Everytime I've shown concerns with the ideas of a single party state, of "democratic" centralism, of a planned economy, censorship, secret police, etc, nothing I say is ever really discussed in depth because people just tell me "read On Authority, just read it, its a 10 min read, it will change everything, just read it!"
No it didn't, this essay is frankly really dumb to me. It feels more like venting than an actual argument. Last time I posted doubts about planned economies and I got a much better view of it with everyone's polite answers, I still don't fully agree but there was at least a discussion with an idea I was able to more clearly understand. So my aim with this post is the same
My main reasons to propose decentralized systems with distributed decision making are:
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Decentralized systems are less fragile both to internal failure and external sabotage, you are all on Lemmy so you must know this when comparing it to the centralized Reddit. A centralized system has one failure point and the higher-up it happens the more catastrophic the consequences, and no amount of representative elections and internal purges are ever going to fix this inherent fragility, they are temporal mitigations. Centralized systems depend on constant dice rolls and hope that the guy at the top ends up being good. With time, the dice eventually blunders, it's innevitable, and this ruins the system and deeply affects the lives of everyone under it
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A small body of people (relatively speaking, in comparison to the greater body of people the system is ruling over) cannot physically and biologically fully comprehend the issues and needs of "the masses" so to speak, that is an amount of information that cannot fit into a couple or a dozen or even hundreds of heads even if all of them deeply want to try. Which most often they don't. This alienation from "the masses" so to speak happens the higher up you are, you start seeing everything as simply numbers, you need to make that abstraction to properly process things and decide, but in doing so you don't realize the millions of entire lives full of hopes and dreams and struggles you are affecting. This is why leaders can order genocides, they are never the ones that watch them being committed, they just see papers.
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Any system first and foremost has to sustain itself and its authority, this is the highest priority, it has to be above any other goals, and sustaining a centralized system is much harder than sustaining a portion of a decentralized one, this is why they need censorship and purges and camps and police and information control and data gathering of everything every person is doing "just in case", all of this effort could be redirected to actually making the lives of people better, but security comes first! Security always eventually eats liberty. What purpose is the liberation of people if that makes them end up in a system where they're actually just as restricted as before?
On Authority addresses nothing of this. It's just a bunch of smug self masturbation and "uhhm actually"s.
All these workers, men, women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for individual autonomy.
Nature imposes a necessity to do things in a certain way but this has nothing to do with how the decision making process of the people who are doing that thing is carried out. By this logic your stomach is being authoritarian when it's hungry.
Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.
If you think nature is authoritarian the spinning wheel is just as much of an authority as the loom though! Both require things to be done in a certain way after all
Let us take another example — the railway. [...] Here, too, the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested. In either case there is a very pronounced authority.
No, there is a key difference of relations and mechanics of decision making in both cases. Authority imposed and authority given are different things. A delegate has no authority, the purpose of a delegate is purely to help carrying out a mandate.
When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that's true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.
He is being smug about not knowing the difference between delegation and representation. They are fundamentally different things though, and this is just a fact. He is mocking people for knowing things he doesn't. How is this supposed to be enlightening?
The mechanics and relations of power are fundamentally not the same. The point is not to never have a position where someone has to follow the will of someone else, it's to make sure processes and structures of things are laid out, approved, and can be changed and revoked by the people who are actually operating in them. It's not to not have a social structure, but to have a social structure that can be taken back and molded
If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other
BUT THAT'S EXACTLY THE POINT! Centralization is a cancer. You fully kill it if you can, and if you can't, you try to reduce it as much as possible. Showing proof that some things have to be centralized is moot, we can centralize that thing specifically and not centralize everything else.
but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight the world.
They fight preconceived notions that things have to be centralized when they really don't have to be. A lot of things are like that.
All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society.
This has nothing to do with what's being discussed??? Also: "Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will" -Frederick Douglass
Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon
If you are being dominated and opressed and by armed means you free yourself that is not imposing authority. That is uh. Freeing yourself. That is self defense. If these things are the same then... basically everything is authoritarian. I get now why people say "its a meaningless word" - people like this guy are the ones who are making it meaningless.
Anyway, same as before, this post is not intended as a "checkmate dumbasses" thing. I'm actually interested in talking and learning. I mean no ill harm. o/
Pictured: A fumo communist
This is definitely a problem of centralisation but I think this is a bit of a reductionist argument tbh.
Yes, there are always going to be issues like corruption and misconduct when there is leadership - people are fallible and that's an incontrovertible fact of humanity.
But I'd pose it to you this way - the solution to a problem is not necessarily the negation.
Take the Flint water crisis, for example. This was caused by government and by poorly managed infrastructure and cost cutting.
How we attribute the blame determines a lot about our political outlook. An ancap is going to blame government and regulations. An anarchist is going to blame capitalism and hierarchical government structures. A communist is going to blame capitalism and bourgeois democracy. A progressive is going to blame neoliberalism. A conservative is going to talk about big government and make appeals to personal responsibility and, ultimately, they're going to make a "let them drink lead" argument or something (idk lol, I'm not steeped in conservative political rhetoric.)
I'm going to impose upon your goodwill here to elaborate on my point about the solution to a problem not being the negation though:
The water infrastructure dumped lead into the water supply. The negation of this problem would be to get rid of water infrastructure. That might "solve" the problem but everything exists in dialectical tension and that means there's always going to be ramifications and compromises inherent to every decision or action. Hence why the negation is not truly a solution, although it can be very alluring because this sort of reductionism is comforting in the simplicity and certainty it provides a person and it's how you end up with people who take hardline primitivist positions of returning to monke and misanthropic positions of wanting to get rid of the human race entirely and so on.
So of course we will see problems in centralisation and hierarchy but it's important to ask ourselves if the negation is truly a solution or if it's just a way of transposing the problems into a different context; unfortunately decentralised systems are also prone to a lot of the same problems that exist in centralised ones but due to their diffuse nature, it can be far harder to deal with accountability and remediation and stuff like that.
In the most crass incarnation of this line of thinking is a thought experiment I like to use: if we achieved a truly decentralised or anarchist society in the country I live in, there's a non-zero chance that a majority of people would support genocidal policies against the indigenous peoples here, or even open genocide. That's not a risk I am comfortable with taking tbh and neither should anyone else who has a semblance of principles.
I have seen organisations established along horizontalist principles and a hierarchy and leadership structure always forms, except in these examples it is almost always de facto and not de jure. Personally, I would prefer explicit roles, responsibilities, and delimitations of power structures and hierarchies so there's a degree of accountability and opportunity to rein in excesses rather than having organic ones that gradually form via accretion and a sort of "that's just how it's done" mentality because it's much harder to deal with internal struggles imo.
How do you tell someone that they've overstepped when there's no formal bounds to the scope of their role? How do you vote someone out of a position if they were never elected to it but they just gradually occupied the levers of power one way or another?
I'd argue that decentralised systems are more fragile because they lack sufficient unification to deal with these internal issues and because their de facto hierarchies are more porous in the sense that people can sorta worm their way in and become fused to the power they command.
With my example of genocide above, we see that there can be a distributed form of points of failure just as much as a centralised organisation can have a singular point of failure.
I'd also pose another thought experiment to you - in my country and probably yours too, we have a rotating cast of leaders in politics. Some countries like the UK and Australia seem to have a goddamn carousel of leadership. This is clearly more decentralised leadership compared to the USSR under Stalin or Cuba under Castro and so on. But I'd argue that there's much more accountability built in, although it's imperfect, with a system of one-party rule and one leader who occupies an executive role for a long period of time.
Sounds counterintuitive, no?
But hear me out - if the party under Stalin/Castro/Xi Jinping finds itself failing to meet the needs of the people and failing to be responsible, does that not risk the position of the leader and the party below them? In this system there is no kicking the can down the road to your successor to deal with it, there is no blame shifting on the previous leaders or parties or obstructionist politics like under liberal democracy. The buck stops with the executive and the party. Any major fuckups risk the entire government being overthrown by the masses if they are overly disaffected or harmed. And these errors are cumulative; people don't easily forgive or forget when the government has seriously wronged them.
In my country, however, it's always someone else's fault and someone else's problem to deal with and if nothing can be done about it then that's because of what the predecessors did and because they have their hands tied by whatever the fuck election cycle is going on.
Is my country's government the Platonic ideal of decentralisation? No, of course not. But it is somewhat more decentralised than single party, single leader rule and the problems that I've described as we slide down the decentralisation spectrum are liable only to increase the further down we go.
The ultimate decentralisation would be the ancap ideal where every person is their own petty autocrat over their own little fief but this is a product of hyper-individualism to the point of atomisation of society imo and it doesn't resolve any problems that can't exist under the rule of an autocrat that presides over a larger slice of the world. I guess except for things like genocide; you can't really commit stuff like genocide on your very own one-acre kingdom.
I would pose this question in response - does a decentralised system (as in a realistic one and not an ancap hyper-individualistic fantasy) not roll the dice in the hopes that the community or the majority will not make blunders or ruin it for people?
There was a time where communities in the US world engage in decentralised decision-making processes to lynch black people, no?
And even that counter-example is itself flawed because the counter-counter-example is when there was that real piece of shit in the US who terrorised his town and engaged in really heinous acts of violence that I'm not going to detail. Eventually he got lynched by the community and I think there were like dozens of bullets from different makes of gun found at the scene of his killing and nobody in the town would admit to seeing or hearing a single thing. The dude got exactly what was coming to him, if you're familiar with his actions, and the community took measures to protect itself. It could have been dealt with in a better way, in a perfect world, but that didn't happen in the lead up to his lynching. So there's the other side of that argument, for whatever it's worth.
Anyway I'm going to be otherwise occupied with things and I'll try to get back to the responding to the rest of this so, uhh, I hope you like essays I guess?
First of all I want to thank you for the detailed and respectful response which is really the only one I've read that genuinely addresses my thoughts and concerns so far.
I don't know the specifics about the incident, so it's hard to really say what a "proper solution" is like. If the water infrastructure has many other benefits and the dumping was a misuse of it, then what causes that misuse needs to be corrected. I'd only advocate for completely getting rid of it if it served no other purpose. Infrastructure and technologies are just tools and it's how they're used whats important.
Getting such a reform would be easier in a decentralized system - no higher up would need to
Instead the very people who operate and are affected by the infrastructure would meet up, discuss how to make this not a problem, and try things on their own until they find something that works more than before. Those people have a way more invested interest in making sure it works correctly from now on AND they have already been operating it so they know best how it works and what they could do.
So there are a couple of answers to this
I have nothing against explicit and formal roles so long as ones don't have inherent unchanging power over anothers and the people who participate in them can change them and recall the people in them when they deem its necessary
I don't believe every single system of production or managing can be done fully horizontally, and I don't believe there needs to be an immediate rejection to having to follow the will of another person in something, the important thing is that this is something that benefits everyone (which can only realistically be achieved if everyone had a say in it) and that it can quickly change and adapt to new needs or discoveries
The problem is that "de jure" systems are much, much slower at doing these things, which is I'd often prefer "de facto" when it's realistic and possible
If everyone else feels like they overstepped then they did. If that person then doesn't stop overstepping, they are immediately recalled and replaced.
That power is being granted, and you can always just... stop granting it. The same way you get a person out of a position in a centralized system, except that isn't done by a higher up, it's done by the people directly affected by that person being in there.
There's a couple of advantages, though
So... a couple of things, again.
That's actually true! If a failure is big enough, even if the next guy at the top is good, they don't have enough time or resources to fix it before the next dice roll. They also don't have only fixing the mistake to worry about - they have to maintain their authority and legitimacy and approval rates.
This is a problem because the system is vertical! Not because it's not.
That's not decentralization, that's distribution since technically their fiefs are separate, but if they're autocrats, then that's a centralized system. And of course in a market and such everything tends to consolidate so they'd eventually end up killing that initial distribution anyways
In terms of decision making, there's no dice rolls at all - because people aren't betting or hoping on anyone to do it right. They decide they should do things and they do them, all on their own. The dice roll would be if the decision is succesful, but that's also a dice roll you have to make in a centralized system anyways.
Now if an ENTIRE COMMUNITY OF PEOPLE is shitty and they decide to do a shitty thing yeah, but... well how would that really differ in a centralized system? They'd just vote a shitty representative to let them be shitty. At least in a decentralized system with free association the victims of their shittyness would be able to minimize the harm caused by it.
Also you talking about "the majority" makes me think you think I'm talking about direct democracy? Maybe that's where your concerns come from? I'm much more in favour of a full consensus-based system.
Anyway thanks for posting this and it's fine if you're busy and it's been too long and you don't wanna respond. o/