Developing Culture

Corporations eat cultures faster than worker's birth and grow them

Recently I read the Kayanerenko:wa for the first time. This was a legal book/study guide for the Haudenosaunee system of law known as the Great Law of Peace, consisting of the constitution itself, the story of it’s formation, and contextual background/case law in practice. As a culture that was subjected to brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns, repeated brutal wars, and eventually outright genocide and extermination, parts of the culture and history are entirely missing and gone to us.

What is notable here is what is gone: the culture of governance of women, women’s duties, women’s rituals, which went unrecorded by western men charting and recording these systems, because of the misogyny and ignorance of the west. However, what is intact is the men’s culture of governance, the “Great Law of Peace” which describes the relationships, duties, responsibilities, expectations of the tribal chiefs and the structure of ceremonies, meetings, etc.

This government, however, does not have enforcement mechanisms, it does not control the behavior of people within tribes, in the manner of control that we are familiar with in western societies. Even more strangely, this government has mechanisms built in for temporary disbandment, reformation, expansion, and contraction, and even *makes room for other governing cultures in it’s society* as during times of war, “war chiefs” would often form separate governments from the great council during the times of war, with minimal technical connection to the primary system of law.

This is very different from how western societies work, in which the culture is, quite simply, the culture of the king or of the government, almost exclusively, on a massively top down basis enforced by violent mandate at it’s most base level. Western culture is so consolidated and centralized that even the bulk of cultural analysis and the study of cultural development uses society as a whole as the unit of cultural development and analysis (such as the integral movement, spiral dynamics, or Hanzi Frienacht’s system).

How would we apply this same system to the Haudenosaunee, who have multiple overlapping cultures at different stages of development, existing under varied material conditions and deployed in diverse and separate contexts? The simple answer is that we can’t - the methods and qualitative nature of these overlapping cultures is actually different enough that we can not simply lump them into these large baskets of culture.

A smaller unit for “culture”

In order to analyze more diverse cultures in detail and dig deeper into the development of cultures, I’m defining a culture as a way of doing things or a behavioral pattern that is maintained and transmitted socially through a narrative or a story about this behavior pattern/way of doing things. While this definition is rather abstract, and is inspired by the Haudenosaunee, if we take a second look at western cultures we will actually find the same patterns. The development of religious institutions alongside governance institutions was a persistent feature of western societies going back at least to the Ancient Greeks, while they were still interrelated they were separate systems with separate leaders, separate goals, separate material interests and participation, while often mutually required, still varied in intensity and thoroughness of role.

This only expanded dramatically through the history of the west, with separate cultural groups developing their internal practices, beliefs, ways of being over time. The masons and freemasonry is one such example, which is quite literally a series of stories and ceremonies that teach a series of skills and a way of being, stories largely around the early masons, the tools of the trade as symbols, and around tradecraft and interactions with bosses and with the public. By the middle ages, various orders of monks would develop similarly with production cultures for wines, crops, books, and so on.

These cultures each followed their own developmental paths in response to material conditions - the movement of the masons into Britain around the 900s lead to a series of changes that introduced literacy and expanded the lay population of the masonic orders, and we see it’s values and stories grow more abstract, but has failed to further develop much since the 1800s.

This conception was also inspired by the news of an orangutan applying a plant poultice to his own facial wound to speed up healing and prevent infection, to ease pain. We have noted “cultures” in animals, such as young elephant burials upon death, and unique behavior patterns and vocal patterns to different groups of whales and porpoises, chimps, gorillas, and even some monkeys. The development over time of these cultures is pretty limited however, it appears learning is very direct and immediate and the rate of transmission is low for at least the land mammals that exhibit evidence of culture. We, however, tell stories to explain how and why things work and to describe what we should do. Stories appear to hold a special place in establishing the technical paradigm of a culture, whether that’s a story about what a chemical is and how it interacts with others, a story about the rules that numbers obey, or a story about our origins.

Production Cultures

A very unspecial form of culture that is highly important to human history is the production cultures. Anthropologically we label some periods of history by their tool use and production cultures, such as the “corded ware culture” or the “globular amphora culture” or the “pit comb culture” Generally speaking, a production culture has stories about what good production and good relations to production look like, about how the job is done, about the tools used and their importance. These cultures appear to form and grow basically anywhere a surplus exists and provides people with free time to investigate and explore the intricacies of reality and to experiment and expand upon existing production cultures, and to create new ones.

These production cultures are stewarded by the old masters, who grow up the next generation of experts, who continue to grow the culture as they grow old. The old provide the young with guidance and teaching, the young handle the simple work they are just learning to master so the masters can grow throwing themselves against the limits of the craft. The expert culture is funded by the prices it charges the public for it’s services, and these, while generally generous, are rarely draining to the other parts of society, in contrast to governance & religious cultures, that don’t seem to respect the limits of what others can afford or what is fair. With each passing generation, the institutions grow, the positions diversify, as does the expertise, and the culture develops into complex interrelations that enable deeper pursuits at the edges of the complexity of the culture.

For example, during the late bronze age society had grown rather complex and interrelated. The imports and exports between areas enabled a complexification of technology and an explosion of the size of society and had developed to a massive scale, writing, calendars, complex trade networks, systems of law, on the back of the tools enabled by the bronzeworking production culture, which improved the conditions for the further development of bronzeworking, with the masters eventually trying their hand at a bit of other metals, even some iron.

Our current set of production cultures began it’s run coming out of the middle ages into the so called “enlightenment” era, with cultures such as masonic culture, convent culture, monastery culture, beginning to stitch together complex industries, as well as urban surpluses playing off one another to begin a more robust investigation into the sciences. Guilds and workshops grew and expanded and we had a wide and diverse range of production cultures developing.

Disaster Struck - the Capitalist Culture

In addition to these production cultures, and the standard exploitation of kings, lords, and religious leaders, a new kind of predatory culture would gradually emerge over the course of the 1300s and 1400s as groups like the Knights Templar began to push against the firm prohibitions of usury and the abuse of capital deals in the course of the later crusades, and as the protestant reformation began and weakened the church as well as pulling attention away from usury as a core issue of debate.

At the shattering of the knights templar, many of the people who had been involved in these usurious games of capital to exploit leaders would keep their lessons, and would use any wealth obtained or held to begin to purchase equipment, as machines began to become more important to production, instead of working this capital, they used their political skills to partner with lords and kings to remove peasants from the land and make them poor and homeless, subject to threat for their poverty, and these capitalists who engaged in this enclosure and cleansing of lands would then hire these dispossessed serfs for labor. The point of all this is to gain leverage over the dispossessed serfs such that their only options are to enter into the slavery-like employment contracts selling themselves to their bosses for their own survival, or face the violence of the state for vagrancy.

Through corruption, the predatory capitalist culture would predate the production cultures, often destroying skilled labor cultures, their stories, their lived experience, their practical knowledge, and replacing it with mechanical systems that do the basic job, but never the complex, cutting edge of the job. Various politics has protected a number of sources of scientific and production cultures since the beginning of capitalism, institutions like the university system that dates back a bit over a thousand years, and a number of skilled trades, including precision machining, have remained extant production cultures with segments uncaptured by capitalists or protected by union organizing, or by government institutions seeking to avoid collapse.

Diverging from stability/homeostatis of culture

Corporations are predatory institutions. They do not create or maintain cultures, but rather they buy up production cultures and bleed them dry, attempt to mechanize their lessons and dispose of the people and stories. Bayer was not a seed/chemical company, when I worked there it was so clear that it was a *profit machine* the bulk of the culture and it’s material resources is in management, is in the culture of keeping the company in line and keeping a hole of all of the resources and connections any individual group of workers would need in order to do their jobs, to ensure workers have nowhere to go to engage in their culture except for the corporation. The leaders and management of Bayer do not care what the company makes, it is not relevant to them or what they do. What they care about is maintaining leverage over a production culture and using that leverage to acquire jets and fly to vacation spots like Little St. James island. The parent company where I work now is similar: a capital institution that makes money, not culture. We who make the culture are not free to explore it, but are highly controlled. The development direction - or lack thereof - is set by the owners who have leverage over and who have captured our culture. Our stories are replaced by carefully crafted corporate propaganda, telling us stories about the company’s history, purpose, it’s leader/founder’s greatness, and so on, the tool symbols and values of our culture replaced with “corporate values” and policies, enforced through a complex web of management finding ways to keep the lot of us in line, producing profits for their predatory culture.

A lot of people would suggest that I’m wrong, that corporate relations are not predatory, but voluntary. Let’s deal with that misconception right now by digging into what I mean by “predatory culture.” If you assume the goal of life is to maintain homeostasis and multiply, then the not-alive primordial soup rich in diverse, complex chemical processes looks chaotic, for everything you want to happen to make a copy or to control conditions, another process is working against you all around. To form life, these processes had to find a way to cooperate, and to coordinate their behavior, to isolate the inside of the system from the outside. Much later, colonies of single cells formed and gradually diversified and coordinated with each other sufficiently to expel divergent processes, and maintain a convergent homeostasis in the multicellular organism, that has gone on to be enormously successful across the planet. Similarly we can think of a predatory culture as one which diverges society away from homeostasis, and a productive culture as one which helps it converge towards homeostasis.

Today’s corporations have monopolized industries, have captured record shattering leverage over working people, their housing, and over every single culture of production. To boost efficiency and profits, they bought competing groups working the culture in different ways, eliminated half of them, and repeated this process dozens of times. Now each of our production cultures exists in only a couple of places in each global region, and is perpetually shortstaffed and underequipped, preventing any advancement not explicitly mandated or purchased by the corporation. A great deal of how we maintain society is right now held within a small number of corporations, and in an irresponsible manner that threatens the destruction of these cultures. I have seen it with my own eyes: at the start of my career just about a decade ago high quality parts were easy to get from almost any source, parts were rarely out of spec and options were plentiful. Today, there’s literally just a few major options and it feels like a 50:50 on whether or not even a loose tolerance will be met and it costs a lot more to pull the lever on this one armed man.

Bit by bit, piece by piece, our production cultures are dying, and because they are hidden away in corporations, and our mentorship programs and paths outside of corporations have become so sparse, that we have no real way to recreate them besides young people getting hired on at corporations for garbage wages to learn. The predation is too complete, and the type of farmer who guts the goose that lays the golden egg has become the archetype in charge of every corporation and the investment banks that pass down orders to the corporate chiefs.

Rebuilding Culture

Getting beyond the horrors of capitalist exploitation is not merely going to be a matter of stopping exploitation. We are going to have to rebuild systems for the stewardship and development of professional cultures, of production cultures. We are going to have to establish these cultures as institutions that anyone who seeks to know and grow can join, can be mentored, can contribute, and can grow the culture. I would like to become free of the debts that trap me and find my way in production without corporate backing, so that I can help set up template organizations, participate in networking, and work on building production and engineering cultures outside of corporate control, to help develop out the patterns, structures, and behaviors that teach people how to grow themselves into masters without masters to mentor them, that teach them how to show the youth the path to excellence and responsible stewardship of their practice, and which provide material support to free more workers and place more competitive pressure on parasite capitalists exploiting our comrades.

We should all seek to rebuild cultures - of art, of dance, of music, of conversation, of community organizing, of community development, of production, of science, and so on. We should be parts of multiple cultures, and we should seek to shape them in ways that allow for their complexification and deepening. Where our unions are corrupt, we should break and reform them, where are professional societies are exclusionary for the sake of chasing exploitative and exclusive profits, we should avoid them and build alternatives.

Lastly - it’s been a while since I’ve written here because I haven’t had much to say. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and deep dives to get through the next level of hurdles to my own development that I’d plateaued at during my last writing peak. I’m a bit too busy and exhausted to give this the energy and care it deserves, but I felt it relevant to put out a condensed updated of some of the theory I’ve been working on. There is a lot to discuss here, but I’ve got a lot of reading and a lot more organizing and business building to do to be able to process it into either a book, a video essay, or some other more in depth, long form content around achieving the goals outlined in the last section above.