Tools Have No Convictions

There is a kind of book one believes one knows after two chapters. An organizational psychologist describes a procedure by which companies steer themselves: those affected decide, the hierarchy steps back, a moderator keeps the process open without intervening in its content. At the end come the big words — commons, cooperative economics, an alternative to the market economy, an "I-within-the-We". And in the middle of the text, almost in passing, stands the sentence that relativizes everything: the model functions, of course, within the present market logics, and it leaves the ownership structures untouched.

Anyone accustomed, as we are, to regarding the ownership question as the decisive one has usually passed judgment at this point already. Another valve. Participation as a method that lets the pressure out of the kettle without changing the kettle. One sets the book aside and feels confirmed.

We want to show why this quick judgment is a fallacy — not because it is wrong in its result, but because it confuses two questions that have nothing to do with each other.

The Temptation to Exclude

The first question concerns the author and his situation. Whoever wants to be heard in a discipline, who must sell books, give talks, offer consulting, cannot attack the frame within which the hearing takes place. He must remain connectable. To question the prevailing system at its root would mean cutting oneself off from the source that feeds one. There is an image for this that has accompanied us for some time: You cannot fight against the spoon. Whoever wants to keep being fed by the spoon must keep away from all those who want to overcome the spoon itself — the system in principle.

This is neither cowardice nor betrayal. It is a condition of survival. And it forces everyone who wants to act within the system into the same operation: to wrap the useful in a casing the system accepts. Some smuggle more through than others — a hidden "commoning", a quiet critique of the machine, a few sentences about the "I-within-the-We". But they do it in a wrapping that must stay market-compatible, or the package never arrives.

The temptation now is to infer the value of the contents from the character of the casing. Because the author stands within the system and does not attack it, her method too counts as system-conforming, as a mere valve, as not to be taken seriously. That is the short circuit. We know it from our own experience, from the other side: that the way we question everything, and at the root, meets with no resonance is no proof against its correctness — it is the logical consequence of the fact that resonance within the system presupposes shared premises. Whoever puts the premises themselves up for disposal pulls the ground out from under resonance. The fundamental is resonance-poor because it is fundamental.

If that holds for us, then the reverse holds for the author: her resonance within the system is no proof against her method. Both — our lack of resonance, her connectability — say something about the relation to the frame and nothing about the matter itself.

Two Questions, Not One

With this the cut is named. The question of the predicament out of which someone speaks, and the casing into which he must dress it, is a sociological one. The question of whether the method that lies beneath this casing is any good is a quite different one — technical, testable, independent of the first.

The original of the spoon image says: There is no spoon — recognize that the rule is constructed, then you can bend it. Our disillusioned reversal says: the spoon is constructed and feeds you anyway, and whoever fights it starves. But it does not follow that one must despise the tools that came into being in the spoon's workshop. One can reject the spoon and take its tools. One need not love it in order to test what can be detached from its hand.

The context in which a method arose therefore interests us only marginally. It is never a ground for exclusion. What counts is solely the examination of the method for its possible applications — and precisely also for those its originator was never allowed to name, because they would have burst the frame.

Do Tools Have Convictions?

Here we must argue honestly against our own thesis, or it turns naive. For it is not true that every method is arbitrarily implementable, a neutral instrument that does the same in any hand. Some procedures carry their politics more deeply within them. Piece-rate pay produces a certain kind of human being, a certain competition, no matter which factory. A surveillance architecture remains a surveillance architecture even when it runs a welfare office. There are tools with built-in convictions.

The question, then, is not whether a method carries its context with it, but how deeply the context sits within it. And precisely that is decided not by exclusion by origin but by examination. One lays the method bare, separates it from the rhetoric in which it was sold, and asks: what does this procedure do structurally — independent of what its seller says about it?

In the case of the catalysis procedure the book describes, the answer is that its character lies not in itself but in the frame into which one embeds it. In the publicly traded or owner-dominated company it is pacification: those affected take on the effort and the stress of finding solutions to problems whose goals, means and ownership others have set. That is the fence without current — free movement in an enclosure one did not stretch oneself. The same procedure on a changed ownership basis is something entirely different: not a valve, but the tool that was missing there until now. The valve-character does not sit in the method. It sits in the ownership relation that surrounds it.

That is the criterion that saves the naive thesis: tools have no convictions — but they have tendencies, and the tendency becomes a direction only through the frame. To examine means to distinguish this tendency from the direction.

The Test

Let us make the test on what really concerns us. We have seen, with the foundation-owned company and with Mondragón, that the ownership form alone guarantees nothing. Fagor, the mother of all Mondragón cooperatives, perished from the fact that collective ownership does not compel good collective decisions — and that the market punishes wrong decisions mercilessly, cooperatives included. Mondragón possessed the right hardware — the workers own — and yet stood before the question of how, within this hardware, decisions are made: when to restructure, when to let a division go. Ownership without procedure is as incomplete as procedure without ownership. And it is not the cooperative alone that teaches this: Bosch and ZF, the great German foundation-owned companies, are right now in massive difficulties — the same lesson from the other ownership side. Purpose-bound ownership too does not hold off the market and does not replace the missing corrective mechanism; it only delays the noticing of the wrong decision. Neither collective nor endowed ownership protects where the procedure is missing that makes mistakes visible before they become irreversible.

And precisely here the material becomes interesting, against the intention of its wrapping. The catalysis mechanism — those affected decide, the moderator has no say on content, the outcome stays open, and whoever stays away from the participation forfeits the right to contest the decision — is, in the market context, an elegant valve. On a cooperative ownership basis, however, it is a candidate for the missing decision procedure on which Fagor foundered. The seven-level grid too, with which one can distinguish whether a problem sits in the everyday routines, in the goal-setting, or right at the top in the leadership system, is serviceable as diagnostics — detached from the question of who owns the diagnosed company.

So we do not take the book. We take the tool out of the book and leave lying the casing in which it had to be sold. What was pacification in the system can, in a different architecture, be the missing piece. The same mechanism, a different frame, an inverted sign.

Taking the Spoon

From this follows an attitude that is more than a reading technique. Whoever builds — and we want to build, not only diagnose — cannot afford to disdain tools by their origin. The inventor who adopts a clamping device from an industry whose business practices he despises does not ask after the device's convictions. He asks whether it holds. We owe the same sobriety to the methods of organizing, of deciding, of steering — even those that come from the spoon's workshop.

This is not cynicism but its opposite: the refusal to throw away the useful merely because it arose in the wrong hand. It is also a form of respect for the author, whose predicament we understand without sharing his silence about the frame. We separate cleanly what he was not allowed to separate: the method from the wrapping, the insight from the career, the tool from the spoon.

And perhaps that is, in the end, the real operation that distinguishes us from those who only refuse or only go along. We reject the spoon and keep what it brought forth. Both-and. One need not fight it, and one need not let oneself be fed by it. One can, cheerfully and without rancour, take the tools out of its hand and build them in elsewhere — there, where they no longer pacify but bear.