Zeitgeist gets a rebrand…
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What is the Integral Collective?
According to Peter Joseph’s new website…
“Integral is a federated, post-monetary cooperative economy designed to incrementally replace capitalist market systems and hierarchical governance with a cybernetically coordinated, commons-based model of labor reciprocity.”
Easy for Peter Joseph to say. But what would your average worker make of it? Reads like a system of transitional Labour Vouchers to me.
Still, you got to give it to him, he never gives up. Zeitgeist was not politically, democratically or class consciously organised so it sank without trace. Will Integral fare any better?
Joseph seems to have regressed. After advancing beyond Technocracy and the Venus Project to Zeitgeist he has now regressed from educational consciousness-raising to something-now gradualism. At least he hasn’t gone reformist but he is advocating organising now on the economic field to try to gradually (“incrementally”, as he puts it) replace capitalism.
It does seem like a modernised version of the idea that was around in Marx’s day of organising cooperative workshops that would use labour notes (based on working time), both internally and externally, and which would gradually spread and replace capitalist production based on wage-labour until a complete “cooperative commonwealth” was established.
This assumes that such cooperative productive units would be able to outcompete capitalist enterprises but that was never on and is even less realistic today than it was in the 1840s and the 1860s.
In any event, they would have to operate within an overall capitalist environment from which they would be unable to escape or isolate themselves.
It sounds like a non-starter and that Marx was right — before socialism can become constructive the working class need to win political control and abolish the capitalist environment.
There are also problems with using time worked to access what you need. What about those who can’t work or for not as long as average (and those who can work more and so get more)? I am sure Joseph will have worked some way out to deal with this but it’s not in his initial manifesto.
Actually, on re-reading his manifesto I see he does touch on this problem;
“Integral functions by tracking voluntary labor contributions through time credits, which are not spent like money but act as symbolic tokens of one’s participation. These credits entitle individuals to access the outputs of other cooperatives within the network.
Labor is valued dynamically using AI-guided cybernetic feedback, which adjusts credit weighting in real time based on urgency, scarcity, and skill need—so if a task is highly demanded (like childcare), it earns more credit value. This motivates labor redistribution without money, wages, or central planning.”This raises other problems. He says here that “time credits … act as symbolic tokens of one’s participation” (in producing useful things or providing useful services). But they do more than this as they also determine how much you can access of what is produced. In his example someone working on childcare would get more credits than someone working in some less demanded line of activity and so be entitled to access more goods and services than the other person. If it didn’t there would be no particular advantage, in his blueprint, to switch to childcare.
As ever with PJ there’s no mention of political organisation, class warfare or revolution. He’s terrified of turning workers off. Yet he still has the habit of couching all of his arguments in impossibly technical language/jargon.
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