Things are right when they make sense and follow logic and empiric evidence, not when a genius says them. Tell me what they said and we may discuss it, to simply say “oh but a genius said so” is meaningless.

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.

Indonesia or Guatemala

Are you referring to Jacobo Arbenz and Sukarno? Those were pacifists who refused to arm themselves. That has nothing to do with decentralization.

If you don’t understand the material trends of society

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.

It’s weird how the author somehow manages to define the word “elite” in such a way that excludes actually existing political elites (since those people are directly responsible to their organization)

Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities.

… And then uses this idea to justify the integration of groups into a hierarchical party apparatus. There’s hypocrisy in criticizing informal elites while openly embracing a larger hierarchical structure and elites. Good luck holding the head of the party accountable!

Also, some of the principles in the essay directly correlate with decentralized principles of organizing anyway - delegation, limited mandate, rotation in particular… the only one not explicitly mentioned is instant recallability. I’d question 2 and 3 mainly. Especially given the party apparatus she’s advocating for… otherwise everything else is already done by “informal groups”

I really struggle to conceive the idea of a “fully structureless” group this is advocating against anyway. Any group of people coming together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure itself in some way. We are people with different backgrounds and capabilities and ideals, after all.

I think overall though… the piece is mostly good. Past a certain size, you need to have formal structure and accountability with clear duties. You also need to anticipate that certain systemic oppressions are going to show up in your group and you need to have a way of accounting for this. I don’t really see why this means every other benefit of decentralization and horizontality needs to be abandoned though.

I guess what you mean is that "everything will somehow work out [without struggle],

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!

Freedom is not the only goal in decentralization, there’s many other tangible benefits to it

And, well, don’t be confused about me saying “we need some authority”, what I’m saying is “if there really is a tangible proof that a process NEEDS to have people in positions where their will has to be followed, that can be done when it is deemed necessary” but this is not me arguing in favour of rigid vertical structures. I am in favour of mods being rotated and elected and that people in the forums should be able to strip them of that role if they think it’s necessary, for example. The point is not to apply a single organization model for everything but to do the best we can

You could only get those admins and mods because those people could make their own Lemmy instance - had they made a subreddit their attitude would have gotten them banned by the higher ups. Because of being its own thing it gets to enjoy its own management consequences and not the consequences of everyone else’s management, which is why it’s not affected by Reddit’s shitty venture capitalist ideas.

All of the benefits you’re speaking of come from decentralization! As for needing a moderation team on a forum, yeah I agree, I don’t think there’s any other way of keeping an online forum good. But, I did say:

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.

This all just reads as “don’t worry, everything will just somehow work out! <3” and… I don’t really buy it.

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.

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

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

1. notice the problem
2. decide adressing the problem is worth their time and effort
3. actually direct an operation to adress the problem
4. manage that operation correctly (or appoint the correct manager of the operation) so that it is a success

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.

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.

So there are a couple of answers to this

1. If people can just vote a genocide and have it executed on other people who had no say in the matter (or just had a minority of votes or whatever) then that’s just not a horizontal system, because there’s more decision making power in one body over another. If it is fully horizontal, then if it’s not a full scale military massacre, they’d have no authority to impose harsh measures on them, they’d just defederate and not follow their mandates
2. People can already willingly vote for genocides by electing genocidal representatives into power
3. Thus what exactly do you solve by centralizing the decision making here? If less people have more power to do such a thing, that’s less people that have to be evil for that thing to be done. You can curate them, but the person that curates them has to also not be evil, so you have to curate them as well, etc etc. It’s one dice roll vs hundreds.
4. If you place yourself in a position of “I know better than everyone else”, even when you objectively do, someone is eventually going to replace you in that position. You’re going to retire or die some day after all. Will that person know better than everyone else? Will the person after that? And after and after?

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

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

How do you tell someone that they’ve overstepped when there’s no formal bounds to the scope of their role?

If everyone else feels like they overstepped then they did. If that person then doesn’t stop overstepping, they are immediately recalled and replaced.

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?

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.

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.

There’s a couple of advantages, though

1. A failure has to reach other points to affect them, whereas in a centralized system a failure always weighs down on those below the chain of command
2. A failure on such a scale is much more difficult to happen and to cause just as much harm
3. There is a chance to separate from the failed system

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.

So… a couple of things, again.

1. Why exactly would they avoid this rebellion by pleasing the population, instead of by deceiving it and coercing it? Improving the lives of people takes a fuckton of time and effort, propaganda takes passing censorship laws and buying journalists. This is already done by every nation on earth, capitalist and socialist alike. This fear doesn’t lead to them doing anything better, it leads to them going nuclear on supressing dissent, and it leads to secret police and banning everything and deportations and even ethnic cleansing at times.
2. Do you really think a system that has to be violently overthrown for it to stop failing if there’s a big enough mistake is at all sustainable or even just… worth living in?
3. This need for an overthrow is another dice roll, and if it fails things get much worse than if there was no attempt at all

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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/

It’s not supposed to be serious theory.

People certainly treat it as one. It’s like a thought terminating cliché honestly. The amount of times I’ve seen people treating this work as if it would blow your mind and immediately stop all your silly little freedom thoughts is way too much to just ignore. Why specifically is it treated so specially, unlike the other work you linked?

I’mma read it soon and post what I think btw thanks.

Sure I’ll add it to the list thanks.

Pacifism and libertarianism are different things - because again, freeing yourself from opression is not opression, justice is not opression, taking away priviledge to hurt you is not opression. If there are such pacifists who view things this way then I agree with Engels here but he never mentioned pacifism, just anti-authoritarianism

Engels is not muddying the idea of authority, rather he is illuminating why authority is meaningless on it’s own as a buzzword

He made it meaningless in the essay! He’s conflating it with other things (like a necessity, or just basic organization), he’s pretending delegates and higher-ups are different words for the same things. He seems to use the word as “the enforcing of will”, and of course such a thing is incredibly vague and muddy - but he’s the one using the word that way

Everyone just says this, but they never say why. If you agree with me on the fragility of centralized systems how exactly would a decentralized socialist area be any weaker to the rest of the capitalist world than a centralized socialist area? Why wouldn’t it be the other way around?

I can get behind that a lot more, but keep in mind, you’re always going to have to end up trusting someone. And I assume the sensible way to go around such a system would be to be informed by it and not commanded by it. To take its data into account when making a decision but not simply doing what it recommends immediately without question. It’s after all still a machine

I get what you mean - the planners and producers become the same economic class, as in their relation to property and capital, but you’re acting as if political class does not exist, the planner has way more power than the producer - as the planner literally controls the production and decides its fate. The planner belongs to a structure of governance the worker doesn’t, the planner is hierarchically above the worker, the two belong in different systems that incentivize them to do different things. You can elect the planners, but it doesn’t fundamentally solve that problem, as you then just rely on rolling a dice over and over and over hoping a good planner is put in that position, and with the passage of time that wont happen

In what way are they part of the planning structure exactly though?

What would ensure the central planning mechanism always puts the needs of the people as the goal, and not the needs of the central planning structure, or the needs to perpetuate and protect it?

can you elaborate?

oh yeah I didn’t say it was any different in capitalism, it’s the same thing. I’m trying to tell you it’s mostly the same thing. it’s the position of massive control over the economy paired with a goal thats the problem to me, not the ideology of the people in that position, that can lead to variations but the problems with the approach are the same either way

The thing is, it doesn’t matter. like… i totally agree that politicians are paid by the capitalists and most are just goons, but even if they weren’t goons, they’d behave in the same way. maybe the favours would be less, maybe they would be to different people, they’d do x or y thing differently, but the core abuse of power and trampling are always going to happen, perpetuating your rule and reach and protecting your power and position will always matter more than any reform or serving

of course I’d much rather have strong democratic checks than nothing but I still don’t think it’d be enough to justify it

I know I’m kind of a doomer on this but I just have never seen or read about a ruling structure that didn’t behave this way

I don’t want this power in ANYONE’s hands, no matter who they claim to serve

States and governments only serve themselves anyway