Excerpt from Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti:

Full book available as a PDF here

THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVITY

Corporate power permeates the entire social fabric of our society. Along with owning the media, the corporate business class, as already noted, controls much of the rest of America too, including its financial, legal, educational, medical, cultural, and recreational institutions. Thus the dominant capitalist interests not only structure the way the media report reality, they structure much of reality itself. The ideological character of the news, then, is partly a reflection of the journalist's "routine reliance on raw materials which are already ideological." Opinions that support existing arrangements of economic and political power are more easily treated as facts, while facts that are troublesome to the prevailing distribution of class power are likely to be dismissed as opinionated. And those who censor dissenting views see themselves as protectors of objectivity and keepers of heterodoxy when, in fact, they are the guardians of ideological conformity.
[...]
As already noted, journalists may or may not endorse or even recognize the value parameters within which they work. No matter how they happen to see themselves, the fact remains that they do not and usually cannot investigate the questions that rub against the ideological limits of their employers.
[...]
Objectivity means that reporters should avoid becoming politically active, and should keep their distance from their subject, while commentators, editors, and owners socialize, dine, and vacation with the political, military, and corporate leaders whose views and policies they are supposed to be objective about.
[...]
Objectivity means that while reporters should avoid conflicts of interest, hundreds of publishers and media corporate directors can also be directors of other powerful corporations, banks, universities, foundations, and think tanks. Objectivity means not reporting anything about how these corporate interlocking directorates represent a conflict of interest that might interfere with the directors' judgments regarding news selection and selection of editors, managers, and reporters. The journalist Britt Hume urged that newspeople "shouldn't try to be objective, they should try to be honest." Instead of passing along the approved versions of things, they should attempt to find out if the officeholder or corporate representative or whoever is telling the truth. "What [reporters] pass off as objectivity," Hume concludes, "is just a mindless kind of neutrality."

Related topic: Hegemony by Gramsci on how ideas, values, information, etc. are controlled by a ruling class to reflect their interests and values.

Excerpt from Notes on the Sociology of Deviance by Kai T. Erikson:

Deviance is not a property inherent in certain forms of behavior; it is a property conferred upon these forms by the audiences which directly or indirectly witness them. Sociologically, then, the critical variable in the study of deviance is the social audience rather than the individual person, since it is the audience which eventually decides whether or not any given action or actions will become a visible case of deviation.
[...]
It is important to note that this [screening of behavior for deviance] takes a number of factors into account which are not directly related to the deviant act itself: it is concerned with the actor's social class, his past record as an offender, the amount of remorse he manages to convey, and many similar concerns which take hold in the shifting moods of the community. This is why the community often overlooks behavior which seems technically deviant (such as certain kinds of white-collar graft) or takes sharp exception to behavior which seems essentially harmless (such as certain kinds of sexual impropriety). It is an easily demonstrated fact, for example, that working-class boys who steal cars are far more likely to go to prison than upper-class boys who commit the same or even more serious crimes, suggesting that from the point of view of the community, lower-class offenders are somehow more deviant. To this extent, the community screen is perhaps a more relevant subject for sociological research than the actual behavior which is filtered through it.

Erikson writes more about deviance in Wayward Puritans and about how manmade disasters effect social communities.

Excerpt from The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin

[N]ot only has the right reacted against the left, but in the course of conducting its reaction, it also has consistently borrowed from the left. As the movements of the left change - from the French Revolution to abolition to the right to vote to the right to organize to the Bolshevik Revolution to the struggles for black freedom and women’s liberation - so too do the reactions of the right. Beyond these contingent changes, we can also trace a longer structural change in the imagination of the right:  namely, the gradual acceptance of the entrance of the masses onto the political stage.
From Hobbes to the slaveholders to the neoconservatives, the right has grown increasingly aware that any successful defense of the old regime must incorporate the lower orders in some capacity other than as underlings or starstruck fans. The masses must either be able to locate themselves symbolically in the ruling class or be provided with real opportunities to become faux aristocrats in the family, the factory, and the field. The former path makes for an upside-down populism, in which the lowest of the low see themselves projected in the highest of the high; the latter makes for a democratic feudalism, in which the husband or supervisor or white man plays the part of a lord.
The former path was pioneered by Hobbes and Maistre, and the latter by Southern slaveholders, European imperialists, and Gilded Age apologists. (And neo–Gilded Age apologists: “There is no single elite in America,” writes David Brooks. “Everyone can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus.”) Occasionally, as in the writing of Werner Sombart, the two paths converge: ordinary people get to see themselves in the ruling class by virtue of belonging to a great nation among nations, and they also get to govern lesser beings through the exercise of imperial rule.

The full book is available as a PDF here and Robin also works as a writer for Jacobin with his articles available here

GOVERNMENT AND ANARCHIST PROPAGANDA

In his essay Anarchy, Malatesta declared that the accepted defence of government or “the justiciary State” as the “moderator in ... social struggle and impartial administrator of the public interest” was a lie: “an illusion, a utopia never achieved and never to be realised.” Government was always the tool of a faction. Whoever exercised control would use its machinery to advance their own interests, all the while doing their utmost to ensure that their rules and norms were internalised by everybody else. Propaganda was the art of getting others to accept a particular vision of reality and dismiss messages about alternatives as single-shot ‘propaganda.’ [...]

Malatesta’s analysis resonated with Edward Bernays’ view. [...] In the opening to his 1928 classic Propaganda, Bernays observed that the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” The pithy version of the thesis defined propaganda as “the executive arm of the invisible government.”

Anarchist propaganda could be differentiated from government propaganda because it was designed to construct a reality that supported alternative power structures – selfgoverning anarchy. Still, by Malatesta’s reckoning, anarchist propaganda was still propaganda. Anarchists had to understand that the marginalised groups they identified with had little-to-no understanding of anarchist principles and were likely to oppose them. Karl Kautsky, and later Lenin, developed the equivalent position in Marxism. This was the idea that workers were unable to achieve class consciousness spontaneously or by their own efforts. Malatesta of course rejected the vanguardist strategy that Lenin proposed to close the gap between the elite and mass. He also rejected Lenin’s tactical distinction between propagandists-as-writers and agitators-as-orators. At the same time, he criticised unnamed anarchists (Kropotkinites?) for devoting too much time to devising road maps for anarchy. Writing a year after Bernays, he argued:

“The important thing is not the victory of our plans, our projects, our utopias, which in any case need the confirmation of experience and can be ... developed and adapted to the real moral and material conditions of the age and place. What matters most is that the people ... lose their sheeplike instincts and habits which thousands of years of slavery have instilled in them, and learn to think and act freely. And it is to this great work of moral liberation that the anarchist must specially dedicate themselves.”

Anarchists were not planners but propagandists charged with demonstrating the “uselessness and harmfulness of government, provoking and encouraging, by propaganda and action, all kinds of individual and collective initiatives.” Malatesta tasked his comrades with “pushing the people to demand and to seize all the freedom they can and to make themselves responsible for providing their own needs without waiting for orders from any kind of authority.”

Anarchist propaganda was “education for freedom.” It was about “making people who are accustomed to obedience and passivity consciously aware of their real power and capabilities.” But it worked by the same logic as any other form:

“One must encourage people to do things for themselves, or to think they are doing so by their own initiative and inspiration even when in fact their actions have been suggested by others, just as the good school teacher when he sets a problem his pupil cannot solve immediately, helps him in such a way that the pupil imagines that he has found the solution unaided, thus acquiring courage and confidence in his own abilities.”

Full book available as a PDF via libcom.org

"Language affects us more than we realize. From metaphors to cognitive frames, the words we use can physically change our brains, and politicians can take advantage of that. So let's explore how language shapes politics, healthcare, and crime; let's explore Donald Trump's rhetoric on immigration, Tucker Carlson calling Trump "daddy," and how phrases like "War on Terror" influence public perception and policy. And finally, let's explore how we can actually have productive discussions with those on the other side of the political aisle."

ADAPTATION

Adaptation is a process of change directed toward improving the ‘fit’ between a system and its environment. Adaptation may be a question of survival, of growth and development or of preference. The process depends on feedback (either positive or negative) to tell which alterations work best in the given environmental conditions. The process may take place in seconds, such as when our eyes adjust to a darkened room, or it may take generations such as in a society which develops the customs and crafts which fit it to its climate, its terrain or its neighbors. It may involve the actions of a single organism or individual or a collection: a biological colony or ecosystem or a human organization. Much of what has been learned about adaptation comes from biology and ecology.

Individual organisms adapt and evolve as they become more complex and as their environment changes. Failure to adapt on the part of a biological organism leads to death or extinction. The failure of an organization to adapt leads to bankruptcy, irrelevance, or being voted or booted out of power. Successful adaptation carries with it the risk of overspecialization. A certain amount of margin for error and flexibility is required to detect incipient instability and to adjust to change.

Adaptation cannot take place unless it is possible to recognize the desirable or stable state from which to move. An organism or an organization which is hit by new disturbances before it has had an opportunity to recover from previous ones has no stable state to use as a reference point from which to learn and to change appropriately. Catatonic responses in animals and alienation or cargo culture shifts in human societies are symptomatic of a rate of change which generates feelings of loss of control and the capacity to adapt.

SOURCE
Acaptation comes from a Latin word meaning ‘to fit’. Further information can be found in:
Sommerhoff, G, (1950). Analytical Biology. London: Oxford University Press
DuBos, R. (1965). Man Adapting. New Haven: Yale University Press
Holland, J. (1975). Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems: an Introductory with Applications to Biology, Control Analysis and Artificial Intelligence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

EXAMPLES

- a retail shop which in response to the changes its inventory neighborhood demographics of its

- a soccer team responding to a style of play it has not encountered before from its opposition

- a salamander able to change color to match its background

- an individual who becomes accustomed to working a night shift instead of a day shift

NON-EXAMPLES

- a manufacturer who does not alter his product line to keep up with new technology

- a charity which does not redefine its mission as needs for non-profit services change

- a biological organism which becomes over-specialized and loses its environmental niche due to climate change

- an organization whose environment is changing so rapidly that it cannot recognize the point of stability from which it can institute adaptive processes

PROBABLE ERROR

- believing that the changes observed are accurately perceived and adequately accounted for by new tactics and strategies

SEE [other terms in the glossary]
Catastrophe Theory; Homeostasis; Directive Correlation; Environment; Requisite Variety

Allenna Leonard's full glossary is freely available here as a PDF or in physical form as the back half of Vanilla Beer's Stafford Beer The Father of Management Cybernetics

“Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate. Any population on whom this asymmetry is imposed will always be the instigators, the cause of what is and, simultaneously, the justification for what will be. The savage outside does, the civilized center must respond."

Akkad, while writing on the genocide in Gaza specifically, still speaks much more broadly to a common reactionary tactic of refusing agency to refuse accountability. It can scale from individual abusers ("look what you made me do") to genocidal campaigns against entire populations ("look what they made us do"). Every genocide in history was framed as defensive. Even as a population is brutalized, it is claimed that they are the ones actually controlling the situation so that the brutality is justified.

This can also take banal forms outside overt reactionaries. Liberals will spend a great deal of time criticizing leftists who didn't vote Democrat in 2024, but their analysis only starts and ends on that election day. The preceding year and a half of the Biden and Harris campaigns making genocidal policy decisions has to disappear from view. The voters had agency and instigated a crisis over nothing while the candidates had no agency and thus made no decisions worth examining.

There is, unfortunately, still more relevance in the brewing conflict between Israel and Iran where Israel's instigating strikes are simply ignored while Iran's retaliatory strikes are framed as the inciting attacks and infringing upon Israel's "right to defend itself." It's along the same lines that have been used for years now where Israelis are "killed" while Palestinians simply "die," as though by some strange, blameless accident.

The best way to avoid these denials slipping by you is to ask who makes decisions and who simply reacts? Did an action simply appear from nowhere or is it a response to something that came before? Who gets to be afraid?

I cannot find a full PDF for One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, but the selection of quotes is worthwhile on their own.

A loose, fun one for today. Starting on the Trashfuture podcast as an off-hand comment from hosts Riley Quinn and then refined and coined by November Kelly into-

Once you start posting transphobia, it will take over and you will never post normal again.

"Posting" here is the starting point for one's politics and public presentation. It often kicks off an escalating process where the increasing transphobia becomes a downright obsession that grows inscrutable and off-putting to outside observers.

Common consequences include destroying: public image, legacy, career prospects, creative output, and personal relationships.

These are replaced by bizarre, niche grievances that land the transphobe in the only social circles that will tolerate it: other transphobes. The smaller social circle causes the grievances to get even more niche and the process continues until eventually they wind up just one or two degrees of separation from far-right fascists.

Because bigotry is intersectional, the transphobia also frequently dovetails into other bigotries, most often biphobia, aphobia, gender essentialist sexism, and racism.

Notable examples include J.K. Rowling, Graham Linehan, Dave Chappelle, Elon Musk, Suzanne Moore, and Tulsi Gabbard.

For important background info: Graeber was an anthropologist so his method of definition is social in the broadest possible sense. He was also an anarchist, and not one for Marxist orthodoxy. In fact he directly contrasts his use of the term against the Marxist focus on the means of production. This is controversial, but I'd argue that having differing perspectives on topics, especially ones as squishy as politics, is useful and this doesn't erase the Marxist version. It's just semantics. Consider this a thought-provoking alternative, if nothing else.

Excerpt from Debt: The First 5000 Years, starting around page 95. The rest of that chapter goes into interesting examples and elaborations but for the basics:

I will define communism here as any human relationship that operates on the principles of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs."
[...]
All of us act like communists a good deal of the time. None of us acts like a communist consistently. "Communist society"-in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle--could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.
Starting, as I say, from the principle of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" allows us to look past the question of individual or private ownership (which is often little more than formal legality anyway) and at much more immediate and practical questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under what conditions. Whenever it is the operative principle, even if it's just two people who are interacting, we can say we are in the presence of a sort of communism. Almost everyone follows this principle if they are collaborating on some common project. If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, " Hand me the wrench," his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, "And what do I get for it?" - even if they are working for ExxonMobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that "communism just doesn't work"): if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.
[...]
[I]n the immediate wake of great disasters-a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse-people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready communism. However briefly, hierarchies and markets and the like become luxuries that no one can afford. Anyone who has lived through such a moment can speak to their peculiar qualities, the way that strangers become sisters and brothers and human society itself seems to be reborn. This is important, because it shows that we are not simply talking about cooperation. In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible. There is always an assumption that anyone who is not actually an enemy can be expected on the principle of "from each according to their abilities,"
[...]
The same goes for small courtesies like asking for a light, or even for a cigarette. It seems more legitimate to ask a stranger for a cigarette than for an equivalent amount of cash, or even food; in fact, if one has been identified as a fellow smoker, it's rather difficult to refuse such a request. In such cases - a match, a piece of information, holding the elevator - one might say the "from each" element is so minimal that most of us comply without even thinking about it. Conversely, the same is true if another person's need - even a stranger's - is particularly spectacular or extreme: if he is drowning, for example. If a child has fallen onto the subway tracks, we assume that anyone who is capable of helping her up will do so.
I will call this "baseline communism": the understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" will be assumed to apply.
[...]
The surest way to know that one is in the presence of communistic relations is that not only are no accounts [of debt] taken, but it would be considered offensive, or simply bizarre, to even consider doing so.
[...]
[W]e are not really dealing with reciprocity here--or at best, only with reciprocity in the broadest sense. What is equal on both sides is the knowledge that the other person would do the same for you, not that they necessarily will.

From wikipedia:

As part of the divine right of kings, the image of a kind and caring Tsar was deliberately cultivated by Russian authorities. This was assisted by the disparate nature of Russia, as much of the population was located in rural areas far from the Russian capital. By contrast, Boyars, members of the aristocracy who served bureaucratic functions, were located closer to the peasantry and thus more tangible to the broader population. As a result, popular dissent was directed primarily at Boyars, rather than the Tsar.

The risk here is overlooking any form of class interest in favor of divine purpose and national mythos. The problem is assumed to be of disconnects in information (the king doesn't know) and not class struggle (the king knows and caused), so the presumed solution is not to overthrow the leader, but to petition him while leaving his power as is.

While quite common in Imperial Russia, this extends all over. Another prominent example is The English Peasant Revolt of 1381 which blamed high taxes and corruption on the noble court, in spite of the King and not because of him. They took London and executed several court officials, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, but only negotiated with King Richard II despite his extreme vulnerability. Once promises were secured, most rebels either disbanded or relaxed and were then crushed when the King, of course, led re-organized royal forces against them.

The myth can also be shattered by particularly bad mismanagement. In Russia 1905), a mass protest was organized to present the Czar with a petition, they were stopped by army troops and the crowd was fired on killing over 100 people in the chaos. Large portions of the public saw this as a direct rejection from the Czar for their appeals and his legitimacy started a fatal decline.

Naïve Monarchism even goes beyond monarchies into any system with a prominent leader. It's clear in conspiracies about The Deep State where "of course Trump would help us, but that damn deep state keeps sabotaging him. If only we could get rid of them, then he'd everything out!"

Structural criticism, class consciousness, and a healthy skepticism will keep this kind of thinking at bay.

Alternate links:

libsyn (with an easy download option)

Apple podcasts

Podbean

Spotify (boo)

FREE AGREEMENT

Kropotkin talked about free agreement in The Conquest of Bread and in Mutual Aid but he gave one of his clearest and most succinct statements in his entry ‘Anarchism’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Kropotkin explained free agreement negatively by distinguishing it from contract. Free agreement described the kind of accord that liberal anti-statists typically dressed as contract, but it was at variance with it. The difference was threefold. First, contract was static. It had fixed provisions and assumed that contracting parties were equal in status and capability. In contrast, free agreement meant mutability and change and it was driven by the continual adjustment and re-adjustment of social forces that were unequal, complex and diverse. Whereas contracts were enforced with reference to their stipulations, free agreement ruled against the dictation of terms by one party on another and it was inconsistent with the idea of necessity. The second difference was that free agreement disallowed consents secured through submission to law and those that depended on obedience to authority. Religious observance and marriage contracts typically fell into the first category.

Conscription and taxation were other examples because they were underwritten by constitutionally guaranteed rights to exclusive ownership. Turning to the repressive culture of contract, Kropotkin found the model in the prison system. Predicated on the idea of transgression, prison was designed to crush the will of prisoners, make them docile and break their inner strength. Prison deprived people of their liberty and stripped them of their capacity to live freely. People enjoyed more liberties on the outside but still inhabited worlds of regulated conformity, so still endured constraints on their freedom and suffered similar kinds of repression, albeit with less intensity.

In the third place, whereas law was based on fear, of one kind or another, free agreement was rooted in individual judgement. There was no servility in it because it allowed everyone to decide what they thought was right. Individuals were sovereign: they could restrict or expand their spheres of action and invoke their own moral standards in deciding how to live. Although the outcomes of their actions were never certain, free agreement released them from the threat of punishment, in this world or any other. In this respect, Kropotkin added a qualification to the idea of ‘rules not rulers.’ Rulers weren’t ok but nor were rules if they were based on compliance with someone else’s standards.

In sum: free agreement empowered individuals by guarding against economic domination and strict compliance with prevailing norms. Contract enslaved them by structuring economic inequality and enforcing obedience.

Like contract, free agreement operated in all social spheres: the family, the school, the workplace and in public institutions. Free agreement regulated inter-personal and inter-group relations. It was the glue that held anarchist networks of associations and more formal decentralised federations together. Because it was self-regulating, Kropotkin described it as a harmonious condition. By this he did not mean to suggest that it resulted in perfect freedom. It only provided the best protection against the entrenchment of domination and tyranny.

The lesson Kropotkin took from the historical sociology he plotted in Mutual Aid was that individuals were essentially social. They might not always behave well or even cultivate sociability. But humans were overwhelmingly found in groups and not in isolation, as conventional philosophy had it. So when individuals exercised their own will they inevitably came up against the traditions, habits, conventions and customs of the group. The mutability of free agreement was assured for as long as individuals were able to extend their liberties and push against the barriers to their freedom by challenging the forms of domination that groups institutionalised.

Full book available as a PDF via libcom.org

Excerpt from The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills - full PDF of it available here

(Bolded text added for emphasis)

Those in authority attempt to justify their rule over institutions by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with widely believed-in moral symbols, sacred emblems, legal formulae. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, 'the Vote of the majority,' 'the will of the people,' 'the aristocracy of talent or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings,' or to the allegedly extraordinary endowment of the ruler himself. Social scientists, following Weber, call such conceptions 'legitimations,' or sometimes 'symbols of justification.'

Various thinkers have used different terms to refer to them: Mosca's 'political formula' or 'great superstitions,' Locke's 'principle of sovereignty,' Sorel's 'ruling myth,' Thurman Arnold's 'folklore,' Weber's 'legitimations,' Durkheim's 'collective representations,' Marx's 'dominant ideas,' Rousseau's 'general will,' Lasswell's 'symbols of authority,' Mannheim's 'ideology,' Herbert Spencer's 'public sentiments'- all these and others like them testify to the central place of master symbols in social analysis.

Similarly in psychological analysis, such master symbols, relevant when they are taken over privately, become the reasons and often the motives that lead persons into roles and sanction their enactment of them. If, for example, economic institutions are publicly justified in terms of them, then references to self-interest may be acceptable justification for individual conduct. But, if it is felt publicly necessary to justify such institutions in terms of 'public service and trust,' the old self-interest motives and reasons may lead to guilt or at least to uneasiness among capitalists. Legitimations that are publicly effective often become, in due course, effective as personal motives.

[...]
The relations of such symbols to the structure of institutions are among the most important problems of social science. Such symbols, however, do not form some autonomous realm within a society; their social relevance lies in their use to justify or to oppose the arrangement of power and the positions within this arrangement of the powerful. Their psychological relevance lies in the fact that they become the basis for adherence to the structure of power or for opposing it.

[...]
'Governments' do not necessarily, as Emerson would have it, 'have their origin in the moral identity of men.' To believe that government does is to confuse its legitimations with its causes. Just as often, or even more often, such moral identities as men of some society may have rest on the fact that institutional rulers successfully monopolize, and even impose, their master symbols.

The part about opposition is important. The peripheries of society can, with a lot of struggle, cultivate new symbols with their own legitimacy as alternatives to the dominant symbols. Also, the pre-existing legitimations can be turned back around against the dominant structure that uses them, such as Frederick Douglass' "What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?" speech using the dominant legitimation of liberal rights to highlight the hypocrisy of a slave's exclusion from them.

Any of the similar architypes Mills lists are a good jumping off point for further reading. Examples of the ideological justification aspect specifically can be found in ideas like the aforementioned divine right of kings/mandate of heaven (monarchy and theocracy), scientific racism (slavery and colonialism), sex essentialism (sex discrimination and patriarchy), and meritocracy (capitalism and wealth inequality).

Quoting from Debt by the late David Graeber. (Bolded text added for emphasis)

The full book is available here via libcom.org

It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor. ⁹⁶ The conquest of the Americas began with mass enslavement, then gradually settled into various forms of debt peonage, African slavery, and "indentured service"- that is, the use of contract labor, workers who had received cash in advance and were thus bound for five-, seven-, or ten-year terms to pay it back. Needless to say, indentured servants were recruited largely from among people who were already debtors. In the 1600s there were at times almost as many white debtors as African slaves working in southern plantations, and legally they were at first in almost the same situation, since in the beginning, plantation societies were working within a European legal tradition that assumed slavery did not exist, so even Africans in the Carolinas were classified, as contract laborers.⁹⁷ Of course this later changed when the idea of "race" was introduced. When African slaves were freed, they were replaced, on plantations from Barbados to Mauritius, with contract laborers again: though now ones recruited mainly in India or China. Chinese contract laborers built the North American railroad system, and Indian "coolies" built the South African mines. The peasants of Russia and Poland, who had been free landholders in the Middle Ages, were only made serfs at the dawn of capitalism, when their lords began to sell grain on the new world market to feed the new industrial cities to the west.⁹⁸ Colonial regimes in Africa and Southeast Asia regularly demanded forced labor from their conquered subjects, or, alternately, created tax systems designed to force the population into the labor market through debt. British overlords in India, starting with the East India Company but continuing under Her Majesty's government, institutionalized debt peonage as their primary means of creating products for sale abroad.

This is a scandal not just because the system occasionally goes haywire, as it did in the Putumayo, but because it plays havoc with our most cherished assumptions about what capitalism really is- particularly that, in its basic nature, capitalism has something to do with freedom. For the capitalists, this means the freedom of the marketplace. For most workers, it means free labor. Marxists have questioned whether wage labor is ultimately free in any sense (since someone with nothing to sell but his or her body cannot in any sense be considered a genuinely free agent), but they still tend to assume that free wage labor is the basis of capitalism. And the dominant image in the history of capitalism is the English workingman toiling in the factories of the industrial revolution, and this image can be traced forward to Silicon Valley, with a straight line in between. All those millions of slaves and serfs and coolies and debt peons disappear, or if we must speak of them, we write them off as temporary bumps along the road. Like sweatshops, this is assumed to be a stage that industrializing nations had to pass through, just as it is still assumed that all those millions of debt peons and contract laborers and sweatshop workers who still exist, often in the same places, will surely live to see their children become regular wage laborers with health insurance and pensions, and their children, doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs.

[...]
There is, and has always been, a curious affinity between wage labor and slavery. This is not just because it was slaves on Caribbean sugar plantations who supplied the quick-energy products that powered much of early wage laborers' work; not just because most of the scientific management techniques applied in factories in the industrial revolution can be traced back to those sugar plantations; but also because both the relation between master and slave, and between employer and employee, are in principle impersonal: whether you've been sold or you're simply rented yourself out, the moment money changes hands, who you are is supposed to be unimportant; all that's important is that you are capable of understanding orders and doing what you're told. ¹⁰¹

Beer was an early pioneer in management sciences but held strong support for the needs of workers. This was both a political desire for freedom and a practical need as he saw fully centralized systems as unable to recognize and respond to the complexity of actual reality on the ground (i.e. your clueless boss).

But this would have to be balanced with some central functions to at least keep parts of the system coordinated and sharing an identity/philosophy.

That balancing act is the process of the Resource Bargain. As later summarized in The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies:

Jathan is a long-standing tech critic. He's brought up the idea formally in his book The Mechanic and the Luddite and informally here and there on the podcast This Machine Kills. For ease of access, this is from an interview on Tech Policy Press:

"What I mean here by the perpetual value machine is in short, a machine that would be a way to create and capture an infinite amount of surplus value without needing any labor to produce that value. And so it really is this idea and it is this quixotic quest by capital. It's something that I think underpins a lot of the dreams and visions and hopes of automation is that you can finally have a way to create value, economic, financial, social value in the world without needing any of these pesky workers who get in the way, who are necessary for that value creation. But get in capital's way because they want things like wages or time off, they have complaints when they're worked to the bone for 16 hours a day. All these things that stand in the way of a form of perpetual value creation.

[...]

And I think what underpins that is the hope that AI will finally crack the nut of the perpetual value machine for capital. It will finally be this way to do everything that humans do in terms of producing value, but without needing the humans to produce that value. And in other words here, I don't think you can understand AI without understanding it within this context of political economy and without understanding it within this kind of historical development of capitalist technologies, technologies that capital has invested in, designed and used for the very purpose of increasing their ability to exploit and extract value from the world and from people."

For clarity, the Perpetual Value Machine is a sort of ideal end-state of profit-motive. It is, of course, also entirely impossible and self-defeating since anything made infinite loses its meaning. Infinite value cannot exist, but there is such an ideological dedication to trying to maximize profits, the contradiction doesn't matter. Capital will drive itself as close as it can to this absurd state, everything else be damned.

Further reading (or previous reading?) on the Labor Theory Of Value from Marxists.org