with friends, we agree to activities, some friends are better at activities than others, forming a heiarchy of task delegation and who does what acording to passion and ability. with the haircut example, the best person at cutting hair is the one that cuts hair and we tell what kind of haircut we want and he agrees to cut our hair that way.
a spouse, tasks are again decided and delagated to a hierachy of ability, passion, values. one person takes the lead on some tasks and another person takes the lead on other tasks.
in a debate, the judges are on one level, the participants on another, and the audiance on another level.
any conversation will have leading and following with people trading off expertise or oppinion or feelings,
this would be authority based on ownership and competance, or maybe you can call it all based on competance, as i know more about how i want my hair cut and the barber knows more about how to cut it that way.
well it would seem to me to be more rational authority to have a pizza companies financies done by a cfo rather than the janitor or the delivery boy. complete free association is a company with 1 million employees seems like a absurd process especily if it means unanimous consent for every new delivery boy.
the democratic process still creates collective irational heiarchy, after all, there are more pizza delivery boys then there are cfo’s
I read sections B.1 through B.1.2 in stsoc’s Anarchist FAQ, and I did not find it very illuminating. There was a lot of (rather vague) talk about the evils of authoritarian (aka hierarchical) social relationships, but very little in the way of explaining exactly what constitutes such a relationship. Two specific kinds of relationships were given as examples: coercive relationships and employment. Unless the goal is to simply list ad hoc a series of relationships which (according to somebody) are hierarchical, there needs to be a definition which explains why those two relationships are hierarchical (I fail to see what they have in common), or, what is the same thing, a larger class of relationships of which they are both members.
But the nearest they came to a definition for hierarchical relationships was this (repeated in various formulations throughout):
But I have no idea what they mean by “giving orders.” I can only assume it’s all instances where one person uses the imperative in conversation with another person? Would it be acceptable then if we simply abolished the imperative and asked everyone to rephrase using another verb mood? Or would it still be unacceptable to phrase a demand in the form of a request? If so, how are people to actually cooperate? Will they be able to read one another’s minds…before or after the seas turn to lemonade and the clouds to cotton candy?
Note: I’ll be happy to take this seriously when I get a serious definition of you terms.
I agree. Anytime there’s significant labor specialization, there’s management: i.e. some people “giving orders” and other “obeying.” There’s nothing authoritarian about this, as the association is purely voluntary. And in the absence of this, I’d argue you actually go back to some dark period before the Stone Age, as even then human beings grouped themselves into small tribes with leaders. It’s simply a fact of human nature that a group of people of any size cannot cooperate in any venture without some form of management. Even a group as small as, say, half a dozen people, has trouble getting anything done unless someone steps up and says, “Hey guys, how about you two do this while me and Jones here do that…” That’s management, that’s “giving orders,” no more or less than the “boss” in a huge industrial enterprise. In the article that stsoc linked, they make a fuss about institutionalized management, as if it’s alright for someone to rise to a leadership position, but an injustice for him to stay there, over a period of time. What they fail to appreciate, or simply don’t care about, is that (absent aggression) no one remains in a leadership position except by (1) having the consent of those he leads, and (2) being successful. The “boss” in a firm only enjoys that position of leadership as long as his leadership keeps the firm profitable. The market “removes him from power,” the moment his leadership fails. And throughout the life of the firm, all the “underlings” are free to come and go as they please.
Hierarchies are nothing more than assigned roles that establish a “chain of command” through which information passes. Computers wouldn’t even work without hierarchical structures. In the social sense, hierarchies are neither constant nor rigid. They are the “spontaneous order” that emerges out of chaos - organizations.
As for the “hegemonic dominance” thing, which I’m sure you’ll mention again soon: just because a behavior is common at the ape-brain level doesn’t mean it can be used to establish institutions of mutually-beneficial social cooperation. Quite the contrary in fact.
Which doesn’t have anything to do with hierarchy as organization of people. Husband and wife are equals, they function same as a workers’ cooperative, not like a capitalist firm. Marriage had a form where a man buys a woman from hew father and the women switches domestic masters when she enters marriage, and that kind of marriage was abolished, but the point is not to replace is with it’s voluntary version, where the father doesn’t have the right to force the daughter to marry, but to institute a marriage as a union of equals, not of a human and a type of sub-human that is there to serve him.
It cannot, it is by definition non-hierarchical. Anarchy, socialism and direct democracy are symonyms.
Because people who are mentaly able, who are not malevolent, and are not brainwashed by authoritarian propaganda, know what hierarchy is.
What is wrong with you? Does giving this sort of idiotic statements makes you feel “philosophical”? You don’t know what hierarchy is and you don’t what “giving orders” means? How do you talk without knowing the meaning of words?
You don’t know the difference between when you get up in the morning and put on a shirt you want and getting up in the morning and being ordered what shirt to wear? You don’t know the difference between making a coffee how and when you want, and someone giving you orders how and when to make it? You don’t know the difference between a capitalist firm and a workers’ cooperative? If so, I will not respond to your writings, being that you’re either trolling or are totally igorant of the world around you.
The point is to have a say in all decision making where those decisions affect you to the proportion in which they affect you. Decision of whether you should wear a white or a blue shirt is totally under your right. In a worker cooperative, being that business running decision affects all the members, all the members have a right to participate in that decision making.
Yes, just like it is impossible to have friends, a spouse, a conversation, a worker coop, or a socialist society. All of which is proven by reality to be possible.
Sure. Self-management being what we anarchists advocate.
Maybe in a group of people brainwashed by authoritarion propaganda.
Leadership can only be of an adviser type, delegation of authority is illegitimate.
(3) having wealth and illegitimate property.
All bosses are exploitative. The very existence of a boss means exploatation, means hierarchy and violation of workers’ right to full product of one’s labor.
I was starting to doubt that there are propertarians who have an idea what words that people use mean.
But their working is totally unrelated to the organisation among people, so they would work perfectly fine without there existing hierarchical organisation among people.
Virtually every decision anyone makes in some way or another affects others. For example, your decision to wear a blue shirt rather than a white shirt affects me insofar as I have to look at it, and maybe I don’t like the color blue. Does it follow that I should “have a say” in what color shirt you wear? Unless you’re suggesting that virtually all decisions be democratic, you need to clearly identify what it means for a decision to “affect” someone.
