Caustic Ramblings

Good question. Now let's try a little thought experiment.

A "classical guild" today might be something as simple as a group of business owners and independent contractors (i.e. freelancers) who work in the same field getting together to promote their common interests and increase their collective presence and reputation, in addition to providing a mechanism of mutual protection against unscrupulous and/or exploitative software development businesses that operate in their locale.

So how would this work? For example, if ten software developers, each specializing in a different aspect or sub-disciplines of software development, get together under one brand/banner and use their combined efforts to create a recognizable local presence and get a more business in the aggregate than the sum total of what each member would be getting all alone as individual contractors. Each member-owner of this guild remains a business owner and thus not employees of and one big boss who makes decisions for them or tells them what to do. Of course the member-owners would have to have regular meetings and arrive at collective decisions each member would have to adhere to, but this would be a relationship of equals rather than the usual employer/employee dynamic. And let's say this guild becomes prosperous enough whereby they can now afford a physical office location to be based out of; they are now able to (if they so wish) to take on trainees/apprentices who wish to learn the trade in addition to each owner-member hiring employees to help out with administrative tasks they don't themselves have the time to do. If an apprentice proves himself to be sufficiently skilled or competent enough at the trade then the member-owner they studied under might then promote him to an associate and pay him a regular wage or salary for the work he does.

This is just the very basics of how this might work. But already we see a business concept that could be vastly superior to the standard corporate model. In this hypothetical association, each constituent member-owner possesses intimate knowledge and expertise of the craft they practice and thus the technical decisions they make are generally going to be decisions borne out of competence. Contrast this with a standard business where there is a good chance the company owner or chief executive might not have any actual technical expertise of his own with regard to the core product the business offers. And yet that owner or executive might be earning magnitudes more money than the technical experts they rely upon for the business to actually function. As with so many corporations today, those in high positions with administrative and managerial skillsets and experience earn disproportionately more than technical experts. Of course those administrative, managerial and "deal-making" skills are greatly needed, but in a guild system, these skills might function alongside rather than soar sky-high over the other critical disciplines which keep the business thriving.

Great summary on this colossally stupid idea [Marx's Labor Theory of Value] that just can't seem to die. From Z:

The idea is garbage. It's a waste of time. If I paint something and it takes me eight weeks to paint it and complete it, should it be worth the same as something that Da Vinci painted in an eight week span, when we used the same materials? Well, no. Because my painting would not be nearly as great. He might have used the same amount of labor as I did, but his product is undoubtedly superior. The Labor Theory of Value completely ignores the quality of the product. I won't pay an apprentice plumber at the same rate as I'd pay a master plumber - because the master plumber would do the job in a shorter amount of time and with a greater success rate. He shouldn't earn less because he is more capable. To the contrary, he should earn significantly more because he is competent.

This same criticism of Marxism can be made all over. People are individually different. They have different skill sets, and each of them will produce a different quantity or quality of something in a different amount of time. To ignore this is to ignore the fact that we are working with living beings. Marxism assumes that the individual is equal to any other individual in terms of capability. This is simple not true. Go look at some sports stats and it is clear as day. In 28 minutes Stephen Curry can score 47 points on 15/26 from the field, 8/14 from three, 9/9 from the free throw line, with 7 assists, 4 rebounds, 3 steals and two turnovers. In those same 28 minutes Lu Williams might score 26 points on 10/26 from the field, 3/9 from three, 3/4 from the free throw line, 0 assists, 4 rebounds, 0 steals, and four turnovers. Should these players labor be paid the same? They took the same amount of shots. Perhaps they possessed the ball for the same amount of time.

The fact is people are different. Some people are better at things than others. To ignore that is to be ignorant, and to ignore that on a large scale it to be self destructively ignorant. Supply and Demand is flawed, but it certainly is not this flawed. Because, at least with supply and demand, the people demanding get what they want at a price they are consentualy willing to pay and the people supplying are consenting to a price point that they too feel is far judging by the market. In a LToV "market", people have no idea what they will get, just how much work went into it. And, people have no reason to improve at what they're doing, because if they do they will not benefit from it.

Any ideology that blindly assumes that everyone is the same is plain evil and an affront to Natural Law. Nothing but terrible things happen from very the moment there is any serious effort to implement Socialism/Communism in the real world.

Distributim is a way of life, not some daydreaming visionary's a top-down grand scheme of how everyone else should live. It's a commitment to living local and within your means; a devotion to family and community; and a wholesale rejection of soulless consumerism and its twin, social atomization. Distributism is first and foremost about the home.

Here's how G.K. Chesterton envisioned this system:

The problem in the modern world is that the exceptions get all the attention. The generalizations get none. The exceptions have become the rule. It is now an exception for a woman to raise her own children. But [G.K.] Chesterton’s distributist ideal not only called for mothers to stay at home, it called for fathers to stay at home as well. The home-based business, the idea of self-sufficiency would not only make for stronger, healthier families, but a stronger, healthier society. If everything in a society is based on nurturing and strengthening and protecting the family, that society will survive centuries of storms. A home-based society is naturally and necessarily a local and de-centralized society. If the government is local, if the economy is local, then the culture is also local. What we call culture right now is neither local nor is it culture. It is an amorphous society based on the freeway off-ramp and tall glowing signs that all say the same thing. Convenience is our culture. We all convene at the convenience store, where we get our gas and our munchies and our magazine and we are careful not to look anyone in the eye, not even the Pakistani clerk who waves our credit card across the laser beam. This is a revealing snapshot of our fragmented society: passive, restless, shutter-eyed, lonely, not at home.

Though Chesterton would argue that a distributist society would be most fully realized if it were based on a Catholic worldview, he would not insist upon that basis as essential for achieving such a society. In fact, he would argue that such a society is more congenial to the different religions than any other societal plan. Freedom of religion, as it now supposedly exists under a huge centralized government, actually needs to be “enforced” by that government. The result, as we have seen, is that religion has actually been stifled where the government watchdog is there to “guarantee” the freedom. But local-based governments (supported by local-based economies) are more conducive to religious freedom because people of the same religion would naturally gravitate together. The main reason that people of the same religion tend to scatter in our society and that people of different religions tend to mix uncomfortably is that our society is not based on the home. It is based on the opportunities outside the home. The better jobs are always elsewhere. It is not their religion that makes people chose a place to live; it is their job. It is convenience. It is not philosophy.

Here the religious or spiritual community serves as the cultural glue for the people in a given locality who aspire to live the distributist ideal. A government-run program or plan is totally unnecessary for this to work. The only involvement with government would be the occasional necessity for the community to lobby local and municipal governments to ease up on any red tape or other cumbersome regulations which may hamper family and community-building and sustenance. Economics would be merely a matter of community members pooling resources and expertise together in order to accomplish common goals in a more efficient and socially-harmonious manner.

Distributism is an opt-in system. People who have no interest in anything related to distributism will of course always be free to have nothing to do with distributism; as long as we are blessed with a free society, people will be able to live their own lives in whatever lawful manner they see fit. In many ways distributism fulfills the libertarian ideal of independent, decentralized communities deciding their own fate and resisting coercion from distant, centralized and impersonal bureaucratic government authorities. The only real difference is that distributism avoids promoting the values of atomized individualism and treating people as soulless economic units. Again, distributist economics is mostly just a function of family and community maintenance; it's never an end unto itself.

A distributist economic network can easily be established in any typical urban, suburban or rural area. All it requires is a group of like-minded friends and acquaintances establishing a semi-formal trade network. A closed-access craigslist type of web page or app for swapping goods and skills would easily suffice as a beginner endeavor. Actually, these efforts already exist in many cities and towns across the US, but of course the way they are identified and publicized will vary according to differing ethical and ideological goals.

Just some notes I've been jotting down:

First off, we have to distinguish capitalism from a mere "free enterprise" system. The latter simply denotes the existence of a market economy. Whereas, Capitalism is a system whereby an investor class of Capitalists effectively run the entire economy; and by extension, the entire social order of the society in question.

1. The most obvious flaw of Capitalism is the fact that Capital always ends up grossly overcompensated, as compared to labor. Obviously, a certain degree of earnings inequality between the two is both just and natural. But a stable system cannot persist when Capital is earning many hundreds of times more than that of reasonably-skilled labor.

2. A Capitalist system produces an intellectual culture that has a tendency to reduce people to little more than soulless economic units; i.e. atomized individuals that have no purpose except to produce and consume goods and services. From the perspective of my own spiritual worldview (and anyone else who had a spiritual worldview), the Capitalist analysis of human affairs is hyper-materialist and anti-life; and it always ends up championing quantity over quality.

3. As mentioned above, Capitalism means that the Capitalists, the super-wealthy investor class, ends up calling the shots and running the show. Referring back to the Social Threefolding model I mentioned in the last few posts, this means that the Economic sphere ends up with a disproportionate degree of power, which makes the other two spheres (Politics and Culture) subordinate to the dictates and whims of the Economic powers. The Economic sphere is that which is most closely oriented toward Matter and thus the most distant from Spirit, of the three. The Culture sphere has the greatest potential to be the most infused with Spiritual qualities. Of course a debased Culture sphere will contain very little of that, but that overall pattern I above still stands. The ideal Political sphere is an intermingling of both Material and Spiritual concerns; a political system that's nothing more than an appendage of Capital, is wholly a slave of Material imperatives. And thus any system where the Economic sphere is the most powerful, is one which turns the people away from Spiritual aspirations. Such a system is "demonic" ... if we're to use such crude descriptors.

4. From the perspective of social class and personality type, Capitalism is a system where the Merchant/Producer/Vaishya order is the ruling class. In all traditional, metaphysics-based social doctrines, natural law dictates that the Merchant class should always be subordinate to both the Warrior and Priestly classes. If we're to look at this from the perspective of personality types, the Merchant class will be comprised largely of Hylic (matter-bound) and some Psychic (mixed) types, and entirely bereft of Pneumatic (Spiritual) people. And thus in Capitalism we get a social order run by people who are lacking in innate Spiritual facilities. Spiritually-oriented people must first and foremost prove their "worth" to the system on wholly materialist, quantity-based terms. The honor-seeking Warrior type must also serve the marketplace before all other concerns. In the Platonic schema, a society run by Capital is what Plato would have called Oligarchy, and thus we can say that Capitalists are a type of Oligarch. In The Republic, Plato calls the collective character temperament of the public under Oligarch rule, "Oligarchic Man." In many Hindu writings, a society where the lower orders are in charge is one that's in the dark age, or Kali Yuga.

5. Last but not least, I need to reiterate the quantity problem inherent in Capitalism. It's a system that, by-design, (1) demands infinite growth, (2) reduces human interactions to the state of mere exchange, and (3) promotes greed as a virtue (as opposed to the vice it is) above all others. On the growth problem, it's quite clear that the investors who own a Capitalist enterprise will always demand that the business keeps growing and growing and growing, and consuming more and more and more resources; and driving wages more and more and more downward, in a race-to-the-bottom sort of way. A Capitalist enterprise becomes a mindless eating machine. And because of this inherent expansionist nature, the most successful enterprise will actively work to snuff out any serious competition, often through buying up the weaker competitor. And thus what always results is a grand consolidation of like businesses into an ever-shrinking inventory of monolithic, monopolistic behemoths. When this process is nearly complete, we get the classical Oligarchy found in historical city-states, whereby a tiny clique of owners/investors colludes with one another to run the entire state and maintain their collective power in perpetuity. States like Sybaris, Carthage and Venice come to mind. However, in our modern system, we have complex systems of government intervention to mitigate the worst aspects of what I'm getting at here. Though government and the black-box credit system, we get boom/bust cycles in the modern age. The infinite growth never happens because too much growth always results in bubbles divorced from the reality of what consumer can actually afford; when supply (or simply hype) vastly outpaces demand, the whole thing goes bust.

6. As in later be talking about, decentralization is the only way to go if we're to avoid the pitfalls of both Capitalism and its false solution, Socialism. Distributism and Syndicalism (both are quite similar) will be alternatives I'll be looking at.

Interesting read:

"Most of our modern ideas suffer from being no more than breakfast cereal. Most of the energy and attraction in them is in the packaging. Inside there is very little substance. A lot of it is fried air with sugar-coating. There may be a few grains of truth, but not enough, not the whole truth. Yet the world feeds on these light and snappy ideas and on nothing else. The rest of the complete breakfast is completely missing. Even those ideas which are profound and practical for our world still suffer from incompleteness. We can have the right ideas about politics and economics, but life is more than politics and economics. The affliction of specialization is myopia. As specialists we are under the delusion that our small area of expertise informs us about everything else. We know more and more about less and less. Truth has been carefully compartmentalized. Colleges and universities have been carefully departmentalized. We are all specialists, and none of us are generalists, and there is no glue to hold all our fragmented truths together. There is thinking, but no thought, as in a complete understanding that is comprehensive and coherent.

G.K. Chesterton had a word for all the specialists of the modern world. It is a surprising word. A jarring word. The word is “heretics.” The problem is not that the specialist—or heretic—is wrong, but rather narrow and incomplete. The heretic is someone who has broken himself off from a wider view of the world. The heretic, says Chesterton, has locked himself in “the clean, well-lit prison of one idea.”1 Another way Chesterton puts it is that the heretic has one idea and has let it go to his head.2 It is a case where myopia leads to madness."

Personally, I dislike the words "Heretic" and "Hersey" given its historical connotations and the overall paradigm of ideological intolerance and sectarian exclusivism that these words are wrapped around. I see "deviation" as a more holistic way of explaining the concept above. Nonetheless, Chesterson was dead-on about the scourge of specialists and their endless specialties that has inflicted out modern age.