The Institutional Imperative, Part 1

[Got my first really good night of sleep in a week today, so I'm finally back to blogging. Did y'all miss me?]

An institution is, loosely defined, a formal system for organizing human effort which has a permanent nature independent of the people who make it up. The reason for forming an institution is so that there is a centralized, legalistic authority which can make decisions necessary for completing the work the institution was established to do. Institutions are the traditional way of solving societal problems, from governing people and resources at the largest scales to running the local girl's hockey team.

However, as Clay Shirky so eloquently points out in this TED talk, institutions have a big problem. No matter what problem an institution is formed to solve, that problem is never the number one priority of the institution. Whatever the nominal prerogative of the institution is, its main priority from the moment it is actually formed becomes self-preservation. No matter what problem the institution sets out to solve, the institution can't work to address that problem if it no longer exists. It's that election-year mentality that says that it doesn't matter how poorly the incumbent governs because if they don't win, they won't get to govern at all.

This is what I call the institutional imperative. It is an inherent feature of any institutional organization. And it is the reason for a great deal of the problems in the world. It is responsible for the inhumanity of modern corporate capitalism, in which individuals are powerless to stop the cold financial logic of human exploitation and environmental destruction. It is likewise the feature which I believe is chiefly responsible for the counter-revolutionary fervor of the Soviet system and its descendants, whose inhuman slaughter of their own populations was truly inhuman.

Marxist Leninism, which seeks to destroy class distinctions and the State through a specific series of political events (which are, it should be noted, completely opposed to both the spirit and letter of Marxian Communism as an ideological system) is incredibly vulnerable to the prerogative because it is so blind to it on principle. Its very goal was to transfer all power into a single institution, the Communist State, so that it could be eliminated with a single blow once the proletariat was organized for self-sufficiency. What it tragically ignored was the intermediate step of getting power from the many varied institutions of contemporary society into the single Communist State. Because its nominal goal was the ultimate elimination of the State, it was ideologically impossible for Communism to admit that any state established by a Communist Party was going to suffer from the institutional imperative, and have as its first priority its own survival. More and more repressive measures were necessary to maintain the "revolutionary" government, because if it ever fell, they could never achieve the revolution.

This mad state of affairs was largely possible only because many people immediately assume that institutions are the only way to organize human labor, be it in a State, a corporation, a trade union, or a bureaucracy. In fact, this is assumed completely implicitly by most. People are almost never taught to consider the possibility that there are non-institutional solutions to societal problems. Although I will not go now into the alternatives, it should at least be recognized that there is such an assumption, that institutions have this feature which dictates a large chunk of their behavior, and that such behavior can be hugely destructive to humanity and the world.

Why Syndicalism

Everybody works. Or, at least, everybody works when artificial unemployment doesn't exist. And I say "everybody" because I always speak in hyperbole. In any case, the overwhelming majority of people seek work of some sort. Just recently, my mom lost her job, and instead of spending all day sitting on the couch watching Home & Garden television (which she could easily afford to do), she went and got a job that pays her barely anything. People want to be formally occupied by something they believe brings benefit to them and their family, or to society at large. This tendency takes various forms outside the capitalist structure of "employment". Artists create art regardless of whether they get paid for it. People who love cooking spend hours perfecting recipes for no one's enjoyment but their own. In a world that didn't care about "marketable skills" and didn't penalize risk-taking with destitution, people would be able to occupy themselves with whatever work they were naturally inclined to do.

In a capitalist society, where people must balance their desires against the demands of the market, many work jobs they do not enjoy, the most unpleasant of which are usually the lowest paying and most exploitative. Such people should, and historically often did, organize into guilds or unions to demand (and occasionally win) increases in wages, reduction in working hours, and improvements in working conditions. These unions are the perfect place to foment radicalism, since workers are the most exposed to the oppressive and exploitative nature of capitalism, and often suffer the most at the hands of the government once they organize. From a utopian perspective (by which I mean, from the point of view of an imagined future free society) such unions would constitute democratic worker councils in their respective industries, certifying members of professional groups and organizing allocation of work and resources. In the modern world, they are means of resisting capitalist exploitation and social oppression.

Not everyone, of course, is keen on resisting exploitation, because they do not see it as such. Particularly in America the myth (that is, the misunderstanding of economics and probability) that anyone can get rich tricks people into aligning their perceived interests with the capitalist class, and the illusion of democracy allows them to believe that the government exists to support them, rather than to support the capitalist system. They believe that fighting for their own, realistic, interests will jeopardize their chances of ascending the social or corporate ladder on the off chance they come up with the better mousetrap. The refusal to admit the existence of a sharp class division between workers on the one hand and owners and rulers on the other leads them to have disdain for anyone who recognizes, and fights against, it.

The disdain many people have for unions specifically is due to the essentially capitalist trades unions whose leaders often have more in common with the bosses than with the workers, and of course to the stain of Soviet Communism on the entire notion. (The Soviet Union was of course in no way communist, but is rather State Capitalist to the core.) When workers are divorced from the output of their labor, whether by capitalist profiteering or state mandates, the tendency to lose personal interest in their work is increased and reinforced, because the work is no longer theirs, either in methodology or results. To contrast, work done by democratically organized, voluntary worker collectives instills a sense of pride and ownership in the work which produces both better results and stronger communities. It is this aspect of union organizing which leads me to believe that syndicalism — that is, the organizing of the working class into unions based on industry or geography — is the most practicable way of achieving revolution.

Workers, who make up the vast majority of society, are shown the power of democratic organizing, the power of their numbers in the face of capitalist and government oppression, and the dignity and satisfaction to be found in controlling the product of their own labor. I will discuss in a future post why I think syndicalism is the best way of instilling revolutionary consciousness in the working class, but it is definitely not the simplest or most glamorous way. It involves working shitty jobs, taking large personal, financial and health risks, and seeing little progress or huge reversals in fortune. The main point is, though, that many workers do this every day without any political motivation anyway, and the addition of that motivation has been proven historically to be easier and more effective than the creation of entirely new, theory-motivated political organizations.