this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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@Cowbee
I never said ideas create reality, however, I do believe that ideas can shape reality through the actions of those who hold those ideas, and I completely agree with the concept of unity through organization, again, never stating the contrary.
You were idealistically stating that more decentralization would have helped the Anarchists despite material evidence to the contrary. Hierarchy is not a bad thint, unjust hierarchy is.
@Cowbee
Hierarchy is a bad thing as it perpetuates inequality and oppression by allowing certain people to have more power than others. Not only would a system where power is decentralized be better in terms of eliminating inequality and oppression, but such a system would be more in line with communism's goal of creating a classless society.
Hierarchy does not perpetuate inequality, accumulation does. Hierarchy without accumulation and democratically accountable does not perpetuate inequality.
A decentralized system is not necessarily better at addressing systems of inequality or oppression.
Decentralized or Centralized makes no difference on creating a classless society.
@Cowbee
Hierarchy is the accumulation of power in the hands of a select minority of people. Even if there are safeguards to prevent too much power going to the top there will still always be an accumulation of power at the top of the hierarchy, thereby creating an inequality of power amongst the population. The only way to not have inequality of any kind is to get rid of hierarchy.
Hierarchy is not an accumulation of power, but authority vested in individuals. Democratically accountable, there isn't anything inherently wrong with it.
Additionally, inequality is not an enemy of Communism. Communism is about providing for everyone and giving everyone a dignified life, not about making everyone equal. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" inherently accepts inequality of circumstances and outcomes as acceptable as long as everyone's needs are met, which is impossible in the contradiction of Capitalism.
@Cowbee
I'm not able to take anything you say seriously. First, you claim that individuals having authority over others isn't an accumulation of power even though a person with authority would have to have power over others to have authority over them, and then you claim that communism is compatible with inequality, which is the most absurd thing I've ever heard a communist claim. You sound like a revisionist.
Accumulation means increasing, it does not mean static power vested democratically. Capitalists accumulate via an endless cycle of M-C-M', which in turn swallows everything else. Elected representatives can be recalled, and even if they never are, they do not infinitely profit off the labor of others.
Please explain how "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" implies the goal is equality, and not satisfying the needs of everyone. Equality is idealist, satisfying needs is materialist. Marx explains precisely what he means:
"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
If anything, you are the revisionist, promoting half of Critique of the Gotha Programme and rejecting the half that isn't Anarchism-friendly.