This is a fine abstract point to make, but it's just that: an abstraction. Once you try to make the distinction practically, you run into all sorts of idealist idiocies. How do you separate capitalist command over labor from labor itself? How do you make a state practice governance (distribution) without also practicing governmentality (control)? How is it possible to posit a beneficial function that can be easily extracted from really existing yuckiness? It's not. As Ida Dominijanni wrote recently, about democracy: "[T]here is no break between the model and the thing, between the idea and the historical experiment. Democracy is real (or actually existing) democracy. It is not something other than the historical realization of the idea."
> And frankly, we both agree that
>there is no reason for the management of things not to
>be conducted in a centralized, hierarchical manner.
>It is the only way which is up to the tasks of a
>complex, industrialized society.
But here you have, just like anarchism's fantasies of decentralized utopia, decided in advance requirements for how a future society should operate. More idealism.
>The problem of the collapse of the really existing
>socialist countries was not the central management of
>production
Really? I never pegged you for a Lenin lover. This was exactly his plan: Taylorism in the factory and redistribution by the state. But it's utter crap. Can capital really be abolished by radical changes to distributive and consumptive regimes that leave production untouched? Given the experiments at it carried out by Sweden, the USSR, and China, the evidence is clearly no.
>Am I the only one who finds anarchist conceptions of
>the post-capitalist future to be a dystopian
>nightmare, "socialism as an endless meeting"?
No. God no.
>overbearing productivist fantasties of "Parecon" and
>the like.
Indeed. Parecon retains waged labor and money as the general equivalent. How revolting.