The Aquarian Agrarian: industrial relations

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Nonapartism (or Unincorporatism): Cooperative Anarcho-Corporativism in a Social Market Economy

The following is a description of the philosophy of Nonapartism (which might as well be called "Unincorporatism", due to its support of unincorporated people, groups, businesses, and land), followed by an explanation of the types of political representatives which I theorize would likely be present in a Nonapartist governance structure which focuses on representing the Third Sector and promoting reconciliation between various anarchist schools of thought / methods of economy.

“Nonapartism” intentionally refers to the lack of apartheid (apartness) in relations between sectors – and connotes nonpartisanship - although its technical meaning denotes that it is a nine-part version of “tripartism”, the neo-liberal/neo-corporatist political synthesis which exists in social market economies.

The tripartist synthesis exists as the representatives of organized labor coming together in a negotiative manner with government and the representatives of organized business in order to jointly regulate the civil social economy.

Nonapartism aims to achieve collaborative regulation of access to the means and factors of production, distribution, and exchange, in order to ensure free, equal, and uninhibited access, and liberty to utilize, possess, and occupy.

Nonapartism rejects communal, cooperative, social, or public “ownership” or “control” of the means of production (i.e., communism, cooperativism, socialism, and Statism), in that each is a form of rentier Capitalism which denies and severely limits the right to personal property rights in allodial title, attacking private property rights in the name of the commons.

The attack on private property rights is problematic because it assumes that private property ownership (the right to exclude) will always be used to exclude. Nonapartism aims to establish a society in which periodic access to private property is the sole condition for the legitimacy of rights thereto. This is to say that demonstrating judicious exclusion legitimizes the right to private property.

Nonapartism was designed as an attempt to improve upon tripartism, in that it provides for better and more diverse representation of the sectors of society which oppose the corporate State, and the environment of corruption and collusion between government and business which it fosters.

Nonapartism desires to render tripartism incomplete and irrelevant, by abolishing the distinction between capital and labor, through making labor own its own capital and be its own capital. Nonapartism blends the functions, forms, and manners of representing associations of labor and capital alike.

Nonapartism holds that organized labor should not be the only actor present in policy negotiations aside from government and business. Therefore, nonapartism criticizes calls for “worker control of the means of production” and “worker ownership of factories”. This is because workers' unions represent the interests of workers; not necessariy the interests of non-working people, consumers, investors, taxpayers, other actors the community or society at large (some of these groups even have an interest in keeping the price and cost of labor low).

Although we are not all workers, we are all consumers of consumer goods. Even those of us who forage and hunt for food are compulsory customers of government services. Those who file for unemployment, the unemployed who have stopped looking for work, the social welfare recipients whose income is based on the minimum wage, the unemployed homeless, and ex-convicts are all stakeholders in public policy of society.

Nonapartism desires that all people finding themselves insufficiently represented by big government, big business, and big unions educate themselves about voluntary association, and the voluntary/social sector (or Third Sector). Nonapartism advocates for the organization, unionization, and formalized representation of marginalized non-working, non-taxpaying, non-investing people's interests.

Nonapartism is against the interests of pro-corporate, pro-big-union, and pro-big-government unions; the tripartist scheme to take tax revenue, profit, and union dues from every person, robbing them of the freedom to represent themselves in so many important ways. Nonapartism advocates that the disadvantaged unionize to demand from the tripartists what is necessary for them to perform the lowest skill-level jobs; i.e., access to housing, education, job skills training, and everything else employed people are expected to have in order to be a functional member of society.

Nonapartism asserts that anything people are ordered and expected to possess, they have the right to demand, at no cost to themselves, and paid for through the labor of those doing the ordering and having the expectation.

Nonapartism advocates for anarcho-cooperativist and anarcho-corporativist groups to regulate neo-liberal and neo-corporatist groups. Respectively, these groups support the regulation of organized labor by liberal-bourgeois elements favoring Statism, closedness, and compulsion in organization; and the regulation of business by conservative-bourgeois elements favoring Statism and protectionist and crony-capitalist interests.

Nonapartism is informed by the fact that Medieval-era guild unions practiced each social-benefit employee organization, professional self-regulation, and cartelization. As professional associations, the guilds trained their future members in the trades. As trade unions, they set rules on wages, hours, and working conditions, provided for the care of widows and orphans, and provided a support group for people living outside the manors to rely on each other for assistance. As cartels, they got together to control all such trade in a given town, and to make sure anyone wishing to trade speak with, pay, and get permission from the guilds themselves first.

Nonapartism supports the utilization of existing and theorized social organizations to regulate the professions, provide for the interests of the workers and the people in general, and organize majorities in the markets to form justifiable cartels demanding mutualism and promoting autonomy and egalitarianism, resulting in increased accuracy and reduced cost of representation of the diverse sectors of the economy (aside from labor and capital) and low prices for all market participants.

Nonapartism criticizes the notion that the low wages paid by Wal-Mart represent the natural result of a competitive market in wages; but rather that it represents unjustifiable, excessive corporate “profit”-taking. The approximately $17 average hourly wage for entry-level labor at CostCo helps illustrate how the function of large retail distributors resembles that of a cooperative wholesale society.

This is to say that Nonapartism advocates for consumers to voluntary cooperate (direct action; boycott; counter-economics; radical redistribution, homesteading, and reclamation) in their purchase habits – pooling their money, productive assets, and force of consumer demand – in order to lower prices on goods through the establishment of price-ceilings (or cartels) on the markets.

This would help achieve the widest possible distribution of the factors and means of production, especially if large retail distributors sold wide varieties of machines (such as 3-D printing machines, to which free access could be also provided at libraries and common places).

Nonapartism supports cooperative anarcho-corporativism, anarchy without adjectives, synthesis anarchism, with equal influence of all sectors of economic society on policy.

Nonapartism advocates that all resources be allocated to the people by freely, fairly, and amicably competing anarchist individuals, Agorists, freelancers, entrepreneurs, mutuals, co-operatives, communes, autonomous unions and guilds, and cooperative corporations, which would be encouraged to stay autonomous but join confederations.

Nonapartism hopes to attract individualist anarchists, voluntaryists, anarcho-capitalists, market-anarchists, left-Rothbardians, panarchists, social democrats, anarcho-communists, mutualist anarchists, market socialists, New Mutualists, industrial unionists, Egoists and Egoist communists, anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-cooperativists, anarcho-corporativists, anarcho-monarchists, Discordian anarchists, religious anarchists, and disaffected tripartists.

Summary of Types of the Nine Organelles

Nonapartist Cooperativist Anarcho-Corporatism

Organizers

Investors

a. Lenders
b. Borrowers

Enterprises

a. Hierarchical Enterprises
b. Egalitarian Enterprises
Workers

a. Organized Workers
b. Unorganized Workers

Consumers

a. Organized Consumers

Representatives of networks of autonomous consumer cooperatives; and consumer protection / advocacy and product quality rating interest / focus groups

regulate

State-endorsed consumer protective agencies and consumer cooperatives, as well as

interest groups and lobbying agencies.

b. Unorganized Consumers

Representatives of networks of homeless and unemployed persons' unions and syndicates, and criminal rehabilitation advocates

regulate

State-endorsed social welfare, accuseds', ex-convicts' unions and interest groups.

Detailed Description of Types and Examples of Classes

and of

Vehicles of Anarchist Representation

(Which Would Check the Vehicles of Political Representation)

1. Organizers

I. Examples:

Distributors
(ex.: Wal-Mart/Sam's Club, CostCo, cooperative wholesale societies)
Managers
Employers
Professional self-regulators
Political professional self-regulators

II. Vehicles of Political Representation

(State-licensed, compulsory / involuntary, and / or overly centralized)

High- or medium-profit multinational corporate chain distributor retailers

Reserve-army-of-labor capitalist managers
Employers' organizations / associations / federations
Guild unions and professional unions and associations

(ex.: American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations,

American Medical Association, Screen Actors' Guild, etc.)

– Attorneys' judges', politicians', and government workers' unions

(ex.: National Federation of Federal Employees; American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; American Bar Association; American Trial Lawyers Association; National Lawyers' Union)

III. Vehicles of Anarchist Representation
(non-State-permitted, voluntary, and / or decentralized / diffused)

– Non-profit and non-for-profit cooperative wholesale societies and distributors

– Federations, confederations, and leagues of unions of egalitarian cooperative managers

Incorporeal “organizations”; and federations, confederations, and societies of egalitarian cooperative employers

– Federations, confederations, and leagues of autonomous guild unions, social- anarchist guilds, and autonomous professional unions / societies

– Jurors' nullification and information rights, and rights of the accused interest and advocacy groups

(ex.: American Civil Liberties Union, Never Take a Plea [Bargain] advocates and groups, and pro-se defense advocates and groups)

2. Investors

A. Lenders

(Statists and capitalists involved in public and private finance, credit and lending, stock exchanges)

I. Examples:

Shareholders in publicly-traded companies
Financiers
Lenders and creditors

II. Vehicles of Political Representation

(State-licensed, compulsory / involuntary, and / or overly centralized)

Limited-liability publicly-traded stock corporations

National and international financiers' interest groups, lobbying agencies, and PACs
(ex.: World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization)
Lenders' and creditors' interest groups, lobbying agencies, and PACs

III. Vehicles of Anarchist Representation
(non-State-permitted, voluntary, and / or decentralized / diffused)

– High-liability publicly-managed citizens' dividend cooperative corporations

– Autonomous financiers' unions and financiers' syndicates, pro- local finance

interest groups

– Autonomous lenders' and creditors' unions, and lenders' and creditors' syndicates

B. Borrowers

(Workers and non-working small and medium-sized market participating civilians involved in paying taxes, borrowing and incurring debt, considering buying stock)

I. Examples:

– Stakeholders (bondholders, customers, suppliers, etc.)

– Taxpayers

– Borrowers and debtors

II. Vehicles of Political Representation

(State-licensed, compulsory / involuntary, and / or overly centralized) – Shareholders, customers', and bondholders' unions

– Taxpayers' unions, and anti-tax and low-tax interest groups, lobbying agencies, PACs, and political parties

(ex.: National Taxpayers Union)

– Borrowers' and debtors' unions; and pro- national and international debt relief,

forgiveness, and co-payment interest groups, lobbying agencies, and PACs

III. Vehicles of Anarchist Representation

(non-State-permitted, voluntary, and / or decentralized / diffused)

– Autonomous combination bondholders' / customers' / suppliers' unions and guilds

– Autonomous tax- and fee- payers' unions, revolutionary tax- and fee- protesting activist groups, counter-economic and Agorist groups

– Autonomous borrowers' and debtors' unions, pro- local interpersonal debt relief

and co-payment interest groups

3. Enterprises

A. Hierarchical Enterprises

(Productive entrepreneurial, capitalist business, and corporate firms)

I. Examples:

– Small enterprises

– Middle-sized and large businesses

– Publicly-traded corporations

II. Vehicles of Political Representation

(State-licensed, compulsory / involuntary, and / or overly centralized) – Entrepreneurs' associations, pro-small-business interest groups, lobbying agencies, and PACs

(ex.: National Federation of Independent Businesses)

– Industry trade groups and pro-business interest groups, lobbying agencies, and PACs

– Business unions / partnerships / alliances / associations

III. Vehicles of Anarchist Representation

(non-State-permitted, voluntary, and / or decentralized / diffused)

– Entrepreneurs' societies, pro-small-business interest groups

– Federations, confederations, and leagues of industrial / labor / trade / craft unions, pro- worker-run and employee-owned business interest groups

– Federations, confederations, and leagues of autonomous business unions / partnerships / alliances / associations

B. Egalitarian Enterprises
(Productive cooperative, mutual, and social enterprise firms)

I. Examples:

Cooperative enterprises / cooperative businesses / cooperative corporations
(ex.: Mondragon [cooperative] Corporation)
Mutuals / mutual banking and credit institutions / mutual organizations
Social enterprises / social purpose ventures / social profit ventures

II. Vehicles of Political Representation

(State-licensed, compulsory / involuntary, and / or overly centralized)

Business and sector associations / partnerships / alliances / federations of cooperative corporations
(ex.: National Cooperative Business Association)

Market-socialist political interest groups, business associations of mutuals
Business associations of social venture-capital firms
(ex.: National Venture Capital Association)

III. Vehicles of Anarchist Representation
(non-State-permitted, voluntary, and / or decentralized / diffused)

– Federations and confederations of autonomous business and sector societies and

cooperative corporations

– Federations and confederations of autonomous mutual aid and benefit societies

– Federations and confederations of autonomous social-venture enterprises

4. Workers

A. Organized Workers

(Productive unionized, organized, corporatist, and union-dependent workers)

I. Examples:

Union workers and laborers
Guild-union journeymen, apprentices, and masters
Syndics

II. Vehicles of Political Representation

(State-licensed, compulsory / involuntary, and / or overly centralized)

Labor / craft unions

Guild unions
National and state syndicates

III. Vehicles of Anarchist Representation
(non-State-permitted, voluntary, and / or decentralized / diffused)

– Autonomous labor / trade / industrial unions

– Autonomous guild unions and social-anarchist guilds

– Anarchist and revolutionary syndicates

(ex.: Industrial Workers of the World / Wobblies)

B. Unorganized Workers

(Non-unionized, unorganized, anti-organizational / anti-corporatist, and autonomous and independent workers)

I. Examples:

– Individuals

– Freelancers

– Free-riding workers

II. Vehicles of Political Representation

(State-licensed, compulsory / involuntary, and / or overly centralized) – Representationally democratic voting, private property ownership, pro-

individualist interest groups, lobbying agencies, and PACs

– Pro- New Mutualist freelancers' unionism interest groups, lobbying agencies, and PACs

– Pro- compulsory unionism interest groups, lobbying agencies, and PACs

III. Vehicles of Anarchist Representation

(non-State-permitted, voluntary, and / or decentralized / diffused)

– Autonomous egoist unions / communes / collectives

– Autonomous freelancers' unions

– Federations and confederations of open-shop and dual- and minority-unionist

workplaces

5. Consumers

A. Organized Consumers

(Organized consumers of predominantly private-sector goods and services)

I. Examples:

Consumer cooperatives
Consumer interest, protection, and advocacy groups
Consumer research and focus groups

II. Vehicles of Political Representation

(State-licensed, compulsory / involuntary, and / or overly centralized)

Pro- consumer cooperatives interest groups, lobbying agencies, and PACs

Public and public-private consumer protection boards
(ex.: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Departments of Consumer Affairs, credit rating agencies, Better Business Bureau)
Pro- public consumer research interest groups, lobbying agencies, and PACs

III. Vehicles of Anarchist Representation
(non-State-permitted, voluntary, and / or decentralized / diffused)

– Federations and confederations of consumers' anarcho-cooperatives

– Diffuse networks of community- and market-based consumer interest / protection

/ advocacy groups, including diffuse networks of business quality and credit rating agencies practicing competing standards

– Diffuse networks of market-oriented consumer research and focus groups and

surveying agencies

B. Unorganized Consumers

(Unorganized consumers of predominantly public-sector [government] services)

I. Examples:

– The unemployed

– The homeless

– Convicted criminals

II. Vehicles of Political Representation

(State-licensed, compulsory / involuntary, and / or overly centralized) – Pro- unemployment insurance social welfare interest groups, lobbying agencies,and PACs

– Pro- housing-relief social welfare interest groups, lobbying agencies, and PACs

– Ex-convicts' unions

(ex.: Voice of the Ex-Offender [V.O.T.E.])

III. Vehicles of Anarchist Representation

(non-State-permitted, voluntary, and / or decentralized / diffused)

– Autonomous unemployed persons' unions and unemployed persons' syndicates

– Autonomous homeless persons' unions and homeless persons' syndicates

– Autonomous families of the accused's unions

For more information on related ideas by the author of this blog, go to:

Feudalism and the Class War

http://aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/04/feudalism-and-class-war.html

Market Anarchy “Without Adjectives”

http://aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/03/market-panarchy-without-adjectives.html

Party for Mutualism and Cooperation

aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/09/proposal-for-cooperative-party-of-oregon.html

I apologize for the quality of the formatting of this entry.
If you would like to be e-mailed a PDF version of this proposal,
please e-mail jwkopsick@gmail.com.

For more entries on enterprise, business, business alliance, and markets, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/enlightened-catallaxy-reciprocally.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/loss-of-public-planning-department.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-konkin-schulman-bastiat-and-agorism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-is-social-libertarianism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/10/comparative-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/07/agorism-summary.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/08/panarchist-welfare-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-market-anarchism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/11/new-institutional-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/02/agorism-and-mutualism-summaries-and.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/03/is-ron-paul-wrong.html