There are also some useful shared notes and links in the working doc from this session.

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More indications of how to restore a new balance towards egalitarian (or rather ‘equipotential’) outcomes come from David Graeber, who wrote a very important article summarizing the last 3 decades of findings from archaeology and anthropology, which have overturned many of our insights:

1) In the excerpt on Seasonal Reversals of Hierarchical Structures‎‎ he shows several examples of tribes and societies which combined more egalitarian and more hierarchical arrangements, according to context.

2) In the excerpt on the Transition from Foraging to Farming Societies‎‎, he shows that this was by no means a universal transition towards more hierarchy ; in fact, many agricultural societies and their cities had deep democratic structures (sometimes more egalitarian than their earlier tribal forms)

3) Finally in the last one, Top-Down Structures of Rule Are Not the Necessary Consequence of Large-Scale Organization, he gives several examples showing ‘size does not matter’

All this should give us hope, that the evolution towards the current hierarchical models are not written in stone, and that societies can be more flexible than they appear.

Seasonal Reversals of Hierarchical Structures

David Graeber: “From the very beginning, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. Anthropologists describe societies of this sort as possessing a ‘double morphology’. Marcel Mauss, writing in the early twentieth century, observed that the circumpolar Inuit, ‘and likewise many other societies . . . have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer months, Inuit dispersed into small patriarchal bands in pursuit of freshwater fish, caribou, and reindeer, each under the authority of a single male elder. Property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, another social structure entirely took over as Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale-rib, and stone. Within them, the virtues of equality, altruism, and collective life prevailed; wealth was shared; husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Seals.

Another example were the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Canada’s Northwest Coast, for whom winter – not summer – was the time when society crystallised into its most unequal form, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastlines of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations, still ranked, but with an entirely different and less formal structure. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter, literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.

Perhaps most striking, in terms of political reversals, were the seasonal practices of 19th-century tribal confederacies on the American Great Plains – sometime, or one-time farmers who had adopted a nomadic hunting life. In the late summer, small and highly mobile bands of Cheyenne and Lakota would congregate in large settlements to make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. At this most sensitive time of year they appointed a police force that exercised full coercive powers, including the right to imprison, whip, or fine any offender who endangered the proceedings. Yet as the anthropologist Robert Lowie observed, this ‘unequivocal authoritarianism’ operated on a strictly seasonal and temporary basis, giving way to more ‘anarchic’ forms of organisation once the hunting season – and the collective rituals that followed – were complete.”

Transition from Foraging to Farming Societies

David Graeber: “Let us conclude, then, with a few headlines of our own: just a handful, to give a sense of what the new, emerging world history is starting to look like.

The first bombshell on our list concerns the origins and spread of agriculture. There is no longer any support for the view that it marked a major transition in human societies. In those parts of the world where animals and plants were first domesticated, there actually was no discernible ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic Forager to Neolithic Farmer. The ‘transition’ from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production typically took something in the order of three thousand years. While agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception. In the time between, people in areas as far removed as Amazonia and the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East were trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you like, switching annually between modes of production, much as they switched their social structures back and forth. Moreover, the ‘spread of farming’ to secondary areas, such as Europe – so often described in triumphalist terms, as the start of an inevitable decline in hunting and gathering – turns out to have been a highly tenuous process, which sometimes failed, leading to demographic collapse for the farmers, not the foragers.

Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like ‘the agricultural revolution’ when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity. Since there was no Eden-like state, from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of rank or private property. If anything, it is among those populations – the ‘Mesolithic’ peoples – who refused farming through the warming centuries of the early Holocene, that we find stratification becoming more entrenched; at least, if opulent burial, predatory warfare, and monumental buildings are anything to go by. In at least some cases, like the Middle East, the first farmers seem to have consciously developed alternative forms of community, to go along with their more labour-intensive way of life. These Neolithic societies look strikingly egalitarian when compared to their hunter-gatherer neighbours, with a dramatic increase in the economic and social importance of women, clearly reflected in their art and ritual life (contrast here the female figurines of Jericho or Çatalhöyük with the hyper-masculine sculpture of Göbekli Tepe).

Another bombshell: ‘civilization’ does not come as a package. The world’s first cities did not just emerge in a handful of locations, together with systems of centralised government and bureaucratic control. In China, for instance, we are now aware that by 2500 BC, settlements of 300 hectares or more existed on the lower reaches of the Yellow River, over a thousand years before the foundation of the earliest (Shang) royal dynasty. On the other side of the Pacific, and at around the same time, ceremonial centres of striking magnitude have been discovered in the valley of Peru’s Río Supe, notably at the site of Caral: enigmatic remains of sunken plazas and monumental platforms, four millennia older than the Inca Empire. Such recent discoveries indicate how little is yet truly known about the distribution and origin of the first cities, and just how much older these cities may be than the systems of authoritarian government and literate administration that were once assumed necessary for their foundation. And in the more established heartlands of urbanisation – Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Basin of Mexico – there is mounting evidence that the first cities were organised on self-consciously egalitarian lines, municipal councils retaining significant autonomy from central government. In the first two cases, cities with sophisticated civic infrastructures flourished for over half a millennium with no trace of royal burials or monuments, no standing armies or other means of large-scale coercion, nor any hint of direct bureaucratic control over most citizen’s lives.”

Top-Down Structures of Rule Are Not the Necessary Consequence of Large-Scale Organization

David Graeber: “notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization. Walter Scheidel notwithstanding, it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe. To take just one well-documented example: around 200 AD, the city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, with a population of 120,000 (one of the largest in the world at the time), appears to have undergone a profound transformation, turning its back on pyramid-temples and human sacrifice, and reconstructing itself as a vast collection of comfortable villas, all almost exactly the same size. It remained so for perhaps 400 years. Even in Cortés’ day, Central Mexico was still home to cities like Tlaxcala, run by an elected council whose members were periodically whipped by their constituents to remind them who was ultimately in charge.

The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.”

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You’ve probably heard of Loomio, the simple but effective decision making software from Enspiral, but what you might not have heard about are the patterns and principles which the founders of Loomio use in their own organisation.

Make no mistake Rich and Nati, who delivered this workshop as part of their grand tour, have been living and breathing this stuff for years. Their pragmatic inspiration shone through the event, like a beam of brilliance from above.

The event took place at the always inspiring Newspeak House, with roughly 30 participants split into groups. Rich warned us he would be delivering a lot of condensed information and I wondered if he would live up to the promise… 4 slides and 20 minutes later I was reeling with new ideas. It’s not that his patterns for working in groups are entirely novel – it’s that he’s thought about it, and clearly lived by the rules he so passionately espouses, I could almost feel his hard-earned acumen making its way from his brain into my own.

Take the first pattern for example: “Intentionally produce counter-culture” which you probably instinctively know is a good idea but what really struck me were the magic words: “belonging is a superpower”. This is something we so often fail to deliver on… If everyone in your group feels the same empowering sense of belonging there’s no limit to what can be achieved. Conversely, if new-comers struggle to find the inroads to find belonging within a group, or old timers lord it over knowledge and do not empower everyone with the same sense of worthiness within the group, belonging can crumble and with it goes organisational effectiveness. We came back to this theme in the second session (see below) but the other patterns are equally awesome.

With pattern 2, “Systematically distribute care labour”, Rich talked about everyone in their organisation being a steward for someone else and a stewardee too – to ensure everyone receives adequate support. Simple, effective relationship building which is bound to reduce conflicts.

Pattern 3 introduced the idea that groups should “Make explicit norms and boundaries” in order to avoid any ambiguity about what a group is, how it works, what it finds acceptable and what it will not tolerate. It sounds simple, but ignoring this step can be perilous.

Pattern 4 addressed the inevitable challenge with the wise words “Keep talking about power”. Refreshingly, Rich recognises that power imbalances are inevitable, citing the public speakers from any group as those that naturally accumulate respect and hence power. The down to earth advice on this one is to make it explicit who has it and to take turns, rotating roles by stepping out and encouraging others to step in. Brilliant advice which might be hard for some egos to hear.

Suddenly I felt myself drifting off – it was gone 11am and I had only had one tiny cup of tea… But before I knew it the inimitable tag-team had switched places and Nati was getting every one up and stretching to boost the oxygen to our brains. The rooms burst into a relived revelry of smiles and stretches and then just as quickly we were back at work.

Pattern 5 “Make decisions asynchronously” is so simple it’s surprising that more groups don’t follow the rule: Meetings are great for bonding and building trust, computers are great for helping us make better decisions – which can be more inclusive and less invasive; timely but not hurried. This is exactly what Loomio was built for.

Pattern 6 address the elephant which lurks in every room by asking groups to “Agree how you use tech”. I’ve never seen it put so simply before and this was a little revelation to me; the vast proportion of tech tools can be split into what Rich refers to as the ‘holy trinity’ for group management: A tool for realtime communication (i.e. chat), a space for asynchronous comms (email or a forum etc) and, a space for static content (a wiki or doc management app). If you can clearly define and agree which tool/s you will be using for each of these three essential areas of group work, your team is bound to be more effective.

Pattern 7 proposed “Using rhythm to cut information overload” by providing clear and well planned times for team members to tell others what they are up to and to find out who needs support. The real gem is to set the right length and kind of rhythms for the right types of sharing i.e. by using quarterly reviews to get everyone out of the office and bonding again (by creating ‘peak oxytocin’ moments!) and shorter cycles for discussing more day-to-day, week-to-week plans, reviews and celebrations.

Pattern 8 encapsulates the overall ethos, that groups should “Generate new patterns together”. Rich and Loomio have clearly learned the value of iterative development, and the power of regular review and reflection. There is enormous strength in continuous participatory change.

For the rest of the workshop they split us out into groups in which we defined a challenge we were facing, worked out a “desired future” and “next steps” to get there together. Our group chose to focus on the process of “on-boarding” and the challenge of empowering everyone, especially newcomers to a group, with the “superpower of belonging”. The ideas we came up with were many and varied and largely inspired by the patterns above and others’ lived experiences. You can see the ideas in the “Next steps” section of our worksheet – hopefully some of them will be useful for you in your groups.

I’d like to send a huge THANK YOU out to Rich and Nati for making this event happen and for delivering such a well planned and designed workshop with such timely content. The more effective we can make decentralised teams the more positive change we will be able to deliver. I highly recommend their future workshops to others, which I am sure will help inspire anyone that attends.

 

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