[lbo-talk] Re-intro

Tayssir John Gabbour tjg at pentaside.org
Mon Jul 17 13:51:09 PDT 2006


George Scialabba wrote:

> I'm sure there are debates on this, but I'm blanking at the moment,

> except for what is perhaps the earliest (and surely one of the most

> interesting): Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward" vs. William Morris's

> "News from Nowhere."

Thanks, I'll read those.

Doug Henwood wrote:

> I can't speak for George, but my view is that you can't have a complex

> economy without large organizations, and you can't have large

> organizations without some kind of hierarchy. The hierarchy could be a

> lot more democratic than a capitalist enterprise, but you couldn't

> make microchips or steel on a spokescouncil model.

Ah, thanks for the explanation.

Maybe everyone heard about this through Chomsky, but I think David Noble did some interesting scholarship on how tech could evolve to either deskill workers for greater management control (cogs in a machine) or remove management layers so teams could impose their own self-organization and discipline. http://nooranch.com/synaesmedia/wiki/wiki.cgi?DavidNoble/ForcesOfProduction

Similar observations are considered mainstream in the tech world; for instance, many consider startups much more innovative than the Intels/Microsofts which buy them up. (Though I have no serious experience with large factories.)

I think that anarchists generally believe some level of hierarchy is sensible and justifiable... not only trivial coercion to keep children from running into the street, but also experienced workers passing their knowledge onto students and momentarily having more de facto power. So, a self-organizing workplace might have "leaders" due to their exemplary actions, but their monetary compensation might still only depend on effort, others are free to dissociate themselves from their leadership, and they'd have to do a share of the crap jobs too.

(I remember David Graeber alluding to this in the Charlie Rose interview mentioned here, and ZNet's Michael Albert mentioned exemplary actions too.)

Of course, if we look at all those books in the business section on how to be an effective manager, one could imagine that an anarchist society would have studies on effective self-management. Instead of spending 9-18% of GDP on the PR industry, and who-knows-what on violence, that could instead go into whatever it is that maintains a bottom-up society.

All my guess though...

Tayssir



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