I made a post on hierarchy a month ago but I have some more specific questions now.

I’ve been hit with the claim that mass production industries that are needed today would not be possible without a hierarchy. That due to regional limitations and the logistics of smartphone manufacturing, technology cannot be produced on the needed scale without a hierarchy of managers.

This is quoted in PCB fabrication, as well as other areas such as medicine and other mass produced goods.

It is also said that managers are needed for efficiency, though I don’t understand that.

Because the anarchist movement, abolishing hierarchy, “runs counter” to the “global direction of humanity and progress”, it is acclaimed to being “doomed to failure” and “idealist”.

What would be the anarchist response to this? Would appreciate detailed responses and/or resources.

I want to improve my anarchist understanding

  • Commiunism@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    41·
    4 months ago

    Centralized, efficient mass production of goods to satisfy human needs does require some hierarchy, but under a society that has successfully abolished commodity production in favor of production for use these hierarchies would operate in a completely different way than they do now - not being born out of class antagonisms but rather out of necessity for coordination, never permanent but revocable and based on competency.

    A project or a large production chain might have engineers, organizers - basically, whatever is necessary for the division of labor and for the end product to come into fruition. After all, how are you going to manufacture something like a phone without dividing up necessary tasks, having someone directing the production chain (which often consists of 1000+ people btw)?

    Kropotkin and his anarcho-communism theory (which is the most developed anarchist theory afaik) does propose a solution as seen in the works such as “Fields, Factories, and Workshops” where the argument is essentially ‘centralized production requires hierarchy, therefore we must have small localized production’, or in other words, throw away hundreds of years of progress and return to medieval style-esque production which would greatly increase the total amount of work hours needed to produce goods to satisfy needs (assuming all the needed materials get supplied without issues), all for the sake of ideology and ghosts within the mind.

    • punkisundead [they/them]@slrpnk.netEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      Kropotkin …

      I would like to reply to this specific part with an quote and an link from the anarchist FAQ. Feel free to follow the link, there is so much more detail an perspective in the parts I left out of the quote.

      I.3.8 Do anarchists seek “small autonomous communities, devoted to small scale production”?

      No. The idea that anarchism aims for small, self-sufficient, communes is a Leninist slander. They misrepresent anarchist ideas on this matter, suggesting that anarchists seriously want society based on “small autonomous communities, devoted to small scale production.” In particular, they point to Kropotkin, arguing that he “looked backwards for change” and “witnessed such communities among Siberian peasants and watchmakers in the Swiss mountains.” [Pat Stack, “Anarchy in the UK?”, Socialist Review, no. 246] Another Leninist, Donny Gluckstein, makes a similar assertion about Proudhon wanting a federation of “tiny economic units”. [The Paris Commune, p. 75]

      …

      Kropotkin’s vision was one of federations of decentralised communities in which production would be based on the “scattering of industries over the country – so as to bring the factory amidst the fields . . . agriculture . . . combined with industry . . . to produce a combination of industrial with agricultural work.” He considered this as “surely the next step to be made, as soon as a reorganisation of our present conditions is possible” and “is imposed by the very necessity of producing for the producers themselves.” [Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, pp. 157-8] He based this vision on a detailed analysis of current economic statistics and trends.

      Kropotkin did not see such an anarchist economy as being based around the small community, taking the basic unit of a free society as one “large enough to dispose of a certain variety of natural resources – it may be a nation, or rather a region – produces and itself consumes most of its own agricultural and manufactured produce.” Such a region would “find the best means of combining agriculture with manufacture – the work in the field with a decentralised industry.” Moreover, he recognised that the “geographical distribution of industries in a given country depends . . . to a great extent upon a complexus of natural conditions; it is obvious that there are spots which are best suited for the development of certain industries . . . The[se] industries always find some advantages in being grouped, to some extent, according to the natural features of separate regions.” [Op. Cit., p. 26, p. 27 and pp. 154-5]

      Kropotkin stressed that agriculture “cannot develop without the aid of machinery and the use of a perfect machinery cannot be generalised without industrial surroundings . . . The village smith would not do.” He supported the integration of agriculture and industry, with “the factory and workshop at the gates of your fields and gardens” in which a “variety of agricultural, industrial and intellectual pursuits are combined in each community” to ensure “the greatest sum total of well-being.” He thought that “large establishments” would still exist, but these would be “better placed at certain spots indicated by Nature.” He stressed that it “would be a great mistake to imagine industry ought to return to its hand-work stage in order to be combined with agriculture. Whenever a saving of human labour can be obtained by means of a machine, the machine is welcome and will be resorted to; and there is hardly one single branch of industry into which machinery work could not be introduced with great advantage, at least at some of the stages of the manufacture.” [Op. Cit., p. 156, p. 197, p. 18, pp. 154-5 and pp. 151-2]

      Clearly Kropotkin was not opposed to large-scale industry for “if we analyse the modern industries, we soon discover that for some of them the co-operation of hundred, even thousands, of workers gathered at the same spot is really necessary. The great iron works and mining enterprises decidedly belong to that category; oceanic steamers cannot be built in village factories.” However, he stressed that this objective necessity was not the case in many other industries and centralised production existed in these purely to allow capitalists “to hold command of the market” and “to suit the temporary interests of the few – by no means those of the nation.” Kropotkin made a clear division between economic tendencies which existed to aid the capitalist to dominate the market and enhance their profits and power and those which indicated a different kind of future. Once we consider the “moral and physical advantages which man would derive from dividing his work between field and the workshop” we must automatically evaluate the structure of modern industry with the criteria of what is best for the worker (and society and the environment) rather than what was best for capitalist profits and power. [Op. Cit., p. 153, p. 147 and p. 153]

      Clearly, Leninist summaries of Kropotkin’s ideas on this subject are nonsense. Rather than seeing “small-scale” production as the basis of his vision of a free society, he saw production as being geared around the economic unit of a nation or region: “Each region will become its own producer and its own consumer of manufactured goods . . . [and] its own producer and consumer of agricultural produce.” Industry would come to the village “not in its present shape of a capitalist factory” but “in the shape of a socially organised industrial production, with the full aid of machinery and technical knowledge.” [Op. Cit., p. 40 and p. 151]

      Industry would be decentralised and integrated with agriculture and based around communes, but these communes would be part of a federation and so production would be based around meeting the needs of these federations. A system of rational decentralisation would be the basis of Kropotkin’s communist-anarchism, with productive activity and a free society’s workplaces geared to the appropriate level. For those forms of industry which would be best organised on a large-scale would continue to be so organised, but for those whose current (i.e., capitalist) structure had no objective need to be centralised would be broken up to allow the transformation of work for the benefit of both workers and society. Thus we would see a system of workplaces geared to local and district needs complementing larger factories which would meet regional and wider needs.

      Link to the relevant part of the anarchist FAQ