>A lot of anarchists/greens, and Michael Albert,
>don't like hierarchies of any kind. Many don't
>like representative structures - people like
>Murray Bookchin want no units so large that
>face-to-face meetings become impractical. I'm
>all for democratic management, but it's going to
>require the delegation of authority - i.e.,
>something like parliamentary and executive
>structures.
How do you know what's going to be required? This already dictates too much, for me. And there's a lot more to criticize representation for than just its impersonal or inauthentic character. Also, I'm not sure why democracy, or democratic processes, gets a free pass in these discussions, why it's assumed to be neutral, and especially why it always seems to be posited as the ultimate goal.
That said, antihierarchy as a principle is easily made a fetish that tolerates lots of other yucky stuff about capitalism. Out of laziness more than self-satisfaction (sure), I'm appending something I wrote about this somewhere else.
>
>Albert's preoccupation in his Parecon (short for
>"participatory economy") schema is with
>hierarchy, as in destroying it in the workplace,
>in the form of the market, and in the economy as
>a whole, and instead implementing hierarchy-free
>collective management. This tenet guides, for
>instance, a recent article on his tours of
>Argentine factories that have been recuperated
>by workers, in which factories that hew closer
>to capitalist management structures are eyed
>more critically than those that don't. In short,
>Albert's is an anarchist economics.
>
>Certainly the abolition of hierarchy is
>something to strive for, a necessary goal even,
>but fetishizing it is problematic, especially
>when you concede that you're willing, as Albert
>is, to countenance the continuation of waged
>labor to expedite its arrival. Deleuze, in
>Difference and Repetition, notes two different
>meanings of hierarchy. The second, the "good"
>one, "considers things and beings from the point
>of view of power: it is not a question of
>considering absolute degrees of power, but only
>of knowing whether a being eventually 'leaps
>over' or transcends it limits in going to the
>limit of what it can do, whatever its degree."
>
>Here, Deleuze says, "'to the limit'Šno longer
>refers to what maintains the thing under a law,
>nor to what delimits or separates it from other
>things. On the contrary, it refers to that on
>the basis of which it is deployed and deploys
>all its powerŠ.This ontological measure is
>closer to the immeasurable state of things than
>to the first kind of measure; this ontological
>hierarchy is closer to the hubris and anarchy of
>beings than to the first hierarchy."
>
>The first acceptation of hierarchy, on the other
>hand, is absolute, measuring "beings according
>to their limits, and according to their degree
>of proximity or distance from a principle." This
>is the hierarchy of the total (totalizing and
>totalitarian) that brooks no difference. This is
>the notion of hierarchy that Albert objects to.
>It's also the kind that, because he meets it
>with irony (to use a different Deleuzean
>concept), he ends up accepting. Deleuze calls
>irony "ascending towards the principles" of
>moral law, which means "challenging the law as
>secondary," challenging its authenticity,
>protesting its illegitimacy and usurping of an
>"original power." He contrasts this with humor,
>"descending towards the consequences," where one
>"falsely submits" to the law, mocks it, and
>thereby is able to "taste pleasures it was
>supposed to forbid."
>
>Albert's principled objections are always
>ascending, never descending. His focus on
>hierarchies elides the other weapons capital
>uses to ensure its domination. By railing
>against capital's illegitimacy--and its
>suspension of some higher, presumably more
>communistic nature--he ends up missing the
>creative pleasures available in the act of
>falling.