VIGDOR SCHREIBMAN, A STRUCTURE OF THE NEXT POLITICAL REVOLUTION:
The end of capitalism & triumph of democracy!
(Topics of Knowledge Organization, No. 4, July 4, 1998)
Topics of Knowledge Organization
By Vigdor Schreibman *
No 4.
A STRUCTURE OF THE NEXT POLITICAL REVOLUTION:
The end of capitalism & triumph of democracy!
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Our worthy ancestors have overthrown the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Church of heavenly Earth, the Feudal Lords and Monarchs of Europe, the slave plantations of America, Global Colonialists, Fascist Dictators of Western Europe, Latin America, South Africa, the Philippine Islands, Indonesia, and Japan, and the Communist Dictators of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. All fell by the unvanquishable power of the People! Now we await the imminent collapse of savage Capitalism, which is written in its self-destructive structure.
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The scheme for existence that evolved from prehistory brought forth: first, liberation of the spirit of humankind to "go forth"; and second, establishment of scientific knowledge as the basis for a valid worldview free from irrational religious dogma. However, the journey forth must be disciplined to be sustainable, we are not born free, as Benjamin R. Barber says:
In real life, as every parent knows, children are born fragile, born needy, born ignorant, born uninformed, born weak, born foolish, born dependent -- born in chains. We acquire our freedom over time, if at all. Embedded in families, clans, communities, and nations, we must learn to be free ... citizens have to be made. [21]
Moreover, knowledge itself, derived from science and technology can increase the power of organizations, divide the citizenry into haves and have-nots, and may be used to betray and destroy, or it may be used to bring us long life. But even in this regard, as Sigmond Freud acknowledged, "what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?" [22]
[...]
Critical analysis of the organizational requirements of a democratic system of governance was not even articulated until the early 20th century, when Mary Parker Follett wrote her classic book, "The New State" (1918) [31]. Follett, was one of the first management scientists [32]. Her work was ignored for much of this century but she is now regarded as a "prophet of management," by the foremost management authorities [33]. In The New State, Follett observed that "'Representative government,' party organization, majority rule, with all their excrescences, are dead wood." She also said this [34]:
We have not yet tried democracy. Party or "interests" govern us with some fiction of the "consent of the governed," which we say means democracy. We have not even a conception of what democracy means. That conception is yet to be forged out of the crude ore of life.... Direct government as at present generally understood is a mere phantom of democracy. Democracy is not a sum in addition. Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals. The question before the American people today is -- How is that genuine union to be attained, how is the true individual to be discovered?
The attainment of "genuine union," and discovery of the "true individual," Follett wrote, should be based upon the following ideas (among others):
* (D)emocracy transcends time and space, it can never be understood except as a spiritual force. Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations. Democracy is not worked out at the polling-booths; it is the bringing forth of a genuine collective will, one to which every single being must contribute the whole of his [or her] complex life, as one which every single being must express the whole of at one point. Thus the essence of democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization [35].
* The activity which produces the true individual is at the same time interweaving him [or her] and others into a real whole. A genuine whole has creative force.... The power of our corporations depends upon this capability of men [and women] to interknit themselves into such genuine relations that a new personality is thereby evolved. This is the "real personality" of modern legal theory [36].
* Individuality is the capacity for union. The measure of individuality is the depth and breath of true relation. I am an individual not as far as I am apart, but as far as I am a part of other men [and women]. Evil is nonrelation [37].
* We cannot, however, mould our lives each by himself; but within every individual is the power of joining himself [or herself] fundamentally and vitally to other lives, and out of this vital union comes the creative power. Revelation, if we want it to be continuous, must be through the community bond. No _individual_ can change the disorder and iniquity of this world. No chaotic _mass_ of men and women can do it. Conscious _group_ creation is to be the social and political force of the future [38].
* Representation is not the main fact of political life; the main concern of politics is _modes of association_. We do not want the rule of the many or the few; we must find that method of political procedure by which majority and minority ideas may be so closely interwoven that we are truly ruled by the will of the whole. We shall have democracy only when we learn to produce this will through group association -- when young men [and women] are no longer lectured to on democracy, but when they are made into the stuff of democracy [39].
The revolution in political structure espoused by Follett, placed the individual citizen at the center of authority (or workers in a position of shared authority with capital), as a means of making decisions of public and private organizations responsible to the whole society. This is the democratic alternative to the Madisonian formula for a strategically placed minority of property owners to assert primary political power, to serve mainly themselves (similar to the Soviet formula for rule from the top by command of raw power alone).
Follett's aspirations for an insurgent American democracy sought to strengthen the psychic bond between citizens, and thereby, provide a remedy for constraints on the volition of citizens, which have been imposed by capitalist propaganda. Within this system, "core beliefs are the product of a rigged, lopsided competition of ideas," as found by Yale professor of political economy Charles E. Lindblom, and other scholars [40].
Similarly, American sociologist James S. Coleman (1990) has described as, "a broadly perpetrated fiction" [41], the theory of free market capitalism, namely, the idea that economic transactions occur between individuals independent of social and ecological factors, which are disregarded by the market as mere "externalities." The game of disregarding such "externalities" allows capital to take a free ride on society, reaping maximum profit from transactions without consideration for the real costs, which are dumped on the society-at-large. In a democracy, political authority is exercised by "the will of the whole," not by the unilateral will of capital.
Full essay:
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