PART SEVEN: Reconstitution
CHAPTER XXV

AUTONOMY

Blocking the worldwide trend to taxocracy is, despite appearances, a task more difficult than raising up the poor countries and controlling militarism. The task begins in the soul, for taxocracy is the super-emotic drive for security and fixation above all else. It extends at the world level to subjugation through stratification, hierarchy, and bureaucracy.

The opposing principle to taxocracy is autonomous organization. An American revolutionary, Abbie Hoffman, put the proposition in two sentences: "Marxism is irrelevant to the U.S.A., a irrelevant as capitalism... The key to organizing an alternative society is to organize people around what they can do and more importantly around what they want to do."1

Whether we speak of great decisions of states or personal lives, the maximizing of group realization and responsible self-realization is important. This is the live and eternal element in nationalism; it is the vital core of capitalism; it is both the restraint upon and the means to the organization of the world and the individual, according to the kalotic ideals of human consensus.

The principle of autonomy is justified on two grounds. In the great variety of life situations, the participants are normally the ethical equals of persons coming upon the situation from the outside. In performing any activity called forth from the situation, those within are normally equal in ability to those outside. In other words, ethical and efficient superiority, the two advantages forever being asserted on behalf of centralization, are as much or more the product of autonomy.

Autonomy has behavioral features: creativity, distinctiveness, privacy, innovation, and decentralization. It has organizational features: consultation, representation, considerateness in human communication.2

The Scope of Self-Realization

In order to achieve autonomy, locally and universally, several axioms have to be followed:

Group planning ought to be spread more and more, by newly invented and sophisticated techniques, among all who are affected. Planning is in essence expanded and coordinated intelligence.3 Classical economists who say that the "free market plans for a society" are in an important sense correct: most people who are affected by the free market have some say in its operations. But the planning of the free market is not at all sufficient. We must always ask whether the best form of representative government is always this particular form, and it will be grasped immediately that the free market needs reform as a kind of representative government.

Planning is kalotic when it is consultative with its clientele and uses in day-to-day practice the mechanisms that are abundantly gathered under the name of representative government. Many of the problems created by the central planning of any aggregate, large and small, can be mitigated by introducing representative forms; other problems can be alleviated by creating the greatest possible local autonomy on every level. A free society can reconcile itself to the remaining difficulties of central planning in view of the valid instrumental rationalism of planning for human goals.

Autonomy should be introduced into all functional and geographical realms. One learns by going into the officies, workshops, farms, and up-river settlements of humanity that their occupants lack initiative and the confidence that they can introduce their own methods of organization.4 The simple peoples of this world are waiting for the cargo of heaven to arrive from their ancestors ancient home, their allies' distant capital, or from their own prefecture. There are two million settlements in this world, and all of them could double their blessings if assured of their right to do so and if united to do so.

No kind of grant program, no superlative design of hierarchical offices, will ever achieve what a loosening of bonds upon the persons and small groups of the world could achieve. The amazing discoveries of group psychology and social relations in the realm of local autonomy have not been put to any use yet; the opponents of autonomy are still insisting, "If the mass is left alone and authorized to help itself, it will do nothing. Whatever these people do is bound to conflict with the moral norms of the greater society. If it does not conflict with the moral norms, it will conflict with the coordination of norms necessary in this world."

The answer is that the world should be primarily interdependent for the sake of the independence of its people. If these people take the world road or no road to interdependence, then ultimately there should be means of diverting them. If they do not gear their plans with related groups, then ultimately there must be means of correction. In any case, the interdependency of the world's people has to be based upon the principles of autonomy and representation, in order to let all be corrected by all, high and low, far and wide, geographical and functional.

Nothing must be done under the treacherous slogan-word, sovereignty. Sovereignty should be only changing, operational designation of where finally a decision ends its career. In that case, accountability is the better word. No group, wither large or small, has an absolute right to anything. All management - in the largest and smallest shops, farms, ships, agencies and settlements - ought to be co-management, considerate management cooperative, consultative, and representative.

On the largest order of things, the world order, autonomy needs to be preserved. The idea that a world order, the cosmarchy, being huge, must have a huge empire is false. Centralized decision-making for the whole world is imperialism. The very idea of world uniformity is the unconscious will and expectation of imperialists, and a chauvinist projection. It is related to the primitive ideal of organization that built the pyramids of Egypt.

On the basic level things, the person, autonomy is as broad in scope as the principle of Kalos itself. The time of man is his greatest resource; whoever appropriates time becomes a master. Yet man must give much of his time to society. To compel organization of time is a grave responsibility that has to be undertaken with all the cautionary rules of dikeos. It is a primordial disaster to the human ego to be told, as millions of men in different cultures are told, they must reorganize the whole of their existence in time so as to obey the absolute law of taxocratic masters, descended from an 18th century English sweatshop, that they must work for him or the government and nothing else between 8 and 6. A man whose life is thus "modernized" is being imprisoned and tortured. If he is an accepting docile servant of the machine age, whether in plutocracies, stratocracies, or taxocracies, he receives a stipend towards the end of his life of a small pension and 24 "free" hours a day. Ultimately he must awaken to the fact that if he had delivered half his quota during those years of imprisonment and half now, he would have enjoyed the happy and healthier hours of his youth and prime of life. Not only governments, then, but the whole taxist concept if modern life has to be radically analyzed and reformed.

The Scope of Reform

In organizing toparchies, representation, an Equal-Sum Activity Formula, and the Countervalor have been proposed as limits upon taxocratic abuses. Other steps can be taken. To begin with, taxocratic system must be studied in full detail and tracers followed through their unconscious and proliferating social ramifications. The indirect costs of organizations and taxocratic societies should be measured wherever decisions are to be made on the basis of direct costs. The full range of antikalotic costs, not merely the narrow and exclusively financial costs, should be discovered continuously, as exemplified in the chapters on plutocracy and kalotic accounting.

Limits must be set to the degree of power, respect, and wealth possessed by all organizations. Both internal and external impacts must be limited. Power ought especially to be watched. The worst bargain is a forced one. There is an evil in every transaction of government and of any organization that has the powers of government and of any organization that has the powers of government, in that at some point one party (the civil party, in government) is affected by compulsion. The transaction is enveloped in the threat of heavy sanctions, that is, of severe deprivations, as opposed to moderate, light, or no deprivations, for deviating from the norm set by the more powerful party.

Automation on a large scale, where inevitable or where unexceptionably more efficient for productivity, needs to be arranged according to dikaic schemes: As scale increases in plant and operations, all participants should increase their rights of ownership and consumption. Both rich and poor should be allowed to clip coupons for income in return for little direct work. Why should not a great many people rather than only a few live off an organization to which they ostensibly and immediately give little? This moral principle can break up one of the most trouble obstacles to the otherwise kalotic development of automation.

Every organization has to pledge itself to a life span and adhere to it. Exceptional conditions, it is understood, can be provided for. Social machinery, it is not realized, deteriorates or depreciates like ordinary machinery. An agency should set itself perhaps a generation of life. A factory should give itself twenty years. A school should exist for fifteen years. And so on. No organization should capture people, minds, resources for longer than a generation unless it is meanwhile thoroughly reconsidered. If it purports to plan, as all modern institutions proudly aspire, it must set an end to the plan. It must phase out. Almost every organization more than thirty years of age is bureaucratized, has become uncreative, has been made the property of cliques. Thomas Jefferson would have even the state revolutionized from generation to generation; when means can be found to do so, his idea should be vitalized.

Ultimately an index of autonomy can be developed by which a person can check the status of his freedom. Take the percentage of political issues in a country on which a man can assume a position of opposition or support without his kalotic status being significantly threatened. Perform a summary calculation for all people and the result gives an index of autonomy. In addition, scores can be figured within all groups, as for instance, students, children, miners, teachers, clerks, or government workers. If there are 20 groupings of importance for each person, there will be millions of calculations for all persons and their collective scores that finally emerge. Computers can be used to perform such kalotic calculations.

Elections should not only be occasions for the choice of officials. They should include individual kalotic profiles to reveal the state of persons, groups, and nation, and hence call to the attention of newly chosen officials a major basis for their future work. Were we to administer this test to all men today, the results would only confirm out belief: Man is in a very early stage of social developments in which his burdens and restraints are very great. If he wishes to suffer them through, he may except many long years of a cycle of taxocratic disintegration.5

The Kalotic Movement is not partisan. The fossilizing of political parties internally accompanies generally an external trivialization.6 But the Kalotic Movement can help to break the log jam of ineffectual party government. The self-confessed revolutionary communist parties of Italy and France, for example, are travesties of social reform. They cannot rule; they cannot cooperate; they can only disrupt. They should be fragmented into three parts, for which they are already prepared: "Tear along the perforated lines," as the food packages say. One part is pleased to cooperate with plutocrats and taxocrats of the other party establishments, playing ins-and-outs. A second portion will remain Stalinoid or Maoist, recalcitrantly paranoid and destructive. It is third part that the Kalotic Movement wants, the revolutionaries of freedom.

The managerial revolution which is to be consummated must depart from practically all large-scale systems of times past. These have been paternalistic, autocratic, hierarchical and topheavy. The history of management theory, with a few primitive tribal and radical 17th to 19th century exception, has up to the last generation repeated these qualities. Now we know that effective work, but more than that, kalotic work, can be achieved if members of an institution - large or small - form a consensus as to what their goals are, are represented in the transformation and execution of these goals, and share the benefits of their collective achievements.

The problem of de-alienation of economic life cannot be solved by the abolition of private property. The transformation of private property into state property (be it Capitalist or Socialist state property) does not introduce an essential change in the situation of the working man, the producers... The de-alienation of economic life requires also the abolition of state property, its transformation into real social property, and this can be achieved only by organizing the whole of social life on the basis of self-government of the immediate producers.7

Thus did the Yugoslav Marxist philosopher, Gajo Petrovic, bring around to kalotics one of the central concepts of Karl Marx.

This is not capitalism and communism as we have known them, but there have been capitalists and communists who have worked, and usually suffered unduly, to accomplish such a system. The underlying principles have been most dramatically announced by the American pragmatic and human relations movements, whose positive and constructive place in the future has to be appreciated and stressed.8 Total application is essential-in the family, church, neighbourhood, army, agency, and nation, small and large, rich and poor.

Representation and Dispersion

The Representative structure of kalocracy calls for the participation of workers and employees, indeed all persons over sixteen, in a functional government that runs alongside the territorial, metropolitan, statal, and personal constituencies." Workers will not only vote for members of Association Boards. Metropolitan Councils, and all other toparchic assemblies related to their roles, but they will also participate in ownership as part of their suffrage in their functional toparchy.

Two centuries of experience with the office and factory system, and with the modern corporation, lead inescapably to the conclusion that shareholders cannot properly run large businesses, management cannot run them alone, labor unions are incompetent to do so, and government are dreary failures. Each for its own reasons falls short of man's hopes, but all fail alike in that they do not faithfully represent the kalotic complex of motives and drives that define the efficiency of enterprise.

Not only should workers and public representatives join management and owners upon the ruling boards of larger companies, but the workers should own shares of them. New companies can issue employee stock; older companies can create a new class of stock, which over a period of time can come to possess voting rights. The shares should not be alienable to union or management and may constitute on the average one third of all stock outstanding and issued.16

All substantive functions of government except the spearhead of defense should ultimately be conducted by non-governmental institutions. A non-governmental form of conducting every kind of activity exists that is superior to the primitive nationalized formula. Government should legislate, represent, express, tax, stress, support, inspect, regulate, adjudicate, penalize, and criticize. Government will emerge more clearly in what it is, does and can be if its direct owing and managing role is reduced to a minimum. It may be better controlled and more efficient for its assigned missions.

In general, every activity should be done by a smaller group in preference to a larger one, and where workers cannot work and are given modest incomes in lieu of work, whether it be caused by increased productivity, by largescaling, by automation, or by importation of foreign skills, then too the less mechanically efficient but more humanly efficient method is better.

Large scale in most productive and service enterprises is justified only through ignorance of social and indirect costs, and or a long-run as opposed to short-run effects. Only a kalocracy, with its complex of policies, can truly justify erecting a huge automated plant in Java to supply all textiles needed, with only a few foreign technicians to operate it, but without participant value and shared experiencing. Even then as, has been asserted, the "great leap" should be brought soon within the framework of kalotic toparchy. The great gap between machined supply system and the supposed enjoyers would bring a nightmarish society if perpetuated. That this can happen anywhere is evident. It has happened in a way whenever the rich have lost their social function, as in Arab Oil-producing countries or in feudal places where modern industry arose, or among "coupon-clippers" in modern plutocracies. In 1962, 90% of the longshoremen of San Francisco were unemployed and living of subsidies because of mechanized ship-loading. The long-run effects of such a system must be destructive of spirit and self fulfillment.

Pneumos is superior in the smaller setting. The smaller groups produce more politists, also. Besides, Marx was correct in believing that the production of capital necessarily increased for the individual firm as the productivity of the capital declined. The small company should, therefore, be favored in the acquisition of capital. The obvious means of doing so are to reduce the costs imposed by banks and government agencies on the raising of money, costs that masquerade as protections to the public and assurances against undue risk but are also prompted by snobbery, saving on scale, attempts to monopolize, social cliques, and ignorance of how to insure a group of borrowers against the most risky firm among the group.

The kalotic principle of the tribunate, or countervalor, explained in the last chapter, should apply to business concerns. In the first place, every business, like every agency, must pay or acknowledge receipt in its own balance sheet of all that it receives from society as it sees the relationship. These are, of course, many of the social costs that business and government agencies do not recognize or fear to admit.

At the same time, every business must announce its objectives publicity. It must name what benefits it brings to society. Thereupon, anyone who wishes to do so may criticize the aims and the balance sheet. One need only examine the barren prospectuses required of enterprises "going public", or the annual reports of those companies who must by law report to their shareholders, to comprehend how far removed plutocracies and other regimes are from ensuring the necessary public posture of business and agencies in a kalocracy.

Moreover, each corporation of 500 employees or more can be asked to report to its superior toparchy or government on the question: "Why the ABC company has been unable to devolve its growth into new independent units and what plans it has for future decentralization and break-off." Just as with government agencies, an outside tribune or countervalor should audit the concern on possible means of radical devolution.

Marx was both utopian and insightful when he denounced the separation of the worker from his product. He erred in discovering a "surplus" that is scarcely real: the worker makes a product that is appropriated by a capitalist who then sells it back to the worker at an exorbitant price. He thought that the capitalist's "price" misappropriates the worker's "surplus." This error led naturally to another utopian error on the nature of money. "Money is the pump between man's need and the objects, between his life and his means of life... Money is the alienated ability of mankind."

The communist response is to eliminate the capitalist and, pretending to return the product to the worker, place it in the hands of a most untrustworthy agent, the commissar, so that the worker pays even more for the product and falls prey to Marx's famous "alienation" to an extent beyond the norm in capitalist society.

Marx gave too much importance to wage-labor as productive activity that has become alienated. It is the system in all of its facets, not the wage, that causes the alienation. Practically everywhere, including the villages of India, China, and Vietnam, the cash wage or payment is felt by the humblest workers as well as the well-to-do to be an exciting liberating instrument. Indeed, a genuine pang of alienation in plutocracies is felt as the inroads of taxocracy leave less and less freed money in the pockets of the citizens.

The Kalotic Revolution gives the employee and worker participation in industrial government by the personal vote, a vastly enhanced pay, and shares of the assets and income of the company. As wage-labor alienates, so credit affectionates, in society. The Tutors should seek these gains in every type of regime, whether cosmarchic or small-scale, such as a small company. All can afford them: all need a thorough reorganization. The great majority of the world's workers need a new kind of economic morale.

The Computer Experience

The computer is an extreme example of how science forces men to change their outlook and conditions their mode of decision, ending in the radical change of the system and with it the transformation of the elite.12 Contrary to a great many "New Left" and liberal voices, the computer presents more advantages to kalocracy than to taxocracy.

The rulers of the Soviet Union, when they discovered the technique of the computer, enjoyed a flush of "final victory" in their struggle to plan and control the total Soviet economy. A giant computer installation, they thought, might be used to register all fulfillments and deviations of productions of production and consumption in every part of the spacious country.

Fortunately, the rulers also discovered that the computer could not govern the shifting preferences, habits, and wills of the numerous toparchies of the U.S.S.R. They promptly moderated their enthusiasm for the highly centralized computer system and saw in the use of computers a chance to promote meaningful and locally free but nationally coordinated decision and behavior. The computer could be an instrument of totalitarianism, but also a means of feedback of local wills expressed in behavior.13

For the first time, the central rulers might be able to contemplate without panic the possibilities of a great many locally differentiated behaviors. As against their minds blocking, when ever the idea of a free market came up, they could now realize the principle that to some degree Marx, Engels, and all the liberal and syndicalist philosophers who were not technocrats agreed to, mused about, and hoped for: central coordination with local and functional autonomy. In their own way, the Soviet rulers seemed to be tending towards a proper use of computers, even though they were backing into the decision. The computer, in this sense, was making them think, as it makes many people think in the U.S.A Since the computer is stupid, but cannot be brainwashed, the most specific instructions have to be given it, and in the process of giving such instructions, a policy-maker is forced to think more logically and clearly in some respects.

The story of the Soviet experience, which of course, is not ended, is repeated elsewhere, because the machines are essentially the same, and men's primary reactions are also similar. It is no longer news that the electric computer has been employed by the thousands by large-scale industry and governments,14 but the consequences to administrative theory of this mass invasion by a peculiar laborer have not been foreseen, analyzed or projected into the future in a mature way. Conversely, the great body of inherited administrative theory has not been reassessed in relation to the computer's role in administration.

The computer would better be called a symbol-processor used for data storage and retrieval, for mathematical computation, and for simulation (more or less exact) of human personal and social processes. It is an actor that can play as many roles as its director can imagine and cause to be written, provided that the roles do not exceed the limits of its character. These are: an abundant continuous, controlled supply of working energy; great speed; obsessiveness (it will not depart from its lines but will only memorize lines that are fed to it in bits of a two-bit alphabet); and an extensive memory that will retain tenaciously many millions of such bits.

Now compare this actor with organic man and administrative man. Organic man is composed of an immensely complicated system of autonomous "bits" and organs. All of these are coordinated in a general hierarchy, peaked by the duarchy of brain and heart. In the words of Michael Polanyi:

Each higher principle controls the boundary left indeterminate by the next lower principle. It relies upon the lower principle without inter-fering with its laws... Each level is subject to dual control: first by the laws that apply to its elements in themselves, and second, by the laws of the comprehensive entity formed by them. Autonomy, that is, consists in the "bits" being composable into a variety of roles, perhaps two, sometimes more. The roles are alike, but also different; the functions (or goals) of the roles are elaborated through their structures and in the end appear highly distinct, as between the eye and the finger. "However close we seem to get to rock-bottom in the organic hierarchy," writes Arthur Koestler, "we find complex, integrated sub-wholes leading a relatively autonomous existence."15

Given these brief characterizations of the computer and the human organism, we can grasp the idea that man has created in the computer (and many an earlier machine) an analogy to himself. Both he and his creature can carry on several roles simultaneously and actually achieve different goals at the same time. Each is a system that can serve (or not serve) several masters at the same time, contrary to the biblical caution that a man cannot serve more than one master.

It is the acting in several concurrent roles that both necessitates and makes possible the philosophy and effectiveness of autonomous and pluralist behavior.

Now consider administrative man. Physiologically he is autonomous, both as a total character and in his parts. But administratively he has always been subjected to primitive simplism which simplism, has been incorporated into the very structure of the ideology, theory, and practice of administration, and thence to government which throughout history has been largely conceived of both unconsciously, and consciously, as administration-becoming, that is, a regrettably not quite complete power over other men.

If primitive and unfortunately current administrative doctrine were to be followed in the nature of man itself, the hierarchical structure would be linear instead of autonomous. Think how long it would take if growth in the human body (or commands to the body) were relayed through a linear structure. No cell or organ could grow or behave except through an interminable succession of commands.

True, man and the computer, too, operate according to some measure of the linear hierarchy. There are major directions; the kalotic trilogy, for example, orients man in his dynamic equilibrium; priorities of change, directions for change, and energy for change are compounded from over-all kalotic formulas. But man, and his computers, are capable of multiselectivity, multi-values, and multi-roles. Man does this through his essence, fighting off simplistic hierarchic theories as they assault him through the ages.

He can do the same with the computer, using the basic fact that the computer can take millions of essential bits of information and permute and combine them in thousands of ways, thus in effect making possible the extraction of numerous organs and systems of pre-directed and post-audited behaviour, all autonomous, all coordinated as desired. He can use his new machines to assist him with as yet immeasurable, but great force in the struggle for autonomy.

Man can control the machine far beyod his ability to control bureaucracy. For instance suppose a single tax of the same amount were to be collected in the one country by a typical civil service and in another country by a computer system. In both cases, a centralized record of everyone would be kept; so both have equally the potential danger of the abuse of centralized information. But, once begun, the computer system would not have the same momentous human forces working to change it into a repressive force as would the human administrative system. The latter would acquire distinctive dress, occupations, titles, prestige, ambitions, families, and power to harass, inveigle, impress, gossip about, and implicate itself in a hundred ways in the lives of people and their governments. We begin by buying a simple administration of a simple tax, but we end with a taxocracy.

In a prescient paragraph Marshall McLuhan has sensed the possibilities in the age of cybernetics, of automatic controls, and of the computer that is the central figure of the cybernetic revolution:

One of the misconceptions attending the onset of cybernation and automation is the fear of centralism. Indeed, on all hands automation is greeted as a further development of the mechanical age. In fact, automation abolishes the patterns and procedures of the mechanical age, though at first, like the horseless carriages with large buggy-whip holders, a new technology is set to perform the old tasks that are quite unsuited to it. Cybernation in effect means a new world of autonomy and decentralism in all human affairs.1

A critical task of the Tutors is to redraft the principles of administration to harmonize with the utilize the advantages of the computer in a new science of administration. Autonomous, kalotic man can realize immense gains through administration of yet unrealized kinds.

There is a great despair over bureaucracy is the world today. The disgust and fear of it are justified, but the despair is needless and harmful. Taxocracy can be converted to Kalos. The proposals for doing so are ready, if the men and women are. They include:

(1) Using computer system as a plowing and cracking tool to break up hierarchy, misunderstanding delays and non-communication in all large organizations.

(2) Adopting the group autonomy and pluralist features of the Kalotic constitution in education, science, government, etc.

(3) Simplifying the economy and metropolis.

(4) Reducing and transforming the influence of military taxocracy.

(5) Opening up the personality and the human spirit.

(6) Adopting special policies such as: the anti-bureaucracy tribune, rotation in office, fixing a termination to organization life.

(7) And Stressed Democracy.