integral, respectively.

Illustration by John Duncan 
in Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend (1917)
From Wikipedia

Love is Real, Part 4

“Love is the active concern for the life and growth of that which we love.”

 – Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Our book lists four basic elements of love – Interestingly, these correspond to the classical elements that I had identified with The Four: care (The Integral,) responsibility (The Sensual,) respect (The Potential,) and knowledge (The Temporal.) It then provides the above definition.

The author covers various kinds of love: brotherly, motherly, erotic, self, and love of God. I’d recommend the text for those interested in his elaboration, but want to briefly discuss a couple things I found especially interesting in this chapter:

First, our book provides a helpful take on the superego & ego ideal which we discussed recently. Fromm says that, rather than (as Freud claims) incorporating mother and father into the self, a healthy subject builds “a motherly conscience on his own capacity for love, and a fatherly conscience on his reason and judgment.”

It also provides a helpful take on the Love of God. Fromm asserts that “The religious form of love … [like all other forms,] springs from the need to overcome separateness to achieve union.” He claims that, for the mature monotheist, “[t]o love God … would mean … to long for the attainment of the full capacity to love, for the realization of that which ‘God’ stands for in oneself.” Discussing the “paradoxical standpoint” with which eastern religions inspired modern dialectical thought, the author says that this standpoint…

…led to the emphasis on transforming man, rather than to the development of dogma on the one hand, and science on the other. From the Indian, Chinese and mystical standpoints, the religious task of man is not to think right, but to act right, and/or become one with the One in the act of concentrated meditation.

Trying to square this “One” with The Four, I would define it as the best possible outcome of The Great Conversation – one that produces food for further conversation and growth therefrom.

Replica of Titian‘s  original
Pesaro Altarpiece painting displayed during conservation,
from Wikipedia

No Bosses, Part 7

Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,
I’m sticking to the union, I’m sticking to the union.
Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,
I’m sticking to the union ’til the day I die.

– “Union Maid,” Woody Guthrie

This entry will summarize the last two chapters – one of them is about addressing the needs of the present without falling into simple reforming, which ends up allowing the system to revert as soon as those in power feel safe enough to yet again reverse progressive achievements. No Bosses offers the example of minimum wage to make the point that we need to promote and hold on to a vision even as we acknowledge that we cannot immediately meet the vision’s standards, asserting that the one it proposes, “beyond fostering hope and allowing a positive tone, … has immediate worth precisely to the extent that it inspires, orients, and informs … immediate and long-term approach whether regarding property, decision-making, jobs, income, or allocation.”

The author then brings this idea to setting up a new institution or movement organization, using the example of a large scale media project, and discusses some related questions, such as whether it should take advertisements. He ultimately concludes that we can use the aforementioned principles as broad guidelines for such judgments, in the above organizations as well as developing “new ways of conducting daily life. Live, learn, love, and otherwise sustain and enrich all lives today while seeking a better world for tomorrow.”

Albert ends the chapter considering how plausible the final victory of winning a new economy, society, and world is. He concedes, since the stakes are so high, that “we don’t wait on proof that action will succeed.” However, he believes that acting on faith is too much to ask. He asserts that, along with a vision, “an effective project for a better society will need … a conception of how to win that we continually update from our growing experience, and that perpetually gives us not just courage but also reason to believe in and guidance to attain our own futures.”

After highlighting the essential need to eliminate private ownership of the means of production, the corporate division of labor, and markets, the chapter reiterates,

[W]e need to understand and share where we now are and what structures and obstacles around us as well as in ourselves enforce current reality. We need to envision and share the core features of where we want to wind up. We need to … traverse and re-traverse a steadily updated path from what we have to what we want.

The last chapter answers various questions the author had been asked most often about his project over the years. I believe he answered many of them over the course of the book, but I do want to mention a couple points that interested me.

First, he makes a distinction that I had not thought of before, that between markets and exchange:

Exchange happens in every economy. Exchange in central planning is regimented. Orders given, orders taken. Exchange in markets is competitive. You fleece me or I fleece you. Market prices reflect bargaining power. Market exchange is an alienated, mis-directed process. In contrast, exchange in participatory economics is cooperatively negotiated. We produce together. We exchange to mutual benefit.

Second, He finds a more succinct way to express the somewhat cumbersome phrase “duration, intensity, and onerousness…,” a phrase used often throughout the book.  Here, he uses the phrase, “effort and sacrifice,” which could put the idea across well enough in most contexts. (I feel somewhat petty mentioning this, but a bit more attention to style might help the cause.)

Toward that end, I want to share a couple passages that encapsulate Albert’s ideas especially well. First, one that lists the five core components of participatory economic vision: “a Commons of productive assets, workers and consumers self-managing councils, balanced job complexes, equitable remuneration, and participatory planning.” Second, one that states Albert’s reason to advocate this vision – that it is: “an approach to economic production, consumption, and allocation that will foster sentiments, aspirations, choices, behaviors, and outcomes consistent with the best human potentials I can imagine achieving in the next stage of economic history.”

from Capital & Main

No Bosses, Part 6

Last Friday sitting in our favorite bar, another young friend asked Orin and me what we’d felt like during the Cuban missile crisis. No need to wonder what he was thinking about! Instead of consoling – for who can? – I spoke angrily about these powerful leaders keeping the world in hostage, “scared to death.” He replied, “I’m not so much scared to death as scared of dying.” Well, okay. It’s human to be scared of dying. But here’s where passion for comes in. There’s more to our humanity than either being scared or trying to deny we’re scared. Can we now consent to joy, heeding the Muse, fire of our aliveness, such that we no longer can cooperate with her banishment?

- Kim Domenico, “Without Our Passion We Shall Overcome Nothing”

I thought the above paragraph from Domenico’s recent article on “passion for” vs. “passion against” would set a good tone for this entry on the overlap between Michael Albert’s economic vision and that of other social spheres he regards as primary. As I mentioned in my last post, Chapter 8 of No Bosses covers (among other things) these realms – three spheres that constitute the idea that its author had conceived with economics professor Robin Hanel – complementary holism.

Complementary Holism
from Real Utopia

The author begins with a short passage on the Political Sphere. Here, Albert endorses “participatory polity,” the concept of political science professor Stephen Shalom. Shalom first expressed this concept in the 2003 article, ParPolity: Political Vision for a Good Society. For those who want to pursue a more updated version of ParPolity I also attach an interview Shalom gave, published on the Real Utopia website (linked above.) Among the ideas expressed in the chapter and articles is a political entity “built on neighborhood assemblies plus encompassing levels of federated assemblies,” through a system that Shalom calls, “nested councils.”

This chapter promotes the work of other participatory thinkers for each of the other spheres. For the kinship sphere, the author refers to the work of Lydia Sargent, Cynthia Peters, and Savvina Chowdhury; and for culture/community, that of Justin Podur. I’d recommend for those who want more information on these realms and their interaction to obtain a copy of No Bosses to get Albert’s ideas or to research the work of his aforementioned colleagues. I just want to provide my own take on one subject: art.

Our book alludes to the reservation of painter Jerry Fresia (a reservation well expressed in this article) that “Art [is] accomplished to express self, find self, understand self, and enlarge self. From these transforming desires there arise some artistic concerns about participatory economics.” Albert answers, among other things, that,

…participatory economics strives to make all work involve experiencing the wonder of engagement and the freedom and enjoyment of collective self-management. It strives to make all work involve the insight and learning that comes from expressive activity. But it also strives to make all work involve the pleasure and sociality of aiding others’ well-being. It isn’t that cleaning a research lab, an assembly area, a dance floor, a film studio, or a painting room is made entirely non-boring, much less entirely expressive. It is that self-managed work freely chosen to fulfill oneself and others – and not to fulfill just oneself or just others – is not work as we have known it.

Although agreeing with the spirit of Albert’s reply, I would add a new dimension to “social value” as this book expresses it – That of The Great Conversation. I think the below words of T. S. Eliot (words worth repeating from the above-linked entry) express my vision:

No … artist … has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.

This paragraph is somewhat mystical, and merits its own series. Luckily, I have been inspired toward that path already, and I’ll return to it after finishing my summary of Albert’s book.

No Bosses, Part 5

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

― James Joyce, Ulysses

This section of No Bosses covers two chapters – one argues against the two most common (perhaps only, not including combinations of the two) forms of allocation, the next proposes Michael Albert’s own. The two he rejects are central planning and markets.

The author begins his argument by defining allocation as…

…the name economists give to how an economy determines relative worths of economic inputs and outputs, determines what and how much to produce, determines investments, and mediates what consumers receive from society’s product as individuals and as part of groups.

He rejects central planning as causing the same type of inequality that he described had developed in Argentina (a development we had covered in Part 3.) Central planning “would generate a corporate division of labor if the past didn’t provide it in full form,” creating a “coordinator class” that would “hold workers to the norms the central planners decide.” Such power would eventually get planners “to view those they administer as subservient.” They would accrue higher incomes and seek to justify them by rewarding others who have their “credentials” and do similar work, thus spreading the inequality throughout the system.

He rejects markets for basically the same reason he rejected market “solutions” in the last chapter we discussed. This chapter elaborates:

First,

Competition incentivizes that if I have a monopoly on information, skills, resources, equipment, venues, connections, or even on the inclination to rule, I have more bargaining power and I get more. … More, lacking such advantages, I seek them.

Second,

A workplace gets ahead at the expense of those it buys from, sells to, or dumps pollution on … My defense against your nasty is to be nastier. My alternative to being nastier is to be out competed. Markets punish cooperation. Markets foster anti-sociality [making us insular, ignorant, and selfish]. Workplaces gouge, dump, and downsize not only to profit immensely, but even just to stay afloat.

Third,

…markets explicitly produce dissatisfaction because only the dissatisfied buy again and again which is what market actors pursue to accrue income … advertising cons us into buying commodities to meet needs the commodities can never fulfill.

Fourth,

…markets bias heavily against collective and public consumption benefits even while they propel collective and public debits by routinely violating ecological balance, sustainability, and stewardship … pollution proliferate[s]. Public services atrophy.

Fifth, markets would eventually corrupt even self-managed councils of workers with balanced jobs. In the effort to compete, councils would hire “efficiency experts” who would oversee cost-cutting and other requirements. Workplaces would ultimately…

…insulate some employees from the discomfort that cost-cutting imposes and then also let and even cause those insulated actors to feel superior to other workers so the elevated few will propel competitive steps at the expense of the subordinated many but not at their own expense.

To introduce his own proposal, Albert’s next chapter offers another definition for allocation, one that might facilitate more creative thought. That is…

…the procedure that selects from a nearly infinite list of every conceivable item that might be produced using every conceivable combination of labor, tools, and resources, a single final list of what economic actors actually do produce and consume.

He calls his idea, “participatory planning. In this system,

…workers in different enterprises and industries, and consumers in different living units, neighborhoods, and regions, propose their joint endeavors in accord with revealed knowledge of one another’s needs and capacities. Councils revise their proposals as they discover more about the impact of their proposals on others and the impact of others’ proposals on themselves. Councils finally arrive at a plan for each new year, and cooperatively update and implement that plan as the year progresses.

No Bosses develops this idea elaborately throughout the chapter, taking great care to show how this can be done and how it would maintain the values and ideas it had developed in the earlier pages. To help councils conceive and enact plans, the author suggests the creation of a board composed of “people, a part of whose balanced job is to help tally and report data that informs allocation.” He calls this an “Iteration Facilitation Board.” He elaborates on the function of this board over the course of the chapter. For instance,

…at the outset of each yearly planning process the facilitation board announces what we call “Indicative prices” for all goods, resources, and categories of labor – in other words, for what goes into production or is available for consumption. Indicative prices literally means informed guesses or predictions of what prices will wind up as. Producers and consumers use indicative prices to guide their path of proposals and thereby arrive at final actual prices…

Through these iterations, neighborhood councils and individual workplaces create a feedback loop with wider federations. This chapter examines ways this process can work from first proposals through final yearly decisions, making changes as needed, including those for externalities. (Here, In a nice answer to Ludwig von Mises’ seminal libertarian essay, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” which we have criticized on this blog, Albert discusses cigarettes.) He also writes of investments:

…Essentially the rounds of back-and-forth procedure, which are called planning iterations, “whittle” excessive or enlarge insufficient proposals into a feasible plan in which what is offered by producers matches what is sought by consumers.Proposals for investments in new consumer products would most often originate in the national federation of consumer councils. Indeed, these councils would not only be intrinsically more closely in touch with consumer needs and ideas, they would also likely employ workers to do research to inform such proposals. Similarly proposals for investments in new tools for production or for simply producing more familiar tools would likely come from workplace councils and ultimately from the industry and national federation of workplace councils. And the federations, and perhaps each workplace, would likely also employ some workers to do research to inform such proposals.

The chapter covers various related ideas and issues. Among them are: social opportunity cost; the uses of numeric prices (such as in dealing with the cost of pollution); forms of updating (and the superiority of “loose” to “taut” plans); boards to facilitate adjustments without disrupting production plans; collective consumption, from subgroups for semi-personal allocations such as pools to hydroelectric dams that would call for relocation; how income should be allocated to various industries – from less onerous ones such as publishing to more onerous ones such mining (perhaps with extra for those which use old technology); and the forms of information (qualitative and quantitative) and communication necessary for the success of this type of economy.

A point it makes well, and often, about participation proportion is that, contrary to introducing “unnecessary complexity,” this system addresses “an actual complexity responsibly.”

The aforementioned procedures, acted on in light of the guiding societal values Albert lists at the beginning of the book, establish what he would count as “socially valued work.” He concludes the chapter asking his readers to choose between this allocation method and what the dictatorship of the prosperous/lucky has imposed on the world throughout most of recorded history.

I urge my readers to get a copy of the book for themselves, if possible. My only complaint about this chapter is that by this point, in which the author discusses society as a whole, I wanted it to bring the other three spheres of the author’s complementary holism into account. The next chapter, however, does discuss these spheres. I’ll cover this chapter soon.

No Bosses, Part 4

In his fifth chapter of No Bosses, Albert discusses who should receive what from the total goods and services a society produces. He frames this total as “society’s pie.” The author considers various (used and proposed) means for this distribution according to how they (do or would) promote or undermine the values we discussed in our first post of this series. He first argues against property-based income, as it …

…causes ceaseless class conflict over property-induced differences in wealth and power. It demolishes diversity by homogenizing each contending class. It subverts sustainability by giving centralized power an interest in exploiting nature to ceaselessly accumulate profits.

He next argues against income based on power itself (the dynamic behind a market-based economy.) Under this system, people “get more income if they are strong enough to take more. They … get less income if they are sufficiently weak to be given less.” The author gives various examples of where such power in markets usually comes, such as, from property, from a monopoly over information or skills, and from being white in a white-dominated society.

No Bosses argues against another form of power, distribution based on what each person contributes through her labor to “society’s pie,” asking what might cause differences in individuals’ ability to produce. The author points out that such a method would “reward only your luck in the genetic, equipment, workmate, or assigned product lottery.” He asks, “Is rewarding luck fair? Or does rewarding luck subvert fairness and our other values similarly to how rewarding property or bargaining power subverts them?”

Albert repeats the principle I gave in the first entry to this series, that under his system, “We get income … for the duration, intensity, and onerousness of our socially-valued work.” In this way, “the greater loss I endure due to my particular efforts [w]ould be offset by my getting more income for” them. As to the last part of his formulation, that the product of our remunerated work be socially valued, he refers to the idea of the Commons, adding to the natural and historical kinds, “what we might call a human commons in society … the accumulation of skills, knowledge, and talents held by humans.” What would most benefit society is what makes the best use of these commons.

The author next turns to how to implement this principle, though acknowledging that “what counts as socially-valued work has to wait as the answer depends on the economy’s method of allocation, a subject taken up in our next two chapters.” This chapter deals first with measuring the three endurance factors: “counting the hours a person works would be easy … Likewise, instances of significant difference in job onerousness would be modest, though perhaps this would arise with dealing with crises that arise.” For intensity, the author notes that “the precise methodology for allotting income inside workplaces among their workforce need not be the same from workplace to workplace.” He offers a general approach based on an “evaluation report” each worker could get, either …

…from their team or from their whole workplace or from just a committee established for the purpose where the report indicates the income they should receive to be used for consumption expenditures. This evaluation report might, for example indicate hours worked, intensity of work, and onerousness of conditions, yielding an overall “effort rating” in the form of a percentage multiplier. If the rating was one, the person’s remuneration would be the social average for the workplace. If that rating was 1.1, it would be a tenth more, if it was 0.9, it would be a tenth less. …

The book goes into much more detail here, but I think the foregoing gives a good idea of what it suggests. I’ll just record a couple qualifications that Albert makes: First, that “however different various [scoring] procedures might be, they could not lead to extreme income differentials since there could only be so much variation in [the principle’s three factors] in any event”; second, that his approach only covers particular workplaces in the entire system – he leaves many questions open for later parts of the book.

The chapter then deals with issues of incentive. The author first counters another Thatcherite argument – “that it wouldn’t be [a gain] to create an equitable society in which, however, no one was motivated to do any creative work that requires a lot of training, or for that matter, to be productive at anything.” He answers …

… that with equitable remuneration the economy’s incentives are just what they ought to be. Income earned for [the principle’s three factors] provides an incentive to work longer (but not so long that the loss of leisure outweighs the gain on income), harder (but not so hard that the losses due to exertion outweigh the gain in income), and, when need be, to complete really onerous tasks that prove necessary outside of balanced job complexes (but not when the pain due to the onerousness exceeds the benefits due to the gain in income).

In fact, No Bosses points out that motivations such as property and power will lead to those who gain these advantages to exploit others ever more aggressively, whereas payments for innate talents “have no useful incentive effect.” As far as equitable income reducing the desire for more creative or professional work, such as medicine or management, Albert asks whether the reader or anyone with a chance at free education for such jobs would prefer a rote and repetitive job, observing that “every student group, including those who are pre-med,” he has asked “would only switch if survival was in question.”

To the objection that any remuneration for effort might sully the motivation of altruism, No Bosses points out that those who refuse to take “more pay for longer hours in our current society … [usually make] way above average rates of payment” and feel uncomfortable taking “more for work they eagerly do.” In any case, the author sees no downside to a worker’s refusal to take extra remuneration.

The last motivation issue is that some who prefer more goods than average could “drift toward a longer work day, toward more intense labor, and toward worse working conditions.” Although acknowledging that this is possible, Albert asserts that that mainstream economists point out that “people are highly likely to want more leisure … rather than more stuff.” However, if I prefer the latter, in the proposed system, the “extra income would be warranted by my actions and if properly agreed and organized would have no ill effects on anyone else’s situation,” nor would this type of society encourage me to “drive myself to dissolution in a mad pursuit of additional income.”

The last objection the author covers in this chapter is encapsulated by Karl Marx’s famous slogan, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” After considering the possible meanings of this slogan, Albert concludes,

…it assumes a mechanism which conveys to each worker and consumer personal and system-wide information that allows them to make responsible choices without imposing class divisions, violating the ecology, enriching the few, or unnecessarily hurting anyone. Of course, the irony is that what can provide that, and was literally conceived to provide that, is …

…participatory planning, including the principle he has been expounding in this chapter. He notes various ways in which his proposal can advance solidarity, summarizing – “It will turn out to be that we cooperatively negotiate outcomes to enjoy gains and endure losses together, even as we also seek work and consumption that is best suited to our personal fulfillment.” He then promises to describe an “allocation mechanism, like our other proposed defining economic features, to produce solidarity and to make typical kinds of anti-sociality literally irrational while abetting equity and delivering collective self-management.”

The chapter ends by discussing how the new economy would handle free consumption. The author notes that although “individuals would not be expected to reduce their requests for other consumption activities because they consume free goods, … the average individual consumption per person will drop when society as a whole consumes more free goods,” since the potential used to produce them reduces the production of other items. He writes that, due to the aforementioned values upon which a participatory society is built, “particular consumption activities such as health care, education, or public parks may be deemed free to all.”  Guided by such values, the benefits of these activities are either “generalized, or [the costs are] universally apportioned rather than penalizing those in need.” On the same principle, a participatory society would provide for those who can’t work “for reasons of health, age, or whatever else may be the case.” Ultimately, “what items should be on the free list would be debated, presumably in consumer federations, but medical care is an obvious example.” Likewise, relevant consumer counsels would address particular requests, submitted with justification for the needed extra consumption, case by case, most likely spreading the costs over the population of the approving council .

Our next entry will cover the allocation chapters. Since this portion is long, this may take a bit of time.

“Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz)”, (1850–1853)
– Jean Francois Millet
From Wikipedia