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
The entire point of scientific socialism, and what elevated it from utopian pipe dreams, is discovering the elements in society that lead it towards the next, and I pointed out some that lead to centralization. You can’t just say “centralization is a cancer” and be done with it. I guess what you mean is that “everything will somehow work out [without struggle],” and this is sort of my fault for not including struggle between classes directly because I wanted to emphasize that, afterwards, new society isn’t formed out of thin air according to moral ideals but is based upon the momentum of old society.
We understand that the capitalists won’t give up their power willingly even when their system is in decline, and that it must be taken away from them by the people, still, class struggle isn’t divorced from material forces; the proletariat itself was created through the industrial revolution (introduction of machinery in production, concentration of production and labor). Human activity isn’t completely spontaneous, and mass revolution even less so; it’s not a question of anything being automatic or everything somehow working itself out without input—the transition can be sped up or slowed down, the emerging mass state can experience setbacks and victories, but in the end the capitalist rule cannot last forever, proven ex. with the fall of the rate of profit, and in its growing tendencies socialism will take root.
No, even with struggle, you’re just saying that things will naturally eventually fall into place because they’re just destined to be like that. You’re not a prophet and you cannot predict what billions of different peoples will do and how. You never really even adressed any of the points I made about decentralization, you just said “nah that wont happen, this will happen instead, sorry”. There’s nothing I can even respond to that! It’s just fatalist nonsense!
I thought it wasn’t necessary because of how shallow they are, and how they treat external realities as ideological methods of organization.
Terror isn’t just for sustaining a centralized system. There have been more or less decentralized systems oriented against imperialism and they have fallen even quicker to external sabotage as in Indonesia or Guatemala. For authoritarianism, it’s a meaningless word as it makes authority a motive force in itself, which is just a product of not understanding the class character of the state.
If you don’t understand the material trends of society and hold to socialism on that basis as the next step forward, you’re just an idealist with moral indignation against the current system and nothing else.
Authoritarianism is a measure of how monopolized and heirarchical the decision-making process is within an organization. There’s nothing meaningless about that, it’s a very specific thing. Now if you use the definition from Engels, where your stomach is authoritarian when it’s hungry, it’s definitely meaningless, but to pretend that is the only or even the main definition is just asinine.
Are you referring to Jacobo Arbenz and Sukarno? Those were pacifists who refused to arm themselves. That has nothing to do with decentralization.
You can’t! No one can! Society is not a monolith! It’s billions of people with different thoughts and feelings and ideals and desires and conditions, you can’t condense them all into a theory, you’re not smart for thinking you can. Guessing that society will definitely surely follow a very specific process to the letter is again, purely self-masturbatory fatalism. It’s Not Even Wrong.
Authoritarianism is a measure of nothing. Do you not just mean authority? For something to be an ism there has to be something constant about it, but authority is a response to external conditions, and when it comes to the state, can’t take on an independent, alienated character, but must conform to the character of the dominant class. This is precisely what Engels was trying to get across with his comparisons.
Wrt Sukarno’s govt., it wasn’t just pacifism. The CIA worked in the first place by bombing areas wanting to provoke separatism, when, surely, they should have promoted unity? In the final act the non-aligned government was undone by taking advantage of the disunity between the army and government, with gangster squads financed by the former able to spread out their terror and make use of the low centralization to hide their atrocities behind proxy groups.
To be clear, I never assumed anything would be followed “to the letter.” I predicted society will tend towards centralization/socialization and pointed out specific causes of this. Your response is “you can’t know, people have thoughts and feelings and free will!” Where do you think thoughts and feelings and ideals come from? Nothing? Do you think mass movements are a product of people coincidentally independently coming to the same conclusions?
You can’t know the individual thoughts of every person in a centralized system, and therefore can’t make any predictions about the outcome. And, in fact, by creating predictions from trends and tendencies you picked up, you’re being fatalistic (you even use the term “inevitable” in your analysis, which is clearly the sign of prophetic day-dreaming).
You’re acting like we, as Marxists, are starting from scratch and basing ourselves on nothing but guesswork. No. There are real, tangible, obvious trends in society, as in life in general. You’re making the same confused argument Jordan Peterson does when, in a Joe rogan interview, he says “we can’t predict climate change, climate just means everything and there’s no way to account for everything.” We don’t need to predict everything; not everything that influences a person does so to the same degree. Class interest influences people in a massive way, we see this most obviously manifested in what people from different classes view as ideal. The bourgeoisie has their free market, individual liberties, etc. In short they wish to roughly maintain the present or the recent past, that time in which their mode of production was most dominant. The petty bourgeois has their decentralisation, their small commodity production, etc., in short they wish to turn back the clock to the very beginning of capitalism, when their small commodity production was still predominant. And the proletariat have abolition of private property, equality, community, etc., i.e. communism, that mode of production in which the proletariat becomes dominant, universalised, and in that action it abolishes itself.
I’ve met countless libertarian proletarians, I was one of them in fact. Because societal trends are just trends, and society doesn’t simply collapse into what the majority of people (not that a majority of proletarians are socialists at all) will it to be, in fact, that happens very little. If your theory were true, states would have never developed in the first place, as they were against the interests of the vast majority of people living in stateless societies.
It’s okay to see trends and predict based on them, but to think the trends indicate a very specific thing is GUARANTEED to eventually happen, and to think henceforth that any other investigation of alternatives is pointless, is what I call self masturbatory fatalism