why do so many people seem to have a hierarchy allergy round these Western leftist parts
Because they’re so used to hierarchy based on oppression, pedigree and greed rather than contextual hierarchy based on actual merit and expertise.
I’d rather take orders about plumbing from a plumber rather than orders from a guy who bought a plumbing company but never did plumbing in his life.
We are all very used to the latter. We have people making public health policy who believe in homeopathy. We have car building companies run by guys who have never built a car. We have guys in control of armies who don’t know the literal definition of genocide. People in charge of companies that make food that have never had to take a single class on human nutrition.
Of course people are going to be allergic to hierarchy when we’re so used to the people in control being unfit for their role.
Hierarchy is a lot different when instead of a single dude being in power because he’s a rich asshole, it’s instead deferring to someone who has more expertise in the task at hand. Hierarchy doesn’t have to be rigid either. The guy who you’re deferring to about plumbing might suddenly have to defer to your experience in electrical work.
True, contextual hierarchy that is based around what needs to be done and who is trained to perform the task and can adapt based on what kind of skills are required isn’t bad.
Like, I’m going to let a surgeon be the boss of me when it comes to surgery.
I think the ‘self enforcement’ approach to covid is a good example of why sometimes you do actually need to give authority to save lives. The important part is getting right who you give authority to. Right now we give it to the least qualified and most bloodthirsty people.
The important part is getting right who you give authority to.
I would personally frame this as the important issue being the mechanism by which authority is given and can be revoked, because if such a mechanism is democratic (and extended to production) then suddenly it’s much less of a problem than in our undemocratic society where politicians answer only to donors and donors answer only to capital.
Absolutely. Temporary, task based authority that only extends to your skill set and can be easily revoked if you’re caught being a corrupt little power piggy.
Because they’re so used to hierarchy based on oppression, pedigree and greed rather than contextual hierarchy based on actual merit and expertise.
Recently experienced this myself. Management wants us to stop splitting orders to ship things from multiple warehouses because it is more expensive to ship. Sure I get that shipping $125 of product from the east coast to Montana might cost us, but shipping $500 of product from California to Michigan is still profit.
Not to mention that this change is also causing some people to just cancel their entire order.
Management is making decisions based on metrics that ignore the customer and I guarantee are going to really hurt overall profit margins long term.
The problem is the people making these decisions got their jobs because they’re good at knowing people and shooting shit over golf, not because they actually know anything about what is good for the job.
During a sales meeting last week they had us watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CbZJL5sez0
“Emotionally manipulate your customers to get them to buy shit they don’t need or might not be able to sell without thinking about it”
That is not a healthy long term strategy for any company and I think I might need to start looking for a new job. That whole video is wild as fuck mask off shit about why marketing people get the wall.
Guy looks like Jeff Bezos
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Another factor is simply sticking around long enough until they have the seniority to be promoted. The motivated people look elsewhere; the mediocre people settle for what they’ve got and slowly advance inside companies.
It’s a mechanism of the Peter Principle.
Good Post.
It depends on how you define “hierarchy,” and that ambiguity is part of why some anarchists say “unjustified hierarchy,” because some people say that having any sort of authority on account of having a managerial role in an organization is “hierarchical,” to which those anarchists say “sure, but that’s not what we’re fighting against.” I think this is a fair approach.
I expect if you get a lot of responses, then many of them are going to talk about rebelling against bedtime, and while there’s surely an element of that in some cases, I think there are a few more productive answers:
The other obligatory answer is going to be the portrayal of basically every existing Marxist project that even momentarily succeeded in controlling a country, where there was a revolt supported by many people who wanted a better society but something something bureaucracy and then it was basically fascism. If you believe these narratives, in which these popular movements where probably the vast majority of people were fighting for liberation and forged their own chains due to those sneaky communists, it makes sense to look at the structure of those insurrections (as-reported) and come to the conclusion that centralization is evil (because this question is inevitably very tied to the “decentralization” fetish) and we need to have prefigurative communes or whatever. If you accept the aforementioned historical narratives and also believe that prefigurative communalism is structurally unable to topple capitalism, then it’s very hard to avoid the conclusion that humanity is doomed, so what is there to do but hope communes can do it?
Lastly, I think it’s worth mentioning that all of these conversations are inevitably going to be very informed by liberal philosophy (as is Marxism, I don’t mean this as an attack), where there is a long tradition thanks to natural rights discourse of viewing governments as inherently unjust because they are contrary to human freedom (this is heavily slanted toward bourgeois freedom in our case, but I did say liberal philosophy), so it’s understandable how there would come to be a fetishization of structures that are unlike what we recognize as governments and let everyone do what they like and they’ll spontaneously (or with a bit of encouragement) do the right thing and that’s the only way to have a truly just organization.
And if they are defeated, then that just means they were too good for our sinful world, so it’s no mark against them. (Also even if they didn’t actually organize that way, we can just pretend that they did because history only matters when it gives us cool stories or lets us own the tankies.)
Oh yeah, and there have been some historical communalist movements that did cool things, like the Communards, but it’s also important to note that the Communards got obliterated.
I apologize because I’m kind of struggling to articulate myself properly because I’m a bit sleep-deprived at the moment, but hopefully I at least gestured at something useful.
I think I’ve said this before, but the bedtime thing as a rote response is insane to me. Why would an adult not be allowed and expected to choose their own bedtime. That’s not even a particularly anarchist opinion.
I mean there are a million situations that would call for a specific, non-individual bedtime for practical reasons, and having someone informed to make that call and help everyone actually get well rested for the morning’s action is useful.
But its only used as a knee jerk reaction because it infantilizes our anarchist comrades so… That sucks
When people mention it, they aren’t trying to convey the need for imposed bedtimes except on children, which so the meme goes some people consider an injustice. As I understand it, it’s about a knee jerk opposition to any situation where one person tells another what to do. But like I said in the comment, I don’t think it’s that helpful here (nor is it in most other contexts).
Imho you can’t organize effectively beyond a certain scale without discipline, and that necessitates a degree of hierarchy. You only have to look at e.g. the SWP to see how that hierarchy can be abused though. It’s not an easy problem
Strategy and planning are more efficient as full time roles. It offloads more time to other roles that no longer need to think about those things and can focus on what they’re doing.
is hierarchy in revolutionary organizations inherently bad?
No
No, people who say shit like that are toddlers whining about bed time
i disagree
Diversity of opinion, unity in action
fr
Congrats
If you are an actual leftist (of any particular stripe) who reads theory and isn’t just LARPing some fictional revolutionary vision in your head, then what you are against are ‘unjustified’ hierarchies.
Hierarchies that are created through trial and error of revolutionary attempts are justified hierarchies. Hierarchies based on whose daddy owned what business, are not justified. Hierarchies based on people being chosen by a group to centralize and coordinate activity, and having more privileges associated with their increased responsibilities is a justified hierarchy. Giving people more power arbitrarily, through no consultation with the community, and then allowing them to use that power to avoid responsibility, is an unjustified hierarchy.
To me it seems to come partly from inexperience with mass actions or organizing. I was definitely more of an anti-hierachy anarchist/idealist at times in the past, but when I started getting experience with protests, I saw how groups that were too focused on “democratic” decision making in the moment couldn’t act as effectively on the street when responding to police or other counter-groups. Like the importance of a vanguard in coordinating the mass of people in the macro sense, it’s much more effective for working on the ground quickly.
Growing up in capitalist societies I think most leftists in the west see only the way hierarchies have been used to fuck people over, and have also been subjected to anti-socialist propaganda that paints any powerful leader of a leftist movement as inevitably tyrannical. What helped me get over this bias was understanding the war aspect of the class war, that it is an actual war with an enemy that wants us dead or enslaved, and in times of conflict history has shown how the effective organization and logistics of a group is an essential key to victory.
Yep, nobody would imagine a clip from Band of Brothers where they are under heavy fire and then they have a debate and a vote before they decide their next move, or the sargeant screaming “GET FUCKING MOVING”, and then the soldier starts quibbling about “ummm you’re violating my rights…”
That would all be ridiculous to even imagine. In war you need to follow orders you may not understand because the only way out is to work as a collective unit. The officers may fuck it up, but it’s far too latefor that to matter now, if you don’t take orders you are weakening the group and making yourself more vulnerable.
Engaging with “class war”, but not being willing to take orders is a contradiction.
There is a big difference between an individual giving orders (and having the power to) in a tense moment, and an individual being the one who gives orders about everything all the time.
The ones who arrange the battles and the ones who arrange the councils are not the same, nor should they be. That equivalence is a flaw of Western civilization going back to classical Greece or even earlier.
Quick surface analysis answer about this in the western world: We’ve never had good leaders or benefited from the system, so anarchism is the go to response. In the underdeveloped world, MLM is popular because they’ve had good leaders do good things for them.
I feel that it may be wise of us to consider that the anti-hierarchical points of anarchism may be a good thing to pursue in the imperial core. I often wonder if this is what is required to break the back of the social indoctrination of capital.
I’ve organized in imperial core for a long time, average people really want hierarchy. Most people don’t want to make decisions, they just want to be told how they can help. They don’t want to have meetings, debates, or spend really any time thinking about things. They want to show up, be told what to do, and go about their day after
I can honestly empathize with that. I don’t want to deal with all the shit going on in the world either. But I’ve seen it pop up here and there that (apparently there’s some research?) anarchism is more popular in leftist circles in the west.
If that’s true, I’d hazard a guess that a combination of what I first posted and newer converts responding based more in anger and a desire burn it all down.
Otherwise, could be CIA.
I think anarchism is popular in the west because of anti communism, which anarchism has historically been a part of. It has been allowed to proliferate as controlled opposition, because it is historically ineffective. They know people will radicalize here and there and they need there to be an option that allows for a semblance of radicalization without producing anything that will actually challenge the status quo. Growing up in the west, you see punks and anarchists in media, but the only time communism is brought up is during school when you are told it is evil and they move on.
In the end, when people start to radicalize or seek out sub culture because they are naturally feeling against the mainstream, the only real option you’ve ever heard of that hasn’t been totally demonized is anarchism. Anarchism in the west doesn’t require any hard work and is mostly focused on hanging out with people, partying, music shows, so it is comfortable and easy for individualist westerners to adopt and not really have to change much
I see your point, but I disagree on it not being effective or that they don’t work hard at things. It hasn’t properly overthrown the order of course, but I see a lot of mutual aid work in anarchist groups. That itself is some powerful propaganda to get people thinking of alternative ways of functioning. And if you learn about real anarchist theory, you will inevitably learn Marxism.
I’m saying it doesn’t require hard work. People can just adopt anarchism without having to change much at all. You don’t have to read much, study at all, etc. of course people do that within anarchism but there are plenty of anarchists who think reading itself is bourgeois, literally.
I’ll also say that, having worked in anarchist mutual aid spaces for a long time, people are burning themselves out doing “hard work” but not accomplishing much. I think this is by design, because these groups reject structure and material analysis, they do things in ways that exhaust resources quickly to produce worse results. I’ve seen countless regular people see how anarchists are operating their mutual aid programs and say "ew get me out of here " because of how poorly run and low quality they were. Rotting food and volunteers who are drunk or high, allowing abusers to be around because there is no system to get rid of them, general unprofessional behavior that makes average people unable to trust them.
To your last part, the most anti-marxist people I interact with regularly are the most well studied anarchists I know. They’ve read all the anarchist lit which is why they feel confident rejecting Marxism.
I’ve seen an anarchist tenants union implode because they had no system in place for handling an abuser, who was also a friend of most. No one person wanted to be the one to do something, or others were waiting on the opaque chain of command to make a move. Way too late they finally got something done about it, but by then it had left a bad impression.
From the outside we were watching and surprised at how little action was actually being done about it. They were also the type of people who would criticize PSL and other ML groups for things like this, while then completely dropping the ball when it was in their court… It was a good learning moment for me and I hope others.
Anarchist groups such as that one are going to have hierarchies. That structure will develop at some scale. They just may not be formally announced and hence not held accountable when shit actually goes down.
Yes I’ve seen similar things and worse in the same vein.
Tyranny of Structurlessness by Jo Freeman always relevant in these discussions
That’s basically the thesis of If We Burn: if we don’t choose our leaders they will choose themselves.
Never forget that Chomsky was cultivated by Epstein.
Another point in the CIA column.
it makes problems, but so does everything, so honestly who knows
more specifically, the point that authority tends to create a separation of interests between rulers and ruled seems clearly true. That’s the very problem that democracy was intended to (and sometimes does) alleviate. It’s necessary to introduce a degree of instability to the social order, and the question is just how much is necessary for it to remain in motion towards the horizon.
hierarchy has problems, complete egalitarianism has problems. i think you have to utilize authority to make hierarchy work long enough that people can be socialized to the point that without hierarchy shit doesn’t immediately fall apart but that would take multiple generations the way capitalism took to socialize competition and rent seeking into people
Every successful revolutionary organization was hierarchical. Being afraid of hierarchy is like being afraid of walls. Sure, if you build them poorly they might fall on you, but if you follow some pretty basic guidelines you have a reliable structure that will protect those within in with no set backs.
A revolution is a body and the revolutionaries are cells. Even if there is the ability for cells to migrate around the body and change roles, the overall structure of the body inevitably leads to some form of hierarchical distribution of responsibility.
Much like a body though, a just hierarchy can function harmoniously, and there are no cells that have defacto power over others since delegation is determined by the superstructure itself.
I’m in favour of democratic and meritocratic hierarchies, against hereditary and class-based ones.
People criticize MLs for hierarchical structures and claim that “power corrupts” yadda yadda, but this is idealist nonsense IMO. The slightest knowledge on the people who ended up in charge of the most historically important ML organizations (Fidel, Che, Rosa, Liebknecht, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh…) will show that no, power itself does not corrupt, since all of these people were never, ever corrupted. Mistaken? Yes, at times. Corrupted? No. The fact that MLs historically managed to consistently elect (in one form or the other) literally the most hardworking, selfless, knowledgeable and capable people such as the examples I provided, proves to me that democratic centralism is actually a good idea.
Can’t defeat capitalism without an army, and an army requires hierarchy
Could you imagine getting ambushed by enemies and then needing to reach consensus about what to do?
It’s more of an allergy to being murdered by the police, and a desire to not be ostracised by academia.
The other answers are excellent, but the understandable adaptation of Western left thought to avoid conflict is an important component, I think.
As of writing I see two thoughtful posts, one of which shows me the phrase I was looking for. I just want to reiterate that the idea of an unjust heirarchy is central to the issue. There are heirarchies worth opting into.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, for example, is graduated by belt level. It’s heirarchy derived from skill in a sport. It’s very useful for organizing competitions as well as being a good signal as to whether you want to learn from someone. If I’m a brown belt (proximate to black belt i.e. competency in the art) and your head instructor is a blue belt (between years ~1-5), I’m probably not going to choose to opt into your heirarchy - I don’t trust that you’re competent to the material you want to teach. I don’t really want a collective teaching experience and I don’t really care if a bunch of white belts think I deserve my black belt. Every technique I use against a new player makes a sound like the home run bat from smash bros, of course they think I’m competent - they’re not a good judge. Such a thing is heirarchical in nature but it’s opt in, useful, and practical.
Combat sports are special because your claim of individual competency gets immediate feedback. In professional endeavors especially because you gain a record of who you beat and who you lost to, how it went down, who was coaching you, etc. It graduates the people who participate even further than a belt system and that’s… le good!
