Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: business vs personal is a misleading dichotomy

[Howard Landman (howard]

Kay Argyle wrote:
> In "business" (capitalism), the goal of the organization is profit -- not
> providing jobs, not even producing widgets, except as those contribute to
> the goal.  All parties attempt to get as much as they can while giving as
> little as possible, with a direct quid pro quo -- in return for money, the
> worker is expected to subjugate her/his own needs to the needs of the
> organization, suppressing as much of her/his humanity as necessary.

It's amazing how many people seem to have this "profit is evil" mentality.
It causes them to say things that make them look like total idiots to
people who actually have to run businesses.  This misconception is so
common that the section on profit in The Entrepreneur's Manual is titled
"Let's Get Our Heads Screwed On Right".

Profit is a fundamental necessary property of any active entity which
survives in the real world.  A plant must gain more energy from a leaf
than it expends on building the leaf, on average, or it shrivels and dies.
An animal must get more from eating something than it costs to find and eat
it, or it starves to death.  Even a "non-profit" must bring in more funds
through fund-raising than it spends on doing that fund or it loses
money and cannot function.

The goal of an organization does not have to be, and usually isn't, profit
per se.  But profit is the single most important indicator of a company's
health.  A company which is unprofitable is dying.

Trying to maximize profits while achieving the company's goals drives a
company towards efficiency, because profit is the difference between what
you can sell something for (the value provided to customers) and what it
costs to provide it.  Delivering the same value while using less (labor,
resources, energy, ...) is both more profitable and more "ecological".
The alternative is waste.

(This is not to say that free market forces always work in a "green"
manner, but the central reason they don't is the failure to account for
so-called "external costs" like pollution and degradation of the
environment.  This is a huge issue which could fill books, so I'm not
going to tackle it here.  Another reason is that Wall Street's focus is
very short term - did you make earnings this quarter? - whereas the true
health of a company is a longer-term issue.)

For the same reason, profit drives companies to try to provide greater
value for the same cost.  This is also a good thing in general.

It is virtually never a company's goal to "provide jobs".  It is a company's
goal to provide something that its customers want, some product or service.
Jobs, and capital expenditures, flow out of this.

> The organization takes little responsibility for the well-being of the
> low-echelon stakeholders.

This isn't universal.  It's less true in Japan, for example, than in
the U.S.  And it also cuts both ways.  Many low-level employees take
little responsibility for the well-being of their company.

> The hierarchy of stakeholders determines the allotment of the benefits

Another symptom of the profit-is-evil syndrome is a marked tendency to
talk in terms of dividing a fixed pie, as if life and business were
zero-sum games where whatever one person gains is something someone else
loses.  But life is not a zero-sum game.  Wealth can be created, value
can be created, through intelligence and effort.  Knowledge can be
gained and recorded and accumulated over centuries, leading to a
steady progress of civilization.  The average American today has a much
longer life expectancy than the Pharaohs of Egypt or the Caesars of Rome,
and is richer in many ways as well.  Most entrepreneurs I know think
in terms of growing a bigger pie much more often than they think about how
to slice up a fixed-size one.  Thinking of everything in zero-sum terms
is a habit of poverty.

> Labor is necessary; workers are not.  If a worker can be replaced
> with a machine (getting rid of inefficient, messy humanity entirely),
> that is a good thing.

Repacing workers with machines is often a very good thing.  Using
electromechanical dishwashers instead of hiring servants or washing
all your dishes by hand, for example.  The whole point of the entire
industrial revolution was that some tasks can be done better and faster
by machine, especially repetitive boring ones.  This is just a fact,
it's part of how the universe is.  Yet there are neo-Luddites still
fighting against it as if it was some kind of wrong-headed policy
decision that could be reversed.  This is rather pathetic, and sad when
there are so many real and important issues that need our attention.
(Most of the communes in the original American communitarian movements
between 1830-1860 failed at least in part because they rejected the
industrial revolution and tried to return "back to the land" by farming.
Most of the 1960s communes, knowing not their own historical antecedents,
re-made the same mistakes.  One of the more stunning successes, by
contrast, the Oneida Community, built its own factories and made
flatware and animal traps.  Read J.H. Noyes, "A History of American
Socialisms", for details.)  The battle was over long before the folk
song John Henry was written:

        "and before I let that steam drill beat me down
         I'll die with my hammer in my hand"

And it was the wrong battle to begin with.  The real question was never
"people versus machines", but rather "people with machines versus people
without machines".  People with machines won.  The steam drill didn't
beat John Henry; its operator and owner (who don't appear in the song) did,
along with the people who built it, and the ones who maintained it.

Anyway, to get back to the original topic of emotional outbursts, I think
there are different kinds of meetings where emotions have more or less
relevance.  If one is holding a "values discussion", emotional input is
the main purpose of the meeting, and excluding it would be ridiculous.
If one is holding a "business meeting" to discuss finances, it's a lot
less clear that expressing emotions is useful or productive.  People who
cannot switch gears - who either cannot let their emotions out when they
should, or who who cannot keep their emotions in check when they should -
will have a problem, or be a problem, in one or the other situation.

        Howard A. Landman
        River Rock Commons
        Fort Collins, CO
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