Sure, let’s say something like a lock out tag out mechanism. Person unplugs dangerous machine, puts a sign on the power button, and either nobody turns it on until its fixed, or nobody touches it until the person who put the sign on is out of its guts. This is not hierarchal authority, and in fact everyone having this power, levelling it, increases workplace safety. This is in fact communication. It’s a veto.
Identifying roles with individuals² necessarily creates hierarchy and reduces communication bandwidth. I think the idea that you need to have one consciousness one individual one will responsible for things above a certain scale is insane and backwards, it comes from an insecurity and an unwillingness to adapt.
Quite frankly, you cannot comprehend all of a large system. You can’t comprehend all of the road traffic in a medium sized city. Can’t be done. Your brain just isn’t enough, and the more you try, the more you abstract and reduce, the more you enforce demands based on your reduced abstract understanding, the more you get into the surreal shit show that was the late soviet union’s industrial system¹. The atrophy and distortion is unavoidable unless you work from the bottom up.
Even in your industrial example, having everyone’s eyes and everyone’s³ voice, including their veto on a process will get you a better end result.
The harder you squeeze the higher functions of society, the more easily they slip out of your grasp. You must trust, you must allow others agency, you must understand that you do not understand and not fucking pretend.
If you must have a hierarchal model, I can recommend maszlow’s–which on a civilizational level isn’t all that far off a Marxian analysis of progress. Sorry for the ramble; am very high rn.
¹not that there was a single thing wrong with the USSR at its worst that isn’t wrong with the united States today, and worse besides that make it harder to use as a clear example, please read like an adult and dont make me baby your tankie ass because your imaginary fantasy of your state-daddy you’ve never been to built from 50 year old propaganda pieces is beyond criticism and was without flaw. You can love shit that wasn’t perfect, it’s fine.
² a lunch huddle, Bob being kind of a safety nerd, and the informal back channels kludges and black markets that literally always grow organically in any rigid authoritative system that needs to actually work, sometimes to everyone’s benefit and nobody’s acknowledgement, sometimes at great cost. When roles like coordination and safety are a group responsibility everyone keeps at least half an eye out, and some fucking nerd always does at least as much as a dedicated manager would.
³everyone who gives a shit, at least. Workers at a factory cross training and coming up with ways they could do better, all reading different industry publications giving them different perspectives at the weekly meeting or next refactoring is going to get you better productivity safety efficiency and QOL gains than any amount of distant bosses or consultants could do, and the same between factories, industries, etc. The same is true for farms, gardens, cottage industry, mines, etc.
You’re dramatically misunderstanding my point, to the point that you’re making the same strawman argument Mises did to try to “debunk” socialism. Coordination and administration does not require a single person having total view, that’s not how broad systems work. You need several levels of abastraction and coordination, which can be done by teams of people, you can’t have a fully flat system at large scale without running into massive problems.
The people doing the actual work, if allowed to see the bigger picture, even piece by piece, will do this better than ‘bosses’.
People with different experiences and who tend towards different roles will have different perspectives, different understandings all rooted in some aspect(s) of the actual function of the thing.
Having a weekly team meeting or culture of conflict resolution serves all the same purposes as a dedicated executive, with none of the inefficiencies and substantial gains in both psychological maturity and worker agency to do their shit better.
Responding to inputs from all directions rather than a rigid up/down tree based structure makes more adaptive more realistic systems with fewer kludges and more honesty.
Strategians and tacticians serve different roles because they see different levels of the battlefield, and footsoldiers can see what they directly interact with but are not privy to understanding the full battlefield. Having a fully horizontal organization is shooting yourself in the foot, we develop intra-class hierarchies like managers not because of class society, but because of the added complexity of large-scale production and distribution.
You seem pretty committed to changing as little as possible and not looking at actual scientific math-backed organizational science (read ‘brain of the firm’).
You seem really committed to fantastic delusions that hierarchal organization functions like you say it does any time it’s implemented.
And you seem committed to roles being personified, to people only doing one thing.
Let’s say, for example: Sam, who works at the steel butt plug factory, can’t be up on the latest sex toy industry publications ¹ and nerd out about it at lunch with their co-worker Alex², who reads the wikis and reports of other factories who work with steel², and Morgan, who has a degree in metallurgy and user-reviews kink³, while they all try out their latest product (a little large on small bodies, put a warning on the box?) and the vegan chili fries at the new diner down the street, while Dave, who doesn’t really care and just thinks its fun to say ‘i work my ass off at the buttplug factory on Tuesdays’, fucks off to get tacos because even though money isn’t a thing anymore, ‘taco Tuesday’ is alliterative and he’s all about that. Then go back to the factory for the weekly job cross-training half day. You’ve got more expertise more perspective and more adherence to any decision reached at that table than you do in any c suite. No authority was exercised, everyone who wanted a say got a say, and the system is better coordinated more fun and probably more efficient than under any centralized system. Maybe they also have a weekly ‘do we need to refactor?’ meeting.
Tell me how the hypothetical steel bbutt-plug factory would be improved by a single manager who does no other work
I’m a Marxist-Leninist, I’m committed to building socialism in the real world, not trying to come up with a hypothetical scenario where management is superfluous. Factories work at the scale of hundreds to thousands, not 4 people living an idyllic life, and these factories have massive supply chains ingoing and outgoing. Management becomes necessary at scales like these, because coordination at such scales cannot be all horizontal.
factories are big and made of thousands of people and machines
Sometimes. For some things. Not always. Especially for simpler products with fewer parts!
A steel butt plug factory could convievably have a dozen or so employees and be perfectly fine, make lots of butt plugs. How many people seriously need to work on that? You’re either casting them or machining them, plus some finishing, maybe testing and packaging–and it’s a product that benefits from being fewer pieces. I just used butt plugs because it’s fun to say and ive seen sex toy factories and single piece metal thing factories, so it isn’t a complete ass pull when i think about how stuff is made.
You seem obsessed with these ideas you have in your head, with no attention to reality. You’re being very idealist for someone who claims not to be.
Again, you’re conceptualizing jobs=people. You’re shackled to capitalist abstractions and unable or unwilling to see past them. It’s incredibly frustrating because I have to restate every principle every time, and be really pedantic.
No, your example is a hypothetical concocted specifically to imagine a case where management isn’t as useful. Even a small factory that needs less than a dozen people for a niche product needs complex supply chains, and moreover is an extreme minority of the total production and distribution. My point wasn’t that everyone needs a direct manager, my point is that management exists because it does solve problems when implemented correctly that horizontalism does not. This gets increasingly complex at larger scales.
I’m not “shackled to capitalist abstractions,” you’re trying to make a point by describing a tiny portion of hypothetical production and trying to layer it over all of production and distribution. This is idealism.
I grew up watching ‘how its made’ while i did my homework, being babysat by my (pedo) uncle who was in industrial real estate, wandering around warehouses and factory floors¹ no sane responsible adult would have allowed a child near, and learned a non-zero amount of mechanical engineering. I am not a specialist, I do not have a degree in this, but this topic was one of my comfort foods as a kid, and kind of a special interest. I do have a real, if not comprehensive, knowledge base. I have been in factories where complex electronics were made.
I tend to take every opportunity to look in on industrial production, because I think it’s cool. I’m not an expert, but I’m not talking fucking hypotheticals here. I’m talking about a composite of real places I’ve been, real people ive known and in some cases fucked who did these kinds of work. I have some actual knowledge, and youre talking about ideal heroic forms of ‘manager’ derived from a russian poster² who never as far as i know actually set foot in a factory and died like a century ago as if that information is as good as modern (or at least living memory) on the ground actual conditions.
Yes there are other things. A car takes a longer supply chain, and a scaled up version of this process still works. Maybe you need a premises matrix or slack server and a local amateur sports league instead of team lunches and an SMS chat. The tools dont even need to be made; they exist already. I have used them.
How the fuck would dedicated ‘managers’ wrangle supply chains better? Why is the factory managing the whole supply chain? Is the supply chain entirely passive and automated and lacking agency? This just sounds like ‘great man’ fetishism. Get over that shit.
Your concept of management may as well involve phlogiston pneuma and agape.
This may shock you, but some of us see materialism as a useful tool for understanding what we see in the world, and not just an identity to project into everything around us in a manner indistinguishable from idealism.
i cannot believe someone who just spent far too long saying “imagine this hypothetical where things go my way” has the gall to say that marxists are idealists.
like your entire argument is fundamentally idealism. its entirely based on your rationalization, with no real supporting evidence except your insistence that it would work
Sure, let’s say something like a lock out tag out mechanism. Person unplugs dangerous machine, puts a sign on the power button, and either nobody turns it on until its fixed, or nobody touches it until the person who put the sign on is out of its guts. This is not hierarchal authority, and in fact everyone having this power, levelling it, increases workplace safety. This is in fact communication. It’s a veto.
Identifying roles with individuals² necessarily creates hierarchy and reduces communication bandwidth. I think the idea that you need to have one consciousness one individual one will responsible for things above a certain scale is insane and backwards, it comes from an insecurity and an unwillingness to adapt.
Quite frankly, you cannot comprehend all of a large system. You can’t comprehend all of the road traffic in a medium sized city. Can’t be done. Your brain just isn’t enough, and the more you try, the more you abstract and reduce, the more you enforce demands based on your reduced abstract understanding, the more you get into the surreal shit show that was the late soviet union’s industrial system¹. The atrophy and distortion is unavoidable unless you work from the bottom up.
Even in your industrial example, having everyone’s eyes and everyone’s³ voice, including their veto on a process will get you a better end result.
The harder you squeeze the higher functions of society, the more easily they slip out of your grasp. You must trust, you must allow others agency, you must understand that you do not understand and not fucking pretend.
If you must have a hierarchal model, I can recommend maszlow’s–which on a civilizational level isn’t all that far off a Marxian analysis of progress. Sorry for the ramble; am very high rn.
¹not that there was a single thing wrong with the USSR at its worst that isn’t wrong with the united States today, and worse besides that make it harder to use as a clear example, please read like an adult and dont make me baby your tankie ass because your imaginary fantasy of your state-daddy you’ve never been to built from 50 year old propaganda pieces is beyond criticism and was without flaw. You can love shit that wasn’t perfect, it’s fine.
² a lunch huddle, Bob being kind of a safety nerd, and the informal back channels kludges and black markets that literally always grow organically in any rigid authoritative system that needs to actually work, sometimes to everyone’s benefit and nobody’s acknowledgement, sometimes at great cost. When roles like coordination and safety are a group responsibility everyone keeps at least half an eye out, and some fucking nerd always does at least as much as a dedicated manager would.
³everyone who gives a shit, at least. Workers at a factory cross training and coming up with ways they could do better, all reading different industry publications giving them different perspectives at the weekly meeting or next refactoring is going to get you better productivity safety efficiency and QOL gains than any amount of distant bosses or consultants could do, and the same between factories, industries, etc. The same is true for farms, gardens, cottage industry, mines, etc.
You’re dramatically misunderstanding my point, to the point that you’re making the same strawman argument Mises did to try to “debunk” socialism. Coordination and administration does not require a single person having total view, that’s not how broad systems work. You need several levels of abastraction and coordination, which can be done by teams of people, you can’t have a fully flat system at large scale without running into massive problems.
The people doing the actual work, if allowed to see the bigger picture, even piece by piece, will do this better than ‘bosses’.
People with different experiences and who tend towards different roles will have different perspectives, different understandings all rooted in some aspect(s) of the actual function of the thing.
Having a weekly team meeting or culture of conflict resolution serves all the same purposes as a dedicated executive, with none of the inefficiencies and substantial gains in both psychological maturity and worker agency to do their shit better.
Responding to inputs from all directions rather than a rigid up/down tree based structure makes more adaptive more realistic systems with fewer kludges and more honesty.
Strategians and tacticians serve different roles because they see different levels of the battlefield, and footsoldiers can see what they directly interact with but are not privy to understanding the full battlefield. Having a fully horizontal organization is shooting yourself in the foot, we develop intra-class hierarchies like managers not because of class society, but because of the added complexity of large-scale production and distribution.
You seem pretty committed to changing as little as possible and not looking at actual scientific math-backed organizational science (read ‘brain of the firm’).
You seem really committed to fantastic delusions that hierarchal organization functions like you say it does any time it’s implemented.
And you seem committed to roles being personified, to people only doing one thing.
Let’s say, for example: Sam, who works at the steel butt plug factory, can’t be up on the latest sex toy industry publications ¹ and nerd out about it at lunch with their co-worker Alex², who reads the wikis and reports of other factories who work with steel², and Morgan, who has a degree in metallurgy and user-reviews kink³, while they all try out their latest product (a little large on small bodies, put a warning on the box?) and the vegan chili fries at the new diner down the street, while Dave, who doesn’t really care and just thinks its fun to say ‘i work my ass off at the buttplug factory on Tuesdays’, fucks off to get tacos because even though money isn’t a thing anymore, ‘taco Tuesday’ is alliterative and he’s all about that. Then go back to the factory for the weekly job cross-training half day. You’ve got more expertise more perspective and more adherence to any decision reached at that table than you do in any c suite. No authority was exercised, everyone who wanted a say got a say, and the system is better coordinated more fun and probably more efficient than under any centralized system. Maybe they also have a weekly ‘do we need to refactor?’ meeting.
Tell me how the hypothetical steel bbutt-plug factory would be improved by a single manager who does no other work
¹they’re kind of a freak
²an entirely different kind of freak
³totally normal
I’m a Marxist-Leninist, I’m committed to building socialism in the real world, not trying to come up with a hypothetical scenario where management is superfluous. Factories work at the scale of hundreds to thousands, not 4 people living an idyllic life, and these factories have massive supply chains ingoing and outgoing. Management becomes necessary at scales like these, because coordination at such scales cannot be all horizontal.
Sometimes. For some things. Not always. Especially for simpler products with fewer parts!
A steel butt plug factory could convievably have a dozen or so employees and be perfectly fine, make lots of butt plugs. How many people seriously need to work on that? You’re either casting them or machining them, plus some finishing, maybe testing and packaging–and it’s a product that benefits from being fewer pieces. I just used butt plugs because it’s fun to say and ive seen sex toy factories and single piece metal thing factories, so it isn’t a complete ass pull when i think about how stuff is made.
You seem obsessed with these ideas you have in your head, with no attention to reality. You’re being very idealist for someone who claims not to be.
Again, you’re conceptualizing jobs=people. You’re shackled to capitalist abstractions and unable or unwilling to see past them. It’s incredibly frustrating because I have to restate every principle every time, and be really pedantic.
No, your example is a hypothetical concocted specifically to imagine a case where management isn’t as useful. Even a small factory that needs less than a dozen people for a niche product needs complex supply chains, and moreover is an extreme minority of the total production and distribution. My point wasn’t that everyone needs a direct manager, my point is that management exists because it does solve problems when implemented correctly that horizontalism does not. This gets increasingly complex at larger scales.
I’m not “shackled to capitalist abstractions,” you’re trying to make a point by describing a tiny portion of hypothetical production and trying to layer it over all of production and distribution. This is idealism.
I grew up watching ‘how its made’ while i did my homework, being babysat by my (pedo) uncle who was in industrial real estate, wandering around warehouses and factory floors¹ no sane responsible adult would have allowed a child near, and learned a non-zero amount of mechanical engineering. I am not a specialist, I do not have a degree in this, but this topic was one of my comfort foods as a kid, and kind of a special interest. I do have a real, if not comprehensive, knowledge base. I have been in factories where complex electronics were made.
I tend to take every opportunity to look in on industrial production, because I think it’s cool. I’m not an expert, but I’m not talking fucking hypotheticals here. I’m talking about a composite of real places I’ve been, real people ive known and in some cases fucked who did these kinds of work. I have some actual knowledge, and youre talking about ideal heroic forms of ‘manager’ derived from a russian poster² who never as far as i know actually set foot in a factory and died like a century ago as if that information is as good as modern (or at least living memory) on the ground actual conditions.
Yes there are other things. A car takes a longer supply chain, and a scaled up version of this process still works. Maybe you need a premises matrix or slack server and a local amateur sports league instead of team lunches and an SMS chat. The tools dont even need to be made; they exist already. I have used them.
How the fuck would dedicated ‘managers’ wrangle supply chains better? Why is the factory managing the whole supply chain? Is the supply chain entirely passive and automated and lacking agency? This just sounds like ‘great man’ fetishism. Get over that shit.
Your concept of management may as well involve phlogiston pneuma and agape.
This may shock you, but some of us see materialism as a useful tool for understanding what we see in the world, and not just an identity to project into everything around us in a manner indistinguishable from idealism.
¹non-operational, still no clue how I’m alive
²admittedly one of the greats.
i cannot believe someone who just spent far too long saying “imagine this hypothetical where things go my way” has the gall to say that marxists are idealists.
like your entire argument is fundamentally idealism. its entirely based on your rationalization, with no real supporting evidence except your insistence that it would work
Project Cybersyn was a real, socialist, working system, comrade and it was based on the same principles as brain of the firm.
It was also an example of centralized economic planning and administration, too.
Read the damn book. Sometimes it is in fact necessary to read more than a sentence from wikipedia to understand a new idea. This one’s worth it.
Edit: nvm. The Wikipedia initial blurb also mentions devolving decision making in the main thing. Didn’t even read that much.
Tankies are like Christians; you’ve all read exactly one book¹, and decided that was enough and you know everything.
¹counting ‘capital’ as one, admittedly a much better one on every metric but entertainment value and metalness
Nope, it was decentralized. Read up on the theory, dawg.
If you call that system centralized, then most anarchists want to establish a centralized system.