Decentralization vs centralization

Aside from Essay on Gift and Archaeology of Violence, there is Clastres' "Society Against the State" which I haven't seen, and Graeber cites some in his book on Debt. And from our class let's not leave out Malinowski's work on Pacific peoples. There was some strange ethnography in a book called Masse und Macht ('Crowds and Power') by Canetti but it's not really focused on economy.

By the paradigm of production I just mean the notion that leaving the 'state of nature' to have a state and political economy is itself natural/inevitable and that there is a dialectic that consummates itself in technological communism that passes through alienation in capitalism. Marx was fine in analyzing capitalism and even history but he did not have all the data on 'pre-history' and he sort of disregarded it unfairly e.g. the 'ladder' with rungs such as 'savagery' and 'barbarism'. Of course I am an enthusiastic supporter of Marx's emancipatory vision, I simply disagree with its claim to universality.

The whole discussion is a waste of time at best, and a dangerous distraction at worst. The supposed 'conflict' between centralization and decentralization rests on a faulty premise: the idea that individual agents can 'design' a complex adaptive system. Such systems are full of non-linearities and homeostatic mechanisms. The idea that you could untangle all of them in service of some abstractly-conceived notion of 'centralization' or 'decentralization' is laughable, as demonstrated multiple times through history.

In reality, a complex adaptive system will, in the course of its operation, find its own balance between de- and centralization. Systems have a tendency toward centralization, but generally maintain enough decentralization as is necessary to make them resilient against the ambient level of volatility.

Take BitTorrent, for example. Cohen's fantasy was of a completely decentralized file-sharing system. In practice, the vast majority of use centered around a single repository - The Pirate Bay. However, when the courts came knocking, the ambient volatility increased to the point that a single, central instance became a liability - so thousands of mirrors sprung up.

The point is, there's absolutely no fucking point quibbling over 'centralization vs decentralization', as it's not something that anybody (even those in absolute power) have any control over. Any society will find the balance between centralization and decentralization that best accords with the material conditions it finds itself in. Predicting or, worse, designing for a specific level of decentralization is a fool's errand.

i saw that same criticism in class, but i never once saw anything like that in marx, engels, lenin. i believe that it's a postmodern, "you can't compare one culture or civilization against another" kind of argument, which Marx et al don't have a response to directly because it's a nonsense argument!

there is a clear evolution of the most progressive societies of the world, with clear class conflicts at every stage. that's the point of Marxism: class struggle and how to end it.

that's very well said user, and i think i totally agree with the conclusion: there's no point in fetishizing different forms of association, and there's no validity in pretending your fetishes are predictions of how society will turn out.

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good laugh, friend. is this something that TNS goes into?

do you have any further readings about this type of argument?

that's anachronistic nonsense

Graeber-tier idiot anarchist anthropologist who traveled to South American tribes with the explicit intention to prove that they are true staytless anarchist utopia™. There's a long ass history of anarchists projecting their insecurities on nature or the primitives as a substitute for theory.

Absolute. Fucking. Cancer.

okay now we're getting into it. and it's as i expected. anarchists desire decentralization, but what do they mean by decentralization? what is "horizontalism" and why does a gender studies professor in Democrat Cops of America say we need horizontalism?

t. doesn't understand recursion

That's reactionary, pure and simple.

I read TANS over a decade ago and don't remember whether they address the point. It's basic math/logic and not an opinion. An example by Kantorovich, which was also posted Cockshott's blog (paulcockshott.wordpress.com/returning-to-kantorovich/):
The solution by Kantorovich is arrived at by considering the whole set of machines together, the whole capacity. If the machines are managed in a decentralized fashion instead with each section tasked with maximizing output of AB pairs on its own, you'll get an inferior result.

The point of a cybernetic economy is to facilitate human decision making in lieu of a market system, not to have the computers themselves do all of the planning for us. Whether decisions are made centrally is unrelated.

You don't know what you are talking about. Decentralizing means cutting off potential decision options. It reduces rationality.

i'm beginning to see there's a distinction between the political side and the economic side. economically i think i agree with what the user said about bittorrent and that we'll end up with a hybrid system, centrally planned for the major parts and let """market""" forces entertain small enterprises that do not engage in accumulation.

politically the reaction against centralization, which seems to be the trend of human history, is a reaction against absolutism and top-down rule. i don't exactly understand if a world central gov't, which in a socialist period and comprised of e.g. the soviet model, is that decentralized or centralized?

in total, i'm getting the picture that this is a nonsensical debate. the material conditions of the time will yield, as we saw with the organic rise of the soviet model, whatever the proletariat and its parties need to transform society into socialism.

Part of the reason it's nonsensical to debate this is that there will always be some mixture. Different problems are just best solved at different scales. Planning infrastructure should happen at the largest possible scale. Planning architecture should happen at the city scale at biggest. Planning individual wirk schedules should happen within a community. Planning your day should involve your social circle.

that's a great way to summarize it, thanks user!

very cringy pciture

Well, people aren't always rational. The idea that they always or even mostly are is a very idealist notion. Modern communication and data infrastructure eliminate the need for a monolithic bureaucracy, so there is an argument to be made that a modest loss in efficiency is worth a substantial improvement in individual freedom. Giving people market-like participation in nonessential matters is a huge selling point in the Western world.