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
