Human Organisation: imperfect action as the method of evolution

The human should take a lead from biology and physics. The great theorists and authors Albert Einstein and Lynn Margolis have through the practice of their science shown how to begin the understanding and ‘management’ of human organisation. They integrate their knowledge with everyday experience.

These human observers sought the pattern of life in data related to energy and its forms. The arguments produced ground the knowledge in the fundamental movement of energy and life forms in the process of the evolving universe.

Management theory as developed by humans, posits the ‘organisation’ as something instrumental, a contrivance to achieve an idealised objective. Management theory does not consider the evolutionary context and thus cannot explain much at all. Therefore management theory is like a growing child, an incomplete developmental journey, and therefore an immature one.

Humanity is ‘governed’:

The human is made up of genes and at a more detail level cells. There are thousands of human genes, maybe 20,000; however, there millions, possibly 20m microbial genes within and upon the human body. In terms of cells the average level of human cells in the human body is estimated at 30bn and the number of microbial cells at 39bn.

As an organism we are a partnership with other microbes which together enable us to function. We are hosting other life forms to form and enhance our ability to live and maintain life. In cellular terms we are a minority human organism. The gut microbiome is a core asset of our functioning as a complete organism. We do not govern that whole system alone.

Humans as a species, as an organism, are a given in much / most public discourse. We do not consider in any meaningful way our highly integrated relationships.

The modern social organisation of humans is situated in what is referred to as the 'nation state' and a dominant agency, referred to as 'the state', acts as the governance source within 'nation states'. No nation state and no state actor devises policy within the context of humans as a minor actor in evolution and likely to remain so. The focus of 'states' is the maximisation of a narrow set of human contrived data variables. So most nation states assess each other by the size of the GDP, the rate of GDP growth and the distribution of GDP per capita. These are the dominant metrics used to 'assess' the performance of 'nation states' and their 'state' agency.

There is no meaningful consideration of how we come to exist and how we might successfully continue to exist. Our ‘medicine’ is about ‘staying alive’ when confronted with trauma and disease. We devise our thinking about our bodies in the context of our separation from the biosphere and how it is organised.

We construct and pursue fictional goals

Economics is the grand fictional thesis of the modern era. As Polanyi attempted to describe in the mid 20th century, humans are in denial of the fictional nature of economics or more precisely the core concepts underpinning it. Land, labour and capital do not exist except as cognitive products. This does not render them unreal but it does render them transitional cognitive states reflecting incomplete understanding. These are not useless concepts, but neither are they 'truths'.

The Great Transformation was understood as the transition from agricultural systems of production to ‘market’systems of production. It should be understood as the movement from ideology to science, understood in nominal terms as the movement towards truth, but a truth that cannot be accessed. The introduction of the fictions of land, labour and capital with the use of the category of ‘money’; rendered the organic social order a contrivance.

Economics is one of the great policy planks of the governance of human organisation. If truth and reality are the enemy then economics does not fare well upon engagement. Economics as we increasingly hear is an ideological activity, not because it is a bad idea, but because it is not informed by a balanced ontology. Like Einstein / Margolis et al it must risk recognition of its own limits by engaging all relevant variables. Einstein recognised the limits of physics, of empirical experimentation and thus that any one human's endeavour to achieve complete knowledge of the universe. Economics has done the opposite, in the mainstream; i.e. policy space.

Governance is not what it appears, 'the acceptable and most developed form of managing human organisation'. Rather it is more an ideological practice of presenting 'the appearance' of an acceptable and developed form of organisation. 'Ideology' is not a lie but neither is it truth. It should be understood as imperfect, as our best understanding, our ‘verstehen’ (Plamenatz). It is how the human individual accesses, develops and shares understanding to interpret the world.

Understanding is the basis of explanation

Marx describes the movement of history as the struggle of the human with ‘nature’. His position must be understood as an attempt to overcome ideology. His constructions are also constrained as ideology by historical limitations. We will all suffer this fate it seems but we can aspire to exceed our limitations. However, without recognition of the limitation, that 'verstehen', we cannot always accept we may be 'incomplete', 'in error'; in other words 'wrong'. Being wrong is not ideology, promoting that you are 'right' when your are in fact wrong is ideological bias.

Science in concept, is the attempt to understand the movement of evolution such that we arrive in a more complete understanding of our existence. That endeavour is fully in the light of being imperfect at any one moment. In addition as actors working in the evolutionary cycle we change the course of our own history.

Marx gives the human some insight while remaining detached from the physics and biology of life. He acknowledges Darwin and thus appears to incline towards the thesis of evolution as a mandatory component of any theory of human organisation. While he recognised science, he did not meaningfully locate ‘labour’ in relation to energy when mapping his version of the labour theory of value. Smith and Ricardo, the other great theorists of the labour theory of value, similarly did not engage this context. None of the classical economists including Marx can claim a rounded out ontology that attempts to integrate what in 'modernity' we have categorised academically as 'subjects' or 'bodies of knowledge'. It has taken others, primarily 'scientists' to begin that process. It is clear that Marx can be developed in this manner but not without major alterations.

Organisation is better understood as the human method of evolution, this seems to be a useful observation when asking oneself how the human has come about, how the human has gone about 'its work'. No human can exist except within a set of relationships with other beings and energy forms. The development of human organisation is a set of narratives, attempting to detail how we as a species exist and 'organise' ourselves within the organisation of the universe. At all times all energy is in play or has the potential to be in play.

The human has set about identifying, mapping and manipulating data patterns and attributes in the physical universe and then subsequently producing cognitive data products that co-exist with the experiences of the physical universe. Increasingly, according to human time, humans are focused on cognitive products as a basis for manipulating the physical universe. Clearly humans have come along in the evolutionary trajectory of earth and it seems we are exercising, through cognitive products, a hegemonic role as the dominant species on earth and possibly the species that enables expansion towards a universe with intelligent life.

Energy and its value:

Steve Keen offers us the potentially exciting innovation that energy is the source of value not labour. It seems to be a pure understanding that energy is the only true variable and all others are energy in data form. All variables must be described in action and their mediation with each other explained. The explanation is immediately contaminated by immanence and the subjectivity of the observer. Thus, we can only have models that approximate the ‘reality’ we seek to describe.

The challenge I would make or question I would ask, is does the energy have value without human intervention? At this stage I think not, thus the labour theory of value is not entirely dead.

If a human actor does not engage ‘land’, there is no land. Indeed the category ‘land’ is therefore a non-thing. The ‘reality’ of land is a purely human construct. It is not reality, but a mediation of an aspect of reality.

Further the human data construct is made up of cognitive attributes such as writing, speech and increasingly software. The data asset is brought into active value by the intervention of labour, specifically cognition, and the creation of cognitive product, likely today to be in a software form. Land as a category is cognitively produced. Land as a physical asset is brought into existence (reality) by labour, or specifically the action of labour upon land.

Keen also observes that capital is a source of value, which initially I find difficult as capital is objectified labour. However in its form as capital it does produce value beyond the capacity and capability of a labourer. A robot acts in part without labour. While historical labour is organically compressed in capital, the macro-level attributes of the configured capital asset are a product in addition to the micro-level capital assets used as inputs.

Either way the value is engendered only within the fictional world of the human artefacts as described by Adam Smith or Marx or Polanyi etc.

Smith wonders at the productivity of the division of labour, while Marx explains its logic and operation. Schumpeter explains the innovative mechanism on a grand theory scale as an energised system with powers beyond the mere imagination of a theorist, it is a phenomenon of capitalism that the human has created a productive power it cannot explain but justifies with economics.

Margolis explains to us that the microcosm of pre-human existence produced a biosphere with infrastructure that could engender an organism such as the human. Oxygen breathing was made possible by the pre-human biosphere, an infrastructure into which a human organism could thrive. Human species organisms and their subsequent development are derived from pre-human production.

Following Adam Smith economics should have explained the division of labour with the biosphere in its theoretical DNA. With that orientation we would not arrive at the fiction of money as an end in itself, but as a lubricant in use for the version of social organisation called capitalism, which has emerged as a transition state for the human.

Smith, Marx, Schumpeter amongst many others articulate a historical movement which carries the fact that there is no state of being human, only an evolving state of development with no end. The human is an agent in that set of relations between genes and hosts of microbes. Human agency is an artefact of the human system delivering energised actions and thus directing the human as an effective actor. Smith emphasised the fragmentation of processes and the passive human actor, he did wonder about the morality of productive and unproductive actors. Marx reveals the alienated worker and therefore the destruction of agency, hence ineffective use of labour. Schumpeter embraces innovation and composition/ decomposition effects that result, with collateral effects including an alienated cohort of humans.

Einstein and Margolis offer alternative perspectives, widening the scope of understanding and allowing the vision of organisation as a species act, not merely an artefact of modernity. Classical political economy has offered insights but they are incomplete. Today ‘neoclassical’ ideologies present fictional narratives about money as the purpose of human life. We are in a cul de sac of cognitive development and need to re-engage the evolutionary dynamics of human life.

Organisation is the human method of evolution

Humans do not exist outside of organisation, we are a species evolved within the evolution of the earth and carrying out actions we cannot completely understand. We can offer descriptions at the empirical level, like critical narratives about soap operas.

In The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin, offers us insight to an alternative lifestyle, human or human like on multiple planets. Current wannabe ‘titans’ dream of life on Mars and an expanded scope for the human. We are going somewhere, as evolution commands and foretells. We are following the innovative path, as outlined by Schumpeter, but we are creating an alienated social order, according to Marx.

Children in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed are not the ‘property’ of their biological parents. They are automatically free and given support to develop in any way. They must provide a productive input to society to maintain the social order. AI is the basis of all processes and choice is a system attribute. We can foresee remnants of such social systems and relations emerging experimentally today. AI and a global network engenders new reasons for organising. The cultures of these initiatives embrace less territoriality and more sharing.

The ‘Le Guin children’ by definition would not be like those of us who were ‘commissioned’ and socialised within the nuclear and extended biological and patriarchal organisations we have evolved. Territorial societies breed divisions and exploitation. AI offers the unity of sharing, if embraced as an evolutionary asset, stimulating new organisational arrangements for future human society. We cannot achieve complete understanding via ideological contrivances to be used as hegemonic tools. Our knowledge must be grounded in experience and aligned to our cognition.