Creativity & Cooperation

I’ve been reading Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking which has elicited ideas regarding the concept of creativity & where that aligns with what Heidegger says. First let’s summarize the Discourse's ideas as I see it. Heidegger makes the point that there are two ways of thinking, the scientific way & the meditative way. The scientific way delves in facts & experience of physical presence, but doesn’t explore below the surface of reality. The meditative way looks deeper into the experience & the evidence to think about some underlying meaning behind the visible experience. These two ways of thinking & observing are part of being, but they also represent our subjective & voyeuristic observation of the world around us. Many choose merely to observe the surface of this world, to explore only what is available to the five senses without asking the more pertinent questions of why & how. They aren’t interested in implication or interpretation. Others want to explore the deeper comprehensions, to analyze these experiences & contemplate their implications in this world. These individuals become the synthesizers of the results of their analysis & meditation. They create beyond their experience. They will no longer seek to meet the expectations of others. This is what Emerson means by what he says in Self-Reliance: “that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion” and begin to plow his own field & reap his own harvest. This is the person who goes beyond the surface knowledge of understanding & the scientific knowledge to the deeper field under the surface, where the world will produce for those who till the soil. For those who simply see the soil as surface, as path, there is a limit to their harvest. It is the person who doesn’t simply exist, who doesn’t simply follow the example of others & find the job that pays the bills. It is the person who goes beyond, whether that beyond is profitable or not is not the point. If she can be self-reliant, then she can go where she likes. As I sat proctoring the mind-numbing Regents tests, I sat in meditation of the sort that I hope emulated the ideas that Heidegger was suggesting, that there was a horizon that had to be coaxed out with waiting, that if I simply existed while existence spoke to me, it would reveal at least for a moment what that meant. What that moment of existence became was the sound of violence, violence in the humming of the radiator & the electrical current, the violence of the scratching of pencils on paper or pages being turned, pages & paper that attacked the students, damaged them with the mirror to their ignorance & the education system that had developed that ignorance by dampening their flame of imagination, that had salted their fertile soil with meaningless & disconnected trivial information that had no connections to the things around them. Heidegger wanted to move people beyond the surface & into the violence that is often perpetrated upon them as they only look at the surface of their existence.

These tests inflicted punishment for the student's attempts to maintain their independence & creativity. It exposed them to the cruel world of quantification that values only measured results, that without quantification, their ideas & creations lack meaning, lack value. This is the core of the damage that has been done. This is the same damage that has quantified value into monetary value. The conflating of values with money leads to the place where everyone is measured by their monetary value to the system. Productivity becomes a quantifiable, monetary measure. Intelligence becomes a quantifiable, monetary measure. Individual thoughts only have value if they can be quantified by money. Look at how education level is valued only by the average salary that can be gained by pursuing the education level. This nullifies creativity unless creativity can be monetarily measured.

When we speak of creativity, it is necessary to discuss what creation involves. It involves taking the materials of the current world & compounding them into something new, something that hasn’t been on the earth before in the same form. How does this manifest? It manifests in the completed product, that may not be completely new (what really is new?) but new enough & unique enough to make it different from what has come before. It may not really do anything that impressive, but even using the waste of our current world to make a bottle opener is a start. Creativity may simply be producing a garden that wasn’t there before, or repairing a house to fit the needs of a family. These are creative acts that are self-reliant. This is the key to the creative necessity of life: creativity is a strong plank in the house of self-reliance. Self-reliance & cooperation nurture creativity. This creativity comes from necessity & innovation, innovation that seeks to solve problems with one’s own abilities. The more that someone attempts to create beyond their current abilities, the more they establish themselves in self-reliance. The more self-reliant they become the more creative they become, a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have seen individuals who have build their own homes from scratch by learning how to do it & then challenging themselves to accomplish the mission or goal they’ve set. This is the reason why cooperation requires self-reliant individuals, who don’t depend on others, but who recognize that sometimes cooperation yields benefits for a group of self-reliant individuals willing to cooperate to accomplish a larger task beyond the scope of even the most self-reliant individual’s capacity.

This is precisely what the Regents don't promote. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) won't promote this either. The education that prepares students to pass either of these tests won't develop students' creativity, self-reliance or cooperation. Where is the creativity in regurgitating trivia? Where is the creativity in writing essays that prevent individuality because the rubrics demand specific formation & content? How is self-reliance developed when the CCSS implies that if a student can't pass this test, he must not be capable of anything society might value? Where is the cooperative spirit? Only in conspiring to cheat on the test, which students across the country have demonstrated great imagination & cooperation to achieve. Power to their efforts!

Creativity comes from necessity, & the self-reliant individual meets necessity with innovation & creativity as much as determination & confidence. In fact, it is the failures & corrections of the failed behaviors & efforts that lead to the innovation & creativity that develops the increasingly self-reliant individual. This goes for any skill or activity. Cooperation amidst self-reliant individuals will be competitive in trying to be the individual who discovers or creates the successful innovation that benefits the group or solves the problem faced by  the community. These cooperative efforts can be seen in a basketball team. Everyone must learn to work together, to try new plays & rehearse the routine skills like dribbling & shooting & passing. The better & more adept that each member of the team becomes at using these routine skills improves the deadliness of the team’s attack. The more they trust each other, the more they can push each other to innovate & create situations that exploit the enemy’s weakness. The more they compete with each other to be better & better, the more their competitiveness becomes a driving force against their opponents. In the individual the need to improve their skills becomes a competition with one’s self to achieve more than had been accomplished before.

Creativity has been usurped by the corporate world into the marketing/advertising realm. Many creative people become marketing specialists, creating the commercials & advertising that influences their fellow individuals. So much of creativity is being utilized to manipulate others rather than to create utility & innovation. Even when creativity begins as an honest attempt to make something new, it is often usurped by manipulation or the desire to manipulate.

Creation doesn’t have to be on the Picasso level, it can be as simple as creating a new way of doing something. Whether I’m working on my garden & making it not only functional but also individual & beautiful, I’m creating. When I’m establishing contacts & cooperation between disparate people or neighbors, I’m creating a network that wasn’t there before. We have this notion in the world that somehow creativity is the purview of artists only. Only those who have been ‘recognized’ and have ‘attention’ deserve the adjective, creative. This is a fallacy. There is creativity happening everywhere. The sooner society begins to recognize folk art & people’s arts, the sooner it destroys the notion that the only important art is that which comes from corporations or exists in museums. This is one of the ways that the value of art is put ahead of the value of productivity.

The same is true in athletics. There is no doubt that a great athlete has creativity in their discipline and mastery of their game, but should such an athlete be making outrageous salaries for that? Should they be crowned as something so special that we need to treat them as superior beings or classes?

Celebrity has been one of the greatest of the efforts at trying to demean the average person. Because he's not creative like Bobo here, he should be glad that he's getting anything in this world. What does he expect?

Are we to be satisfied with mediocrity? No. We shouldn’t be satisfied with mediocrity, but the way to dispel mediocrity from our lives is not to shame those whose behavior has been mediocre, but to applaud every effort to rise above mediocrity. Rather than compete for the small pedestal that recognizes only one or a few as being worthy, why not work to make everyone worthy? Why do we feel that if others succeed it lessens our success? Why do we think that if everyone were capable of independence that would somehow infringe on our independence? This is the error in judgement that leads to the ‘zero-sum game’ mentality of the current culture. In a cooperative society, the zero-sum game would have no place. Instead of the mentality that I only win if others lose, the mentality would become (not initially be, but become) 'as everyone gets better, the situation gets better'. Another way of thinking about this is to compare it to the open-source programming versus the Microsoft/Apple nexus of corporate control of source programming. The Linux software becomes better & better as more & more individuals contribute to the programs, which means that many bugs in programming get worked out by everyone to the benefit of everyone. In the corporate model, we must wait for the ‘Genius’ to come along and save us. We are dependent on the ‘Genius’ to solve the problem, leaving us at their mercy & in their ‘debt’.

Cooperation versus competition leads to more not less creativity.

The Temporary Nature of Cooperation

Rotation is the means to temporary authority, but the purpose of temporary authority is more than just prevention of usurpation or permanent hierarchical structures. Instead temporary also defines the length of the actual authority itself. Most collective actions should be temporary as a rule, self-eliminating when the need no longer exists. The best example that I have to support this would be the modern union. Collective bargaining is a necessity for workers in a capitalist society, & the workers need to negotiate directly with the corporation as a collective for the power to negotiate as equals with the corporate power. Even a few hundred workers need an individual or a committee to represent them in negotiations. What often begins as a grassroots, cooperative effort among the workers, becomes a stepping stone or a position to gain power & prestige by collectivists who seek to control others for their personal gain using the "good of the whole" mantra.

In the earliest efforts of union-building toward collective bargaining, the grassroots efforts had leaders & individuals who pressed the majority toward the necessary steps to make the collective bargaining effort possible. Again, let’s differentiate between collective action & collectivism. Getting together to watch a movie is a collective action. Workers joining together to demand better pay, working conditions, respect is a collective action. They are not collectivism necessarily. If the individuals get together & support what is ‘best for the whole group’ because they are told to do so, then willingly sacrifice some individuals to the whole, that is collectivism. If workers begin to offer up some members of the union as sacrifices for the good of the whole, say let’s give the corporation power to fire the older/younger workers so that the whole group gets a pay raise, this is collectivism.

This is the problem with the current unionism in this country. For the most part, the leaders tend to protect certain constituencies within the union that are either the most vocal or the largest in numbers. Unions become part of the hierarchy of the corporate world, standing between the workers & the corporate executives. This role, which appears as one of protection, becomes a place of power maintained by coercion & propaganda. The head of the union almost always doles out prized positions in the union structure that provide it with vocal supporters & useful idiots. Both protect & support the union leadership. The union leadership has to find justification for its existence when the collective bargaining process has ended. They generally get heavily into political efforts to elect candidates that they ‘evaluate’ as being ‘pro-union’ or ‘pro-worker’. They promote the union as benevolent & philanthropic. They provide the legal advice regarding due process & work to keep teachers from being fired unfairly or ‘not by the contract’. They also spend time promoting the union process to the membership, demonstrating why the union dues must be collected & why these dues are so important to the good of the whole. This occurs because workers within the union are led to believe that the union must be protected over everything else, that any attack on the union was an attack on them, & that they must be ready to sacrifice for the union.

I’m not well-educated on the history of the UFT, but I’m fully aware of the UNITY faction & its control of the union hierarchy. First let’s point out that every district representative & all the leadership of the UFT are members of the UNITY Faction. The faction gives out those positions as rewards for loyalty & productivity. This gives the UNITY leadership great power to wield & determines that those in positions below remain loyal to the collective. Delegate Assemblies are blatant examples of this, where any proposal not approved by the UNITY faction will be voted down in lock-step fashion. UNITY uses collective mentality that guarantees that some membership will be sacrificed for the the good of the whole. Let me be fair: no other faction in the UFT has a platform for cooperative, consensus-based organization either.

First, there is always some segment of the membership that has to be sacrificed, currently the ATRs are the sacrificial lambs to the UNITY collective. The most outspoken & active segment of the union, as well as the ones most capable of putting in the time for activity & speaking are the retirees. The retirees hold sway currently. This has not always been the case. Now however, as the baby-boomer generation retires, they represent the largest segment. Demographics is one reason for their larger position, but the other is perhaps the most insidious part of the NCLB/RTTT Common Core examinpolooza that the reform movement is perpetrating against teachers. With each of their efforts to quantify education, as if an annual test could possibly quantify the education & knowledge of anyone on any more than a snapshot, the reformers seek to discredit collective bargaining & due process. More to the point as these younger teachers are attacked, it is the retirement segment that sacrifices new teachers & allows such damage to our contract as changing the process to receive tenure & allowing certification to be called ‘professional’, hiding the fact that professional means a re-certification process every five (5) years. The old ‘permanent’ certificate meant much more even if it didn’t sound as economically viable as ‘professional’. The 3-year period where teachers can be let go without the level of due process that longer serving teachers escaped is another sacrifice. New teachers face increasingly difficult standards to teach & prepare students for the mindless testing process known as Common Core. These sacrifices lead to lower retention rates for new teachers. UNITY tells teachers that they want the testing challenge as a way to quantify good work. Again, a year's worth of effort to educate a child cannot be quantified by a high-stakes test.

As to the reformers, let me end the idea that Bill Gates & his foundation have any honest desire to improve education: Where, in any of the ideas presented by the reform movement, is it suggested that computer programming should be taught from kindergarten? If they really wanted to prepare the American children for competing in the 21st century, that would be common sense (especially from a software ‘genius’). They should probably also be learning Chinese or some foreign language from that age as well. Instead, the reformers promote more testing that numbs the minds of students beyond repair.

Back to collectivism in unions, the leadership of any union will be controlled by a faction if it is allowed to become a permanent part of the community. The long-term goal should be to put those who put their work & effort into the production in control of the means of production. For that to happen, the workers would have to be cooperative & based completely on voluntary consent to the organizing of a collective bargaining union for negotiations. It won’t happen with the traditional hierarchical system that currently occupy unions.

As factions gain control, they work for the good of the individuals with the most clout. In the 1970s during the Brownsville/Ocean Hill conflict between the parent boards & the union, this became clear by the Jewish contingents ability to force the union to fight the will of the public & the parents. They took a very unpopular stance to protect something vital to the union (due process), but as a leadership they did it without consensus, without a process that demonstrated that the union leadership actually spoke as the whole union. It must have been a very difficult decision, one that shouldn’t have been made by a small committee. The committee might come up with the suggested decision, but ultimately the union should have to come to a consensus on what that decision would be. Perhaps they would have all recognized the good reason for standing against the parents, namely due process. Unfortunately the leadership made a decision which became a division between the union & the parents/public. This division still haunts the teaching profession, as hedge fund backed 'parent organizations'  exploit that divide. 

Ultimately in a consensus-based organization, the sharing with all members of the union might have brought out options that hadn’t been explored by the committee. Consensus unifies the individuals participating; they feel empowered. They feel informed, justified by the consensus of their peers, invested. These are reasons why consensus is preferable to democracy. While there is the ability to disagree with the majority in a democracy, it always creates riffs, riffs that allow those in charge to remain in charge (divide & conquer). Collectivism at work. Now if the union were temporary, only established when negotiations needed to occur, usurpation by collectivists would be less likely. In the case of cooperative-ownership (through the cooperative process) responsibilities & authorities would be rotated among the individuals & temporary by rotation. Again, a union doesn’t have to disappear in a cooperative, but until that is in place, it should disappear between contracts as an authority-wielding entity. The membership would need to be & would be informed & comprehending of the contract language (since they had given their consensus to the contract), so that advocacy (the bread & butter of the union hierarchy) remains at the individual level, only large violations require committees, which again can be filled by all individuals on a rotational basis. What this means is that a ‘permanent’ union becomes the cooperative of individuals actually owning the means of production. Until that happens by peaceful means, then the union must be a temporary union, brought together when necessary to negotiate or strike.

Temporary cooperative actions of a community would best serve the community. This is because the cooperative actions would have specific goals to reach or problems to solve. Once the problem has been solved or the goal reached, the need for the action disappears. In my previous post I mentioned the mythology of the barn raising cooperative efforts in the pioneering west. This is an example of a temporary cooperative action of a community. Once each member of the community had a barn, the organization would self-eliminate. As such, the need for cooperation would never be a permanent fixture like a union, a corporation, or a state. Instead, the cooperative process would simply be structured & modified to fit the temporary goal until the goal was met. Certainly the community could come together to evaluate the success & necessary improvements to the cooperative processes (evaluation being a part of the cooperative process). However few cooperatives need to be permanent. Individuals who cooperate to provide a service or product for the community might be permanent, but the leadership roles & responsibilities would be temporary. This means that the temporary nature of cooperation has two facets - temporary in goal orientation & temporary in responsibilities/authorities. 

Let me explain: the temporary goal orientation means that most cooperative actions don’t require a permanent or long term structure. Cooperative processes to reach a specific goal would be temporarily established to achieve the goal. Once the goal had been met, the need for the cooperative would be eliminated & therefore superfluous. This is one of the significant differences between cooperation & collectivism as I discussed in my previous blog post. So for instance if a cooperative community decided to establish more energy autonomy by installing solar panels onto all the roofs of the community, once the solar panels were installed, the need for the cooperative would vanish. Any necessary maintenance could be done by the self-reliant individuals who belong to the community. Since they had worked together to establish the solar panels, they would have received the necessary training to maintain the solar panels. If some permanent maintenance rotation needed to be established, this could be a cooperative of some of the individuals to provide that service, each individual sharing in the responsibilities & labor as well as the benefits of providing a service (i.e. charging a fee to those who are not part of the maintenance cooperative).

The argument is becoming stronger everyday that the local is going to be the way to get things done in this world. There is no simply occupying the current system: it’s crumbling. What we can do is stay out of the way of the ruin & survive the accompanying disaster, whether that disaster is war or just economic or environmental disaster. What will the future look like? I suppose that it will be much bleaker than today. I don’t have an especially positive attitude toward the future. In every direction I see strife & difficulties. As such I don’t know whether I’ll have a struggle with my fellow man or a struggle with nature. Neither will be pleasant, & both will not have great difficulties delivered randomly & meaninglessly. When does it begin? I hope that this continues to be a slow decline into epic fail, but I’m afraid that it won’t be like that.

Collectivism vs. Cooperation

I've been told that my cooperative processes sound like socialism or communism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Cooperation is not an ideology, like socialism or communism or capitalism for that matter. These ideologies are just collectivism in action. Cooperation is a process. A process that promotes voluntary consensus. Collectivism demands coercion to enforce the ideology of the collective.

What does it mean to act collectively? We do it all the time. A corporation is a collective. A football team is a collective. Much like other loaded language in the political arena, a collectivist has come to be equated with communism, nanny states, & totalitarianism. These are forms of collectivism, but they are not the only examples of collectivism. If we think of a collectivist mentality, it is one where the individual’s needs & rights are subordinate to the needs & authority of the collective. Take a football team where the coach yells to his players “sacrifice your body.” What is more collectivist than this? The military is the ultimate collectivist organization, teaching its recruits to literally die for the greater good. Besides taking the good of the whole as being more valuable than the good of the individual, the collectivist sees the world as an either-or dilemma: as George W. Bush’s famous quote after September 11th, “You’re either with us or against us”. This is collectivism at its core. Everyone must be coerced into the collective, or they become the enemy (those who refuse or resist the coercion). War is collectivism in action.

Propaganda is necessary to keep collectivism going. The corporate collective spends a great deal of time proving how the corporation is providing “value” to its shareholders, workers, & the public at large. If the workers don't continue to be more productive, then the company cannot continue to provide them with jobs: economic coercion. The state, the highest form of collectivism, always requires propaganda to support its abuses in the name of collectivism. The benefits of collectivism are coerced & unnaturally delivered. Let’s just take the fact that social security payments are taxed as income. The wealthiest individuals in this country will receive social security benefits that they don’t need, that wouldn’t sustain their ‘lifestyle’ for a day. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just let individuals keep their money & provide for their own social security? Not according to a collectivist. We are told by propaganda that social security protects the elderly from poverty & tragedy. Naturally poverty is real. Poverty should be eliminated, if such a thing is possible. However, after 80 years of social security, poverty has not been eliminated or even lessened. The only difference between then & now is that our poor can actually afford goods that don’t support them (TVs, cellphones, etc.). They still struggle to pay their rent, feed their family & themselves, and struggle to survive, even when holding more than one job with a collectivist corporation. Categorically the efforts of a state to maintain their collectivist paradigm means suffering for those coerced into the collective.

It is coercion even for those who think they support it. They have swallowed the propaganda of the collectivist that they are better off if the state is better off. The collectivist applauds the coercion of the police to enforce taxation & adherence to laws based on the superiority of the good of the collective over the individual. The collectivist mentality that is created by propaganda creates such lovely slogans as: “America, Love it or Leave it” or “If you don’t like America why don’t you leave?” or "If you don't want to be killed by the police, then submit to their demands." Now granted the individual can leave if they so choose, but the collectivist cannot accept much criticism of the state. Those who criticize eventually must be coerced into submission or relegated to the enemy status. Individuals can complain about the individual holding the authority at the time, if it isn’t a totalitarian state. That level of criticism boosts the argument of the collectivist that there is a democratic process & freedom of criticism. Still being able to complain because you don’t like George W. Bush or Barack Obama doesn’t exactly compare with critiquing the entire process. People become so caught up in the collectivist mentality that even elections become simply which collectivist to put in control. When I’ve admitted to voting for a third party candidate or a write in candidate (I used to vote for Bill the Cat every four years), I’ve been met with such expressions as “you’re just throwing your vote away” or “why even vote?”. This demonstrates the powerful ideology of collectivism at its worst: the winner-take-all mentality & the fallacy that one vote (yours) really matters. Elections in this country have a decidedly horse race mentality or for most Americans, a Superbowl mentality with playoffs (primaries) leading to the ultimate showdown between two collectivists who won’t significantly change the core system, just continue to infringe upon the individual rights of the people. 

Who is the worst president ever? The next one.

This is another layer of propaganda in collectivism, the cult of personality or the savior complex. Elections come down to one or two word slogans like: hope, change, dignity, progress. This is blather. This contradicts the idea of temporary authority in the cooperative process. Namely that any position of authority should not only be held temporarily, but that the whole position should be temporary to fit the current need. The cooperative mentality means that any authority position should eventually self-eliminate. A collectivist doesn't want the problem eliminated because that eliminates the need for the authority. The one thing that the collectivist needs to continue the collectivist project is a perpetuation of the problem. If the problem is solved, the need for the collective authority disappears. Take the case of what’s happened after September 11th, 2001. Americans had reached a disdain for the collectivist propaganda of intervention in the affairs of the rest of the world. Remember that George W. Bush claimed he wasn't interested in "nation-building" during his campaign. The old enemy of the Soviet Union & communist spread no longer frightened the masses. The collectivist needed a new justification for the continued intervention in the world to support the Military Industrial Collective. What a bonus that 19 hijackers flew planes into buildings & shifted Americans back to the interventionist mentality from their isolationist leanings. Since that horrific day, the collectivists have managed to pump people across the world full of fear. However the average individual is more likely to die from a car accident or disease than from a terrorist attack. The propaganda effort not only builds fear in the coerced membership of the various collectives, but it creates its own antithesis in a collective of those who have been labeled & declaimed as terrorists. I’m not making conspiracy theories here. I’m not claiming that the government or the state intentionally or deliberately created the ‘terrorists’. I’m saying that identifying an enemy, an antithesis to the collective will, is innate in collectivist thinking. It isn’t deliberate: its the ideology. The collectivist 'creates' the enemy by coercion to ideology. Those who reject or renounce the ideology become the 'facts on the ground' enemy. The collectivist goal is always to confront a physical or an ideological enemy. Note how our country is now inflamed in the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, & we even spent a decade on the War on Poverty, which some collectivists want to re-escalate. So a collectivist mentality, by those who adhere to the ideology of collectivism, finds justification for any and all collectivism.

Now cooperation can be seen as a collective action. Any time individuals get together & work for a common goal, it can be called a collective action. However cooperative process is not based on a collectivist mentality. Individuals can come together voluntarily to solve a particular dilemma without having to create a collectivist organization. Individuals who act cooperatively will not form a collectivist mentality that the good of the whole is more important than the good of the individual. The first difference between the two organizations is the voluntary vs. coercive nature of these organizations. A collectivist mentality requires membership of all. No one is exempted. While some collectivists will volunteer, the majority will be coerced. In a cooperative process, volunteers are free to join or leave at their volition. The cooperative process works through consensus to benefit the individuals in the cooperative. If an individual doesn’t see the benefit, that individual doesn’t have to participate.

Whether it is a myth or a reality, the shared cooperative activity of barn building on the prairie is an example of cooperative action. Each family recognized the difficulty of building a barn alone, & so the families voluntarily came together to build each others barns. Once the barns were build the cooperative organization disappeared. Families could choose not to participate, but they didn’t benefit from the cooperative effort. The cooperative organization didn’t force the membership to build barns for people who didn’t want one or didn’t participate in the cooperative. For that matter, the individual family probably might have left the cooperative effort after their barn was built & not helped with other barns without being coerced to participate. They would have been denounced & probably wouldn’t have been popular. I don’t think this happened often because most people recognize innately the benefit of cooperation & choose to participate rather than take advantage. There will always be some individuals who seek advantage without toil, but they will be ostracized by self-reliant individuals & will probably not be asked to participate in future cooperative efforts. According to the mythology of the pioneering era, the barn raising was a social event with celebration & camaraderie, yet another motivation for individuals to participate. While the men built the barn, the women prepared a huge meal (I acknowledge the patriarchal hierarchy & don’t wish to perpetuate it, just describing the mythology’s plot). Why do I continue to describe this as a mythology? For the most part, I get this imagery from various movies, TV series & literature where these activities are portrayed. I don’t have primary documentation that they ever occurred, but whether they did or didn’t, the behavior is consistent with what I’m describing as cooperative action rather than collectivism. Self-reliant individuals cooperating to achieve what is difficult to achieve as individuals alone isn’t the same as an authority deciding that everyone must come together & build barns for the ‘good of all’.

If I think back to my experience with PAUSE (Palestine Action, Union Square East), I can see the cooperative model working consistently. A completely anarchistic operation from the beginning, the group never had leadership, never coerced people to belong or leave, never established any hierarchy. The only guidelines that received consensus were the times we agreed to meet on Saturdays. No one held any positions of authority, & no one was coerced into participating in a certain way. When there were disagreements about the materials or the speech that some individuals used, the group as a whole got together & developed a consensus that all agreed to follow. Violations were met by other members speaking to the infractions. We decided what was acceptable to discuss & what wasn’t pertinent to the cause. Once we had agreed that the cause was informing the public on the Israeli occupation & American financial, military & diplomatic support for that occupation, the determination of what language or presentation was acceptable was always based on these goals. If the particular language or presentation didn’t promote the goal, then the language wasn’t used at least at that setting by consensus. For years, we were held together by the violent, hateful responses to our weekly protests by Zionists, Israeli apologists, uninformed Americans who believed otherwise, & religious zealots who couldn’t see beyond their religion. It often drove them nuts when they asked to speak with the leadership that didn't exist. We had to provide security for each other, but the main way this was flexed was by massing around the individual being aggressive & not allowing them to continue. Rarely did we have to use defensive force, but on those occasions, we stood together. Individuals who didn’t take action were shunned & shamed by the rest of the members. They weren’t coerced into leaving, but they weren’t made to feel as welcome (ignoring them was the common demonstration of disapproval). As we gained a stronger foothold & a better presentation, the strength of the protest began to make the opposition from the aforementioned groups less prevalent & less distracting. Slowly we overcame any opposition except for what we began to refer to as ‘drive-bys’, a snarky comment shouted as they walked by. Fewer and fewer antagonists stopped to argue or agress. We reached a point where the protest became what Saul Alinsky calls a “drag”. It became a ritual & not a productive use of our time. On top of that, bigoted individuals within the cooperative began to spew ridiculous statements & refused to agree that these statements were not in service to the goal, bringing an end to the cooperative consensus. Their continued obstinacy in the face of objection from the rest of the group led most people to stop participating, demonstrating again the voluntary quality of the cooperative organization. When it no longer matched individual goals & values, individuals voluntarily left rather than participate or be attached to the changes in the group. It came apart just as organically as it formed. Many of the individuals have stayed in contact but no longer attempt to protest for a Free Palestine together at Union Square. The best part of being involved in this action was learning about anarchic methods & process, meeting some of the most amazing individuals I’ve ever met, & interesting me in more cooperative, anarchic organization & process.

In summary, the collectivist adheres to an ideology, the ideology that the good of the whole supersedes the good of the individual. Coercion & brute force demand the acceptance & participation of the collectivist community. A process of cooperation is not an ideology & doesn't use coercion. Rather cooperation is a process, a process that has few defining elements other than individual volition & consensus. When these two elements work together, a cooperative process starts. Where it leads is up to the volition & consensus of the self-reliant individuals who work together. I'm not claiming that cooperative process will replace the state with a new form of governance. Rather, cooperation is process that works at local levels. Cooperation is grassroots action that doesn't get usurped by collectivist leadership who only want to establish a new hierarchy under their 'leadership'.

Rotational Process in Cooperative Organizations

As was discussed in the previous post, the rotation of authority among members lessens the risk of usurpation, but it doesn’t eliminate it. Nothing will eliminate the risk of usurpation by individuals with miscreant intentions. However the rotation of authority & responsibility does lessen that risk. Another way that it lessens that risk also provides an additional benefit: increased expertise & capability across the membership. Since the various positions of authority or responsibility are shared & rotated among all the membership, the strength of the organization is only as strong as its weakest link. The value of rotating these positions is that even the weakest link becomes stronger with more practice & exposure to the responsibilities of the role. People can learn to be competent in a wide variety of areas. Could everyone learn to fly an airplane? The vast majority could if given the training & experience. There will always be members of the human race who lack certain cognitive ability, & a cooperative society would have to find roles for them that they can hold responsibly without feeling denigrated or denied. Each of us has limitations, some more drastic & complicated than others, but each has limitations. These limitations shouldn’t be seen as negatives however. A cooperative society would find ways to accentuate & utilize these individuals for their strengths rather than denying them based on their limitations. While a blind person shouldn’t be flying an airplane or driving a car (at least until these machines can be driven without needing to see), they can hold other roles within a society.

Rotating positions of authority & responsibility will provide the education & improvement of each member of the cooperative community. While some positions will require expertise in order to fulfill, the goal will be to spread that expertise across the community. Obscuring & occulting knowledge has been a real source of power in human society since the earliest civilizations. A cooperative society would despise such occulted knowledge & monopolized expertise. A society that seeks to improve itself will look to having all members of the society well-versed in all areas of expertise & responsibility. Why would they seek this? Competency across the community means that no necessary task is limited to a small group of individuals, but can be performed by most if not all of the community. This prevents problems when & if the expert becomes incapacitated for any reason. Beyond that, the community develops and improves on these tasks & responsibilities as competency grows. As the community becomes more fluent in a particular skill or task, individuals will begin to find ways to improve or innovate. The more individuals know about a body of knowledge the more that their individual experience & cognition will absorb and critique the way that the body of knowledge is being used. An example of cooperation with a body of knowledge shared & transparent would be the open-source programming community. Cooperation across disciplines is a common, if not necessarily commonly practiced, tenet of education. Students learn best when they see connections between the various disciplines. The same would be true in a cooperative society. Those with mechanical & structural skills will see the same problem with different eyes than the analytical & logistical minds. This will lead to innovation & evolution of the process to be more efficient & productive.

The rotational process also develops the new members of the community. Whether an individual decides to voluntarily join the cooperative community or the children of the community mature & become ready to hold positions of increasing responsibility, the rotational process acts as an apprenticeship for learning the procedures & skills necessary to hold and deliver the responsibilities of a certain position. As individuals matriculate through the rotational process, they receive the approval of the community to hold particular authority individually rather than as an apprentice. Whether the skills are managerial or leadership oriented or skill-based and artisan, the individual develops a competency that the community recognizes & rewards with the responsibility. The desire to be recognized & rewarded with increased responsibility is a motivation to improve one’s abilities & knowledge, perhaps more so than monetary compensation. That’s not to say that a cooperative society might choose to compensate individuals with higher levels of expertise & responsibility. A cooperative society would not deny any individual the opportunity to hold those higher compensation positions. The more individuals who had the expertise, the more individuals who could receive that compensation. If it came to a point where everyone had the competency, then either the competency no longer needs to be rewarded, or the opportunity to be rewarded is rotated among all the membership. This goes to the level of desire & motivation of the individual members of the cooperative. This sharing of responsibility & reward wouldn’t inhibit competition, but it would make competition fairer, without the monopolization of occulted knowledge. Let’s take the example of a cooperative ballet troupe. Instead of one or two individuals being the lead ballerina, the position would be rotated among all competent members of the group. Rather than a popularity contest or who knows who, who’s sleeping with whom, the competition for the position would rely on skill & ability to fulfill all the moves of the particular dance. If only two or three of the members of the troupe can accomplish the dance with competence, then the rotation is between those three. However the opportunity holds that any other member of the troupe can demonstrate competency & be brought into the rotation. The troupe’s membership would come to consensus on what these competencies would be. Anyone who has worked in the arts knows that many of the decisions about who will be exalted often have more to do with popularity or courtier-like behavior towards the arbiters of exaltation. Would rotating the lead role of a ballet stifle competition & stagnate the learning? Some would say that it would as the incentive to hold the role would be diminished because someone couldn’t hold it alone. That seems absurd. In healthy competition where the end result is not a zero-sum result (either I hold the role or someone else will), the healthy competition is to improve to a point where fewer & fewer can master the competency. As the skills become more & more difficult, fewer will be able to meet the standards, so the competition is to be among those who can. Perhaps even in a cooperative, there may only be one ballerina who can perform a particular dance at the highest level, but eventually there will be others who by aspiring to the role will achieve the competence. The cooperative individual will not be against sharing the lead position.

Naturally for any cooperative organization or community to flourish, it will require a changing mentality & attitude toward competition & sharing of knowledge. As long as individuals can benefit from occulting information & preventing others from exploiting the knowledge as well, the cooperative organization will struggle to grow. Never-the-less we also know that this monopolization of knowledge & expertise creates a society that is inherently unjust, divisive & destructive. The goal of a cooperative effort is to eliminate these qualities of the current system-in-place that prevent humanity from evolving & solving the complex & immense problems that humanity faces in the 21st century. Rotational processes would attempt to circumnavigate the monopolization of knowledge & skill for power toward a more just and humane competition of ideas. A competition to improve the lot of all rather than the lot of a few.

Rotational Authority

The dangerous situation developing between Mayor de Blasio & the NYPD provides an opportunity to explain why authority should be rotational to improve accountability. The behavior of the police turning their backs to the mayor in a hierarchical system is flagrantly insubordinate. I’ve thought quite a bit as a former Marine officer, how I would have handled such a situation if it had occurred under my watch. I’d have reacted the first time the NYPD turned their back on Mayor de Blasio in the hallway going to the slain officers’ bodies. My initial reaction was that I would never have walked through that hall with individuals who were behaving that way. I would have called the individual commanding the unit & demanded he/she clear the room of all those disrespectful & insubordinate individuals. I would have also demanded the names of each of the individuals & ordered them into my office the next day for an individual interview, where after having their time to air their grievances implied by that behavior, I would have dressed them down. The individuals were not only disrespecting Mr. de Blasio & the office of the mayor, but more to the point, the citizens of the city of New York. I would have made that clear to each individual & to the public. It would be important to punish any of the members of the unit who didn’t recognize their error. That is how a hierarchical leader would have to approach such a situation. In order to maintain the authority, the hierarch must punish insubordination without impunity. In a hierarchical system, without the position of authority respected, the authority loses its power to control, creating a vacuum that will be filled by someone who will maintain the authority. This is one inherent problem with hierarchical forms of authority.

Let’s establish what a police force actually does: provide security for the community. Security from external & internal threats. Threats aimed at the citizen & the citizen’s property. In a hierarchical system the leader of the community (i.e. the mayor) maintains & directs the actions of the police to provide that security. The mayor has been chosen by a process that the community accepts or concedes. The mayor determines in conjunction with his police chief the needs of the police force to provide that security & budgets to implement that security system. The hierarchical system requires that those at the bottom of the hierarchy pay allegiance to those above. The opportunity for abuse becomes readily available, especially as the top of the hierarchy also establishes the parameters of what is considered ‘threats’. Because most laws that a hierarchical system establishes are to prevent or deter threats to ‘person & property’, they are open to misuse. As we have seen post 9-11, ‘threats’ are established by the hierarchical elite to protect their position & authority, not to protect the citizens & the citizen’s property, even if this is what is claimed. The failed drug wars (drugs are the threat) provides another example of how the hierarchical elite protects itself against the citizens it claims to protect. Taxes or the ‘threat’ of citizens not paying taxes created the situation that authorized the police to strangle Eric Garner. This is while ‘threats’ to the rights of citizens are downplayed & denied in order to protect the same citizens from ‘threats’ perceived or created (tax evasion as a justification for deadly force). The hierarchical system of authority doesn’t provide a protection to those at the bottom of the hierarchy from abuse by the top echelon. That is the difference between a hierarchical system & a cooperative system. One way that the cooperative organization differs would be the use of rotation.

The goals & basic structure of a cooperative system to provide security would not be significantly different. Patrols of the area would be necessary, tools to provide the security would have to be provided, & a hierarchy of leadership would have to be established. The difference would be in how that hierarchy was established & how the upper echelons were filled rather than chosen or taken.

Most proposed cooperative systems use the term ‘horizontal organization’. By this anarchists attempt to prevent a vertical (hierarchical) power structure from being established. If a system is horizontal, then there is no higher authority that wields power over the rest. A cooperative society would be based on such a system. So how can that work for a community to provide security? Obviously, a hierarchy must be established for a security force to provide the protection the community needs. An horizontal organizational structure doesn’t eliminate hierarchical positions of authority completely, but it changes the method by which those positions are assigned and held by making the assignment temporary & rotational. Temporary authority would limit the possibility of usurpation & corruption of a position of authority as important as security, but it can’t do it alone. I’ll discuss temporary in future posts. The other necessary ingredient is rotation. The importance of the rotation cannot be negated. By rotating, the cooperative not only prevents an usurping of the power of the authority established in a security collective action, but it improves the quality of each member of the cooperative to provide that security. As each member must hold the role at some time or other, it behooves  everyone in the collective to ensure that each individual is properly trained & prepared to successfully fulfill the responsibility of security for the collective. My personal experience in the Marines demonstrated that even the weakest link in a collective chain can be held to standards acceptable to the collective’s needs. Further, the collective can then hold the individual accountable when they don’t fulfill their responsibility or duties. So in a cooperative, the security details would be established on a rotating basis of guards, patrols, & officer of the day. Each would have specific tasks to accomplish during their tour of duty (authority). The tour of duty could be on a 24 hour basis. With this in mind, the position of even mayor could be rotated on a regular basis, daily, weekly, whatever the cooperative membership decided. The rotation of this authority would put some weak individuals into the position & some corrupt individuals as well. Both could be held accountable to improve or change. At worst an individual who decides to usurp the power to a dangerous level would have to be confronted immediately by the cooperative community as a whole. This would be easier to do in a rotational basis, since the usurping individual would have less time or opportunity to develop subordinates who would aid in his usurpation. A mixture of leadership skills throughout the organization's structure would help to prevent this. The basic guideline of responsibility would have to be that no unlawful order should be ever followed by those in subordinate roles. Knowing that they won’t be in that role permanently or that any move up the hierarchy is not dependent on following the orders of those above without question would give most individuals the strength to challenge unlawful orders.

There are many strengths to the rotational organization that I want to discuss in future posts, but the most important is that rotation provides a barrier to usurpation. Without self-reliant individuals comprising at least a potent minority within the community, it would be a difficult barrier to maintain, especially after the first failure of the system to provide adequate security offering the opportunist a chance to sway minds that the opportunist could do a better job than the cooperative/rotational method. However, as we’ve seen with the rising movement around the police state, attempts to usurp the leadership role of the movement have generally failed because there are enough individuals within the movement who speak loudly and forcefully against individual leadership roles (note the backlash to Oprah's comments about the need for leadership). I hope that the skeptical attitude toward individual leadership will continue because that will only strengthen each member of the movement to be self-reliant and cognizant of their own power to promote and propel the movement through cooperative not hierarchical organization.