Life Project Teams.
” Never doubt that a small group of conscious and committed men can change the world. It’s even the way it’s always happened.” Margaret Mead.
This example is often cited in communication or management manuals as a question of a worker’s motivation :
Say who is the most motivated of the three men who work on a building construction site according to their response :
i carry a heavy stone,
i work for a living,
i build a cathedral.
The ability to strongly motivate and gather.
Life project teams have the ability to strongly assemble and motivate for several reasons:
- projects were selected together through political action and their usefulness is clear to all.
- they are the place for the development of social relations based on common action, that is, the exercise of power in their group of belonging.
- work is timed through the project’s stages and the end of a project is an opportunity to invest in new projects on site or through internal mobility elsewhere.
- each project develops personal skills and advances in levels of responsibility.
Finally, project membership takes place in full knowledge of the facts after consulting the list of open projects, here and elsewhere in the Confederation, the jobs to be filled and their remuneration, the skills to be developed, social and cultural benefits, etc.
We find what has been used in companies so far: quality circles in the 1980s and from the 1990s onwards, project teams in the automotive sector: Twingo, 308, etc. and in other industries.
What changes in life networks is the scope, the dimension of the mission of these life project teams. There is no longer a separation between a market and non-market economy, a profit and non-profit economy, between business and administration.
Creation of Life Project Teams:
A project team is formed during the political action to solve a problem of cause (dysfunction in the current situation) or a problem of purpose (setting new objectives).
The request to set up a life project team is validated by the political action assembly of the free city to which this team is attached.
The political nature of the project
may be related to the exercise:
- authority: minimizing violence in and around oneself,
- power: create, improve, remove a standard of living or one or more lifestyles
- command: to implement or improve, to remove a measure of application of a rule or standard of living.
The economic nature of the project is determined by the level of human activity
- work essential to life and survival
- making works that raise living standards and are passed on to future generations
- political action assemblies at local or federal level
We know the relationship between the first two levels of activity: the level of skills available makes it possible to further develop the production of works when the work essential to life and survival is carried out according to the objectives set.
But today, the need for survival work to combat climate change, the warming caused by human activity but also by the more intense activity of the sun as well as that of volcanoes, increase the need for skills. On the other hand, to combat these threats, the work focuses on the creation of works capable of resisting these threats and above all capable of being transmitted to future generations.
The first two levels of activity have thus become very intertwined and complementary in a major challenge that power systems refuse to take into account but that the Networks of Life are able to win.
Management strategy
Troubleshooting and objective setting
The first step is to position the project to meet its objectives: it can eliminate a malfunction or utilization problems or it can propose to achieve new performance or satisfy new needs.
When it comes to skills, projects to eliminate dysfunctions will, in principle, be easier to tackle. For projects with new objectives, the skills will be higher to deal with contingencies and risks. Their duration will be longer and the resources used will be greater.
This graduation in difficulties also serves as a basis for education and training networks and internships, apprenticeships especially for young people in vocational training or people in social reintegration.
The organization of work in these teams is discussed in the following chapters and especially at the level of the Social Institutions in the chapter Work in the Networks of Life.
At the moment we are characterizing the organization Life Projects Team according to the Management method. Projects is plural because the team can take care of a central project but requires the resolution of other related problems for its realization.
At the Policy Choice
Networks of Life do not develop an economy based on free markets and their privatization through increased and destructive competition. Not all management strategies in the liberal capitalist system are useful here.
The strategy of the life project teams is first conditioned by the use of the full currency and the circulation of bills of exchange or treasury bills between the various actors of a chain or a production process.
The two most useful strategies are then the strategy of vertical integration in production lines on the one hand and on the other hand the strategy of horizontal integration in conglomerates of various activities carried out in the same geographical framework such as the free city or the same political framework such as the National Confederation.
The use of the full currency with the Treasury Bills to rebuild France after 1945 also set up a powerful conglomerate that brought together many production lines. The CGE. We have worked for some time in two companies that have been run by the CGE: Thomson-CSF and then GEC-Alsthom… and we have experienced some of the ups and downs described in this article that illustrates our remarks.
document: excerpts,
Ambroise Roux’s CGE, “ minister-in-charge of Industry ”
Ambroise Roux’s CGE is the symbol of state-embedded “ capitalism without capital ”. Founded in 1898, it was mainly built after the war, and its dismantling began in 1983. It is the group that probably best illustrates the economy of administered funding: its financial resources come to a large part, not from the market, but from public contracts, grants, subsidies, incentives, subsidies. Representative of the “high tech colbertism”, Ambroise Roux’s CGE will not solicit the stock exchange, but will be able to connect with public funding to invest, export, set up abroad, develop its research. It will even make intelligent use of pre-financing from the public order to develop its production tool and ensure a cushion of resources that it will use for its investments and its self-monitoring.
Ambroise Roux knows how to be indispensable in all the major projects initiated by De Gaulle, financed by the State, with guaranteed outlets and protected from external competition: CGE thus occupies a central place in CII (Compagnie Internationale pour l’Informatique, created in 1966) then CII-HB (born of the merger of CII with Honeywell Bull in 1975), the drivers of the French IT project. Partner of CNET (Center nationale d’études des telecommunications) in France Time switching, it has long been a major player in the telecoms project with its subsidiary CIT, which became CIT-Alcatel after the merger with Alcatel in 1968. It is also in the nuclear/nbsp sector: it supported the PWR’s rival ( boiling water) project, which won the day. But it enjoys a near monopoly in the manufacture of power plant turbo-alternators, particularly through the absorption of Alsthom.
This latest acquisition, completed in 1970 (which also gave the CGE a leading position in the railway, and thus the high-speed train programs), was a great victory for Ambroise Roux in the battle that then pitted him against Paul Richard, the boss of Thomson. The enemy brothers fought in many other arenas, including telecoms and computers. The fight only ceased during the five years (1969-1974) following the establishment of an agreement between the two companies, in the name of the ‘ resistance to foreign competition ’ : a division of tasks nicknamed the ‘ Yalta de l’electronica ’.
…/…
After Valéry Giscard d’Estaing arrived at the Élysée Palace in 1974, the CGE, considered a “Gaullist” enterprise (its president had supported Chaban-Delmas during the presidential campaign), did not favor the new government.
…/…
So Georges Pébereau is leading a nationalized group. But nationalization will not change the CGE’s internal workings or its strategic choices. The new boss remains faithful to his predecessor’s legacy. He began to establish ties with Alain Boull (François Mitterrand’s industrial adviser), and thus positioned himself to enlist the state in the service of the group’s growth. Even Ambroise Roux would gradually regain his grace with the new government, becoming Mitterrand’s hidden adviser on industrial issues. The latter, despite its ideological differences with its predecessors, considers that industry is an attribute of sovereignty, that the role of the state is to promote the interests of national industry. So he pursued an interventionist policy, at least until the turn of 1983-1984. The CGE can redefine its portfolio of activities under the best possible conditions, since the State is often a shareholder of both the target and the prey.
CGE first strengthens its telecom hub with the acquisition of Thomson-Télécom. Thomson had broken the “ Yalta of electronics ” by entering the market, which was then being encouraged by the Telecommunications Branch (DGT), and had thus become a direct competitor in a rapidly growing sector. But in 1983 Thomson ran into technological and financial difficulties. Its president Alain Gomez knows that, to survive, his group must disengage from certain activities. Georges Pébereau took the opportunity to buy the telecom division of his competitor, and merged it with Alcatel. He evidently succeeded in presenting the merger as a necessity for France and France: to reduce development costs and to present a united front on the international battlefield. Once again, the public authorities are endorsing the policy of the CGE, which its president seeks to internationalize.
…/…Pierre Suard will be responsible for the privatization of CGE. The privatizations of that era illustrate the nature of French capitalism after nationalization. To overcome the lack of actors able to exercise control over newly privatized companies, a system of “hard cores”, of cross-shareholdings between pre-selected companies, is put in place. The minister is inventing oligarchic capitalism controlled by a public elite, of which Pierre Suard, like other bosses, is the beneficiary: the CEO has practically carte blanche to choose his shareholders.
…/…
Governance, management : the privatization shock
These companies were suddenly orphaned when the financial economy and Internet crawl system was dismantled. They had to learn how to raise money in financial markets, how to talk to shareholders and analysts, and they lacked that culture. The ability to mobilize resources through political influence rather than through market practice became wholly unnecessary when they had to operate within the European framework of globalized financial capitalism.
Privatization was a key moment in this regard. Indeed, the pre-nationalization CGE, closely tied to the state and governed by a self-replicating ruling elite, was a caricature of a private enterprise. Paradoxically, nationalization did not undermine this system.
source : From CGE to Alstom : a French story, written by Elie Cohen CNRS Economist, January, year 2004 In Sociétal Q1 2004 – N°43
This document demonstrates the weight of political leaders in this story of the economy of the Glorious Thirty that suddenly became unacceptable after 1973 by the new elected officials brainwashed with the liberal dogmas of the market economy and the prohibition of full currency.
The Life project teams are not a new, revolutionary or folkloric experience, but the resumption of this successful experiment, symbolized since by the establishment of the CGE as a large conglomerate capable of meeting almost all the development demands of the French authorities. They make sense in Economics and Management and again in Politics as part of our Networks of Life.
The political conflicts that precipitated its dismantling, its privatizations by apartments and finally the deindustrialization of France by the Anglo-Saxon financial oligarchy, do not exist in the Networks of Life. So the factors for success are there, provided, of course, that you leave the power systems.
The strategy of vertical integration in a Life Project also represents a production chain from raw materials to after-sales service. For example, the team of life projects that is responsible for developing energy production from hydrogen will set up a whole chain of production and consumption of this energy. There will be local and other institutions at the national level or in countries outside the national confederation. With the example of the CGE we just saw, it’s clear and easy to understand.
Legal status:
The project team, like a free city, is a network that brings together companies, free cities, other projects, the Confederation of Networks of Life, other companies or institutions still present in systems of power.
Its legal status is not that of a private or social enterprise, but that of a confederation of narrower dimensions than the Confederation of Life Networks. A free city thus gathers several project teams that work at the local level and depend on a branch located elsewhere. This city can, of course, create project teams in its own network, especially for the realization of works when a workforce is available and not used by other project teams.
Purpose:
To guarantee the satisfaction of individual material and intangible needs by organizing the work essential to life and survival.
Ensure full employment by managing jobs at the level of work, production and political action.
Ensure a higher level of skills among the life networks by organizing professional and private life, education and training courses, in which each member of the network can freely determine his or her choices.
Objectives:
The quantitative objectives set in the context of the work essential to life and survival, aim at achieving a level of abundance in the production of material wealth to satisfy individual needs. Second, and in agreement with the Confederation, quantitative production targets will include export trade. Arbitration depends on the resource requirements used to produce works at the local or confederal level.
Qualitative objectives are more present in the realization of the works and the management, the use of the common goods, in particular the heritage goods intended for leisure, family life, well-being, festive moments, etc.
Objective setting is the exercise of authority and command in a project team. Objectives vary depending on the progress of the project. The team is autonomous on this point. Where an objective calls into question a mission, a purpose of the project, the project management will debate with the level of political action which has decided on that project, if necessary or in the event of a dispute, with the Confederation.
The objectives, in the event of difficulties in achieving them, open up a new use of subsidiarity to find answers in other networks or project teams (top-down subsidiarity and solidarity practice) or by setting up, alone or with other interested project teams, an expert group to obtain the optimal solution. This will be tailored to the local circumstances of each team or each objective.
Resources used:
The resources used depend closely on local circumstances: environment, climate, available land, infrastructure, labor pool and skill level. The present enterprises of the liberal and financial system, as well as the craftsmen and merchants before the industrial era, in antiquity, have proceeded in the same way, using local opportunities and fleeing threats present in other territories.
Hardware Resources:
They use the existing heritage left by the liberal system of power, as long as it has not been destroyed during the restructuring or demolition of factories or offices.
Free cities, with or without the assistance of the Confederation, in their unions with other free cities, decide to build new facilities and premises adapted to accommodate life project teams.
This depends on their local opportunities. Example: education and training centers in places rich in cultural or welfare heritage; factories in areas where pollution removal is easier, management centers in areas well served by transportation and communication. This distribution is the domain of political action exercised in free cities and their network of production of agricultural, food, artisanal, commercial, industrial, health, hotel and restaurant goods and services, etc.
According to their unions and taking into account local particularities, a free city will specialize in such and such type of project teams and exchange this production with its associated cities to find the satisfaction of its other needs.
Hardware is managed as a common asset. Project teams rent these material resources. Where these have already been amortized in accounting terms, the cost of these leases remains minimal simply to maintain these material resources. This is a structural productivity gain and a positive economy of scale.
Human Resources:
They are essential and the main issue in the development of Life Networks. Without available or sufficient skills, a project cannot be created. The main issue is what we have already stated: use as the main source of productivity, the increase in skill level from the beginning to the end of the project. We’ll come back to that.
The priority lies in the success of a mix between experienced and beginner staff. Beginners, apprentices, trainees have a sufficient level of qualification to quickly acquire useful and indispensable experience. The project team in its wealth production network is a structure, a learning enterprise.
Sharing experience
is therefore essential at each stage of the project’s progress. Most of the time it is carried out through the ad hoc intervention of experts working in other project teams.
For example, a technician who has been involved in the integration of a weapons system into a radar on board a fighter aircraft may be sufficient to learn this approach of integrating an electronic system into a project team working on the nuclear submarine launcher system.
We lived through this case, except that this technician, like the other members of his team, could no longer bear the arrogance of the project manager, a rugged careerist, who had taken over for himself the success and prestige of this world-class technological performance.
A single man, this rather discreet technician with no important connections in the Paris region, knowing our project and its progress, had thought that he could be useful at home and especially during the assembly and integration phase of the weapon system. His request for a transfer was quickly accepted. Faced with the difficulties of the team that was facing this work for the first time, and in front of the project management gathered, calmly, he explained how to carry out this crucial step. The project manager and his team remembered that he had come from the establishment in the Paris region which, in the group, had successfully completed the first integration of a weapon system for the radar on board the Rafale.
Once we were lucky enough, the Branch quickly realized how lucky we had been and how deleterious it was to lose expertise if this technician had gone to foreign competition. The project manager in the Paris region was summoned and lectured on his non-participatory management and contradictory to the corporate culture.
The technician came to my office to accept our proposal to upgrade him to senior management status with the related pay, a promotion with an excellent salary increase, which he accepted without discussion, always as quietly and discreetly. Doubting the future of this former technician who had learned many things from his team as well as from the Polytechnicians of his team management, the project manager asked me for advice.
Without mentioning my poetic experience, which on my CV that he had read during my recruitment, was limited to the indication that for a few months with 500 other authors, I had been poet shareholder of the Cherche-Midi Publisher of the Librairie Saint Germain des Prés in Paris, I had discovered in this employee the abilities of a monk, or even a soldier monk, in short, a knight who moves at his pace in a world which he quite rightly perceives as being surrounded by perils, especially his modest social origin and the fact of not having attended an engineering school and even less a great school, hence his modesty and humility.
He had understood that he would not be able to eliminate all these dangers but at least defeat a certain number of them around him…because he was able to dare to remain himself and he was not afraid to clearly transmit to others his skills that he had acquired through his work and his intellectual gifts that we had all noticed and for me, also his gifts in the spiritual initiatory field that I had sensed.
In short, a real expert profile capable of using our two sources of knowledge, and therefore not a careerist for an extra penny, but capable of other great discoveries, initiatives and creativity to lead development, progress, in his home group, where he will go … but above all do not let him go to the competition and even less across the Atlantic!
This case convinced the Branch that the focus on developing a corporate culture that fosters a learning enterprise was a sound one that generated considerable productivity gains as the skills level rose across the group and across all business areas. Synergies were possible and should not be missed.
The life of project teams
Wealth production project teams are supported in human resource management by wealth production network management centers, as well as for logistical functions or supports.
The management center to which the project team is attached has the skills to define the position sheets and their levels of responsibility (NR) and thus their remuneration. This work will be validated and modified, improved by the project team on a case-by-case basis and as the project progresses. Similarly, the management center has the database of staff and its current or desired competencies of citizens.
Project team members already have their own networks of relationships with former colleagues or young apprentices or students. This allows project team management to quickly determine who is available now or later, who can be permanent, and who can be involved on an ad hoc basis at a particular stage of the project. The planned management of the staff needed to make the project a success thus takes shape and is updated according to the skill needs. The project can also feed messages, especially for the strong personalities who wish to run a business themselves or create a new project.
It is possible that at the end of a project, the same team will stay together to carry out a new project complementary to the first.
This principle is well known in industrial groups, especially in the automotive industry, mainly for engineers and executives who start by working in the design and creation group of the project and then in the group that organizes and directs the production. Once the organization of production has been set up, they develop the after-sales service to realize the comments and criticisms of consumers on their products. Armed with this experience, they go back and create a new project group.
technology resources:
Technical capital in social life networks is managed in common or collective ownership by the management centers of production networks. This management takes place in consultation with the free cities which are closely associated with this management.
After two years, as in Germany, depreciation from operating results translates into a zero value for this machine or equipment on an accounting basis.
The company managed by the project group and the free city may decide to keep the property and allocate the depreciation to a reserve account or better, sell the property and replace it with a better performing nine if it exists. The company uses its depreciation to purchase new equipment in order to guarantee a total quality objective: zero failures and use the source of productivity gains associated with production tool modernization.
An asset depreciated at a carrying amount of zero. This property can then be assigned to a training and learning center which will only pay the cost of moving and setting up on its premises. Training in the use of this property is carried out through exchanges and sharing of experience between the first enterprise which gives way to the second which receives the property.
The aim of this long-standing method of management by German companies is to ensure that pupils, students and apprentices in vocational training use only equipment of a maximum age of 2 to 4 or 5 years. Every two years, these training centers have more recent equipment which is donated and purchased free of charge from the production companies. Depreciated equipment that remains unoccupied is sold at reduced prices to subcontractors or other regions.
Here we are developing an important source of productivity gains: modernization of the production tool.
Management practice which is very little used in France by the bosses of the liberal system and which is illustrated by the fact that the average age of French robots is 17 years. Read the Proceedings Fact-finding mission on production costs in France of Thursday 22 November 2012 9.15 a.m. session at the National Assembly:
Document:
“Today, this modernization is the subject of only 28% of productive investments in France. With only 6.1% of GNP spent on machinery investment, we are among the last OECD countries, with Italy or Germany doing much better at 9% and 7.2% respectively. Indeed, the 21% decline in French industrial investment in 2009 was never compensated.
In 1999, the average age of the machine tool fleet was seventeen years in France, ten years in Italy and nine years in Germany. In other words, a significant part of our machines was financed by the Marshall Plan!
Moreover, our rate of robotization is very low compared to that of our neighbors: last year there were 34,500 robots installed in France, 62,000 in Italy and 157,000 in Germany, or 122 robots for 10,000 industrial jobs in France, 159 in Italy and 261 in Germany. The level of the French production apparatus therefore leaves much to be desired, which constitutes a serious handicap on the market.
This makes it difficult for us to meet the quality and responsiveness requirements of our customers, but also to adapt to the increasing sophistication and personalization of new products, as well as their constant evolution.”
These technological resources are thus managed in production channels from the large company to the smaller one. Planning for investment in goods and production equipment is useful and indispensable for the management of the full currency and the financing of new equipment to be produced, so as to ensure that the technology needs of the enterprises managed by the life projects are met.
This management is practiced between the unions of free cities where these production equipment are located and for new equipment and new technologies, the Confederation’s assistance to bring or create full currency intervenes as soon as necessary.
The Confederation of Life Networks ensures that the technologies essential to the management of human activity on its three levels: work, work, political action, are available in sufficient quantity. In particular, in the event of crises due to natural disasters or pandemics and in the event of war between nations subject to systems of power in order to defend the Confederation of Networks of Life and its free citizens. Likewise, the Confederation ensures the research and development of innovations within the framework of the practice of subsidiarity at the level of the political action of citizens.
The use of alternative technologies is based on a trade-off to determine their level of use in each area of human activity. When they make it possible to free up labor in the work indispensable for life and survival, that labor is available for the realization of works that raise the standard of living and are passed on to future generations. Likewise for their use in the realization of works. The limits to the use of technology are set by the humanist culture of Social Life Networks and its values, which we will return to at that time.
Free cities may delegate to the Confederation the task of managing a few fully automated factories to produce certain capital goods and consumer goods in order to achieve positive economies of scale. These factories are then subject to security and civil and military protection measures entrusted to the local National Guard or the military means of the Confederation, this because of their strategic importance for the economic independence of the Networks of Life.
Financial resources:
The initiators of a life project and then the managers of the various companies that carry out this project present their budgets.
An overview is then possible for this project to be submitted to the assemblies of political action in the various local networks, free cities stakeholders of this project.
The optimal solution to satisfy a need or a service, brought about by the practice of subsidiarity, the adaptability of this optimal solution to local particularities, is then reflected in budgets drawn up with the help of the production network management centers. They will help with the resources available and their use or not in this new project.
The same applies to purchases of raw materials, supplies or services that enter intermediate consumption to produce the expected good or service. Value Added calculation is thus possible as well as a forward calculation of the main management indicators: income, profit, financing need and cash management throughout the project.
There is no longer the obligation, as in the system of capitalist and liberal power, to bring in capital and borrow from the bank an amount of debt money to ensure the financing plan until the sales, the turnover is sufficient to reach the break-even point and cover fixed expenses.
We have seen this in the material resources used by the project. As much as possible, these financial resources come from the common property managed by the Free Cities and Confederation.
These material resources re-used in a life project are allocated to the project team not in the form of currency, full currency but in the form of social rights, property titles to be authorized to use, to use a common property managed in common ownership by the free cities and the Confederation. Remuneration shall in principle be paid in full currency or in social security entitlements.
The clients of life projects are citizens, consumers and in life networks, they use political action to manage, in particular, common property, common property and collective property delegated to the Confederation. When intermediate goods and production equipment are lacking in infrastructure to carry out a project, political action will set up life projects to eliminate these shortcomings or malfunctions.
In order to create these new common goods, the use of money creation may be necessary in the context of the management of full money. We will see how when we present how a full currency works. But before even thinking of creating a full currency, the political action enlightened by the centers of management of the networks of production of wealth must know whether the material and especially human resources, in quantity and quality, are available to realize these new life projects, especially in the other networks of life present in the Confederation.
Otherwise, the Confederation will decide whether or not to acquire these resources through its trade with the other Confederations of the Networks of Life or with companies still in power systems. The local solution for producing the missing goods and equipment will be favored if it has the technical knowledge to produce what is missing itself and is able to train staff to have the necessary skills.
In this financial management of life projects, there is not, as in the economy of power systems, the primacy of clients who approach a company to ask it to produce a commodity or consumer, a service at a certain price which depends for them on the level of the market and the profitability, the profits, dividends they want to obtain.
It is the utility of the project, its value of use decided by the citizens through their political action that leads or does not lead to the decision to create and then realize a life project. We are very close to the public order to which the CGE responded, except that here it is the assemblies of political action that replace the decisions of a President or his government.
The necessary financial resources are then provided by the common property managed by the free cities, the collective property managed by the Confederation, possibly by the private property of foreign companies still in power systems or better, by an association of citizens members of the Networks of Life who wish to participate in this project to develop their skills in a field of new knowledge for them. They then bring their capital either in full currency, in social rights or in industry (working with their current skills in this project).
There is no intervention by a system of commercial banks to provide credit and indebtedness to companies. The financial services of a bank are provided by the production network management centers in terms of accounting and management accounts and treasury financing. In case of need and depending on the speed of circulation of the full currency or the lack of currencies, they ask the Confederation Bank or, if necessary, the Free City Bank for assistance in finding full currency or currencies.
This cash management conducted by the management centers is as it is in the major international groups of the liberal economic system. The financial resources allocated to each project are not all consumed at the same time. Funds awaiting project progress are pooled to meet the cash requirements of other projects where this is more relevant and appropriate in the use of full currency or foreign currency liquidity.
In the liberal system, these funds are placed on the world financial market for short-term interest and the cash manager who is responsible for the management of these investments must guarantee their liquidity at the appropriate time according to the progress of the project. We saw that the CGE was doing that..
After the period of growth of the Networks of Life, the number of common goods available throughout the Confederation, allows to set up life projects that use greater financial resources, especially for the realization of works. Raising living standards then allows citizens to benefit from a lifestyle guaranteed by the humanist culture of Social Life Networks. We will come to that.
Immaterial Resources:
The starting point for knowledge and skill level elevation is in the definition of work positions.
In addition to the expected level of responsibility and skill level of the incumbent, creative initiatives indicate to each incumbent of a position, on the one hand, the expected complexity in the use of several areas of knowledge at the same time, what foreseeable difficulties he must solve alone by using his knowledge and, on the other hand, to what extent unexpected events, risks and threats, his creativity and initiatives are, if necessary, required to solve a major difficulty either alone or in a participatory manner with his fellow project team members.
We are here in the decision-making scheme in terms of positioning alternatives and, above all, risk measurement. Personal abilities to master several areas of competence and to demonstrate a certain level of expertise thus call upon the individual’s character, personality, social identity, that is to say, the experience he has developed since his childhood.
Here we find the importance of social group culture and the use of our two sources of knowledge, initiatory and spiritual as well as intellectual and rational. The systems of power prohibit, we repeat, the use of our first source of initiatory and spiritual knowledge with the aim of defending the dogmas and ideologies with which they manipulate peoples to submit them to their private interests. This is especially true in Western countries with their Judeo-Christian culture. In Asian countries, the story is different. Consider Japan’s ability to master plant automation quickly.
Missed robotization in France.
In France, in 1986, faced with the difficulties of developing in factories, robots and automation of manufacturing processes, a study mission comprising representatives of employers and National Education, vocational training and led by the Minister of National Education, went to Japan to find out how they did it! This is a devastating finding for the French industry. In Japan, the level of qualification equal to or greater than Bac+2 in our country, is 93% of the workforce.
In our newly automated chemical plant, we were just under 50 percent. In French industry, the level was much lower, closer to a third than half of the workforce. This handicap could be overcome by the vocational training and general education plan, which had as its objective 80% of an age group that passed the Bac in the year 2000.
But as early as 1986, the Minister of National Education and other members of this study mission understood that this objective could not be met because it lacked the essential element of this Japanese advantage: Zen culture! A personal and initiatory approach that uses our first source of knowledge.
Japan, like other Asian countries, has maintained the complementary use of our two sources of knowledge. The use of our first source of knowledge, that which does not need to know how to read and write, gives us a worldview by responding to our reasons for living in our human condition. With these answers about our reasons for living on planet Earth, we are then able to use with increased motivation and determination our source of intellectual and rational knowledge to develop a mastery of technologies capable of preserving or restoring an art of living in a humanist culture.
The Zen spirit.
Modern Japanese culture is certainly also, if not more, standardized to the consumerist norms of the American liberal system than Europe, but at the individual level, the Zen spirit has been preserved as a personal spiritual movement.
In Europe, the papacy in 320-325 is confused in the person of the Roman emperor. This forbids spiritual movements during the Council of Nicaea. Spiritual movements developed well afterwards, particularly the Benedictine movement, which helped develop the time of the cathedrals and the flourishing medieval period in Europe. We know the tragic end of it on Friday, October 13, 1307 on the soil of France.
In order to restore a French if not European “Zen spirit”, it is all these prohibitions and taboos laid down in Western culture that must be broken in order to regain a “Japanese-style” level of skills in order to master the automation of our factories and thus our economic development. To begin with spreading the Zen spirit and a spiritual experience among the leaders of the liberal system, if they volunteer!
Life project teams use our two sources of knowledge as in the last flourishing period in Europe, the medieval period, when most popes were educated and trained by the Benedictines.
Non-material resources, beyond the use of high-quality knowledge, also rely on a brand image, a source of motivation.
Subsidiarity and the development of intangible resources
We have indicated this in the introduction to this document: i’m building a cathedral! This building symbolizes not only a spiritual education accessible in such an architectural masterpiece but also the power of political, economic, social and cultural development, military of the free city, episcopal city, republic-state that has succeeded in carrying out such a project. This local project has only been successful through the help of the European network of masters and companions who build abbeys, convents, fortresses, free cities, forges, mines, mills, roads, etc. This aid is, of course, in line with subsidiarity.
At local level, the practice of subsidiarity is transforming not only cities but also the countryside, and today this is still the case. The monks teach the peasants to keep the milk processed into cheese, to produce wine so as not to drink too much contaminated water when the running and healthy water is not available for all.
The optimal solution for producing cheeses or wines, once developed, is the adaptation of this optimal solution to the local particularities that will make all the difference between them and the richness of a society that will taste and appreciate these different flavors. In each village, each mountain, we are proud of our local production which has managed to exploit the local particularities of a region
For example, in Alsace the vine exploits an exceptional mineral wealth of terroirs. The village of Rorschwihr is a good example of this. Successive geological upheavals have shaped the commune of Rorschwihr with no less than 21 different types of basements, dominated by limestone, marl and clay, producing 12 unique and different wines expressing a strong identity. Pierre Gassmann is a geology and therefore terroirs enthusiast. The winemaker offers a dozen wines from this unique diversity in the world. For example different Rieslings according to each plot of land.
The logic of the capitalist industrial system and its “liberal” ideology forbids the practice of subsidiarity and the joint search for the optimal solution. Rather, it is based on private property and the privatization of knowledge through patents, industrial property, economic intelligence and simply the espionage and piracy of competitors’ patents. The chimerical will of the leaders of the liberal system is to privatize all living things.
The life project teams put subsidiarity into practice in the industrial field and just as the shepherds and winegrowers are proud of their typical local productions thanks to the particularities of their terroirs, their members are proud of their industrial productions and of the total quality they have developed in respect of the environment and future generations while guaranteeing abundance in the satisfaction of individual and collective needs among the Networks of Social Life.
In conclusion,
we have remained here in terms of political institutions and their definition and characteristics.
We have understood that the work has nothing to do with the economic horror of the liberal capitalist system, which is very rightly caricatured in the “metro-travail-dodo”. When we see the humanistic culture of the Social Life Networks, we will approach the ways of life. At that time we will specify everything that concerns the management of human activity and therefore also the organization of work: schedules, working conditions, how to reconcile according to one’s personal aspirations, education, training, use of the two sources of knowledge, spiritual initiation path, love life, etc.
For the moment, let us continue this presentation of the political institutions of the Networks of Life by approaching their Confederation.