i am considering writing an article for my organization about the "centralization vs decentralization" argument, after hearing the praises for "decentralization for decentralization sake" a few times and not having a great comeback immediately.
I guess the argument is the same as "centralization = bad", so it sounds similar to anarchist thinking. but what's the difference between political centralization and economic centralization?
what are your thoughts? is decentralization just a rehash of anarchist idealism, but now with Technology and Blockchain petty bourgeois nonsense? should I read TNS?
I would highly recommend checking out the work of Pierre Clastres ("Primitive Economy" chapter in Archeology of Violence) who was an anthropologist who posited 'primitive society' as 'society against the state' and besides that plenty of ethnographic facts do not agree with the old Marxish idea of 'primitive communism'. Communities are self-sustaining and autonomous (this is in fact their goal, economic autonomy and political independence are the same) but also trade with their neighbors. Might also want to check out Marcel Mauss' essay on gift. Clastres speaks of a paradigm of society vs state, centrifugal vs centripetal forces. Communities and households/kin groups within communities strive for autonomy in production but do not develop their productive forces. I would say that political centralization and economic centralization are the same. The political centralization ensures a balance of debt-power towards the state, while decentralization keeps the primitive chief or leader obliged to his community. I think blockchain and all sorts of technology could be 'liberated' post-capitalism but I do not want anything to do with people who would continue with those sorts of toys and games when society is no longer a labor camp.
Matthew Sanders
where did you get that photo of bookchin?
Liam Stewart
The only correct stance to take on this issue is that it's idiotic semantics and a useless concept for politics. Is it something geographic, with the way public administration is divided within a country?
Jose Brooks
kek
Kevin Long
pretty sure thats Lenin
thanks for the recommendation. i am super interested in primitive societies, i took a class in basic anthropology and learned about basic tribal structures and how it was not undemocratic and leaders were powerless.
could you explain? i'm actually tempted to agree, i agree with Lenin in S&R that discussing what communism will look like is pointless. while that could be the theme of my article, i'd like to at least try to summarize the arguments of both sides.
Same here basically. I didn't learn about powerless leaders (or forgot) but it was extremely eye-opening, obvious why they have to keep it out of lower-age education (they need to be fully dyed in the wool first). I'm not quite a primitivist but I think the ethnography is important if we're gonna think about non-capitalist social forms for ourselves. Also it BTFO's some of the budding I'm not going to call them vulgar Marxists here who believe in THE world-historic paradigm of production.
Connor Nguyen
could you expand on this, user?
do you have any references or books in mind? like i said, i'm super curious about ""primitive"" cultures.
Bentley Cox
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.
Jose Smith
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.
Colton Wright
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.
Michael Reyes
...
Chase Thompson
good laugh, friend. is this something that TNS goes into?
do you have any further readings about this type of argument?
Thomas Hall
that's anachronistic nonsense
Josiah Barnes
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.
Angel Taylor
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?
Lucas Brown
t. doesn't understand recursion
Jose Lee
That's reactionary, pure and simple.
Caleb Howard
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.
Landon Gonzalez
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.
Aiden Butler
You don't know what you are talking about. Decentralizing means cutting off potential decision options. It reduces rationality.
James James
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.
Benjamin Richardson
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.
Jayden Jenkins
that's a great way to summarize it, thanks user!
Lincoln Brooks
very cringy pciture
Kevin Butler
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.
