Everytime I’ve shown concerns with the ideas of a single party state, of “democratic” centralism, of a planned economy, censorship, secret police, etc, nothing I say is ever really discussed in depth because people just tell me “read On Authority, just read it, its a 10 min read, it will change everything, just read it!”
No it didn’t, this essay is frankly really dumb to me. It feels more like venting than an actual argument. Last time I posted doubts about planned economies and I got a much better view of it with everyone’s polite answers, I still don’t fully agree but there was at least a discussion with an idea I was able to more clearly understand. So my aim with this post is the same
My main reasons to propose decentralized systems with distributed decision making are:
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Decentralized systems are less fragile both to internal failure and external sabotage, you are all on Lemmy so you must know this when comparing it to the centralized Reddit. A centralized system has one failure point and the higher-up it happens the more catastrophic the consequences, and no amount of representative elections and internal purges are ever going to fix this inherent fragility, they are temporal mitigations. Centralized systems depend on constant dice rolls and hope that the guy at the top ends up being good. With time, the dice eventually blunders, it’s innevitable, and this ruins the system and deeply affects the lives of everyone under it
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A small body of people (relatively speaking, in comparison to the greater body of people the system is ruling over) cannot physically and biologically fully comprehend the issues and needs of “the masses” so to speak, that is an amount of information that cannot fit into a couple or a dozen or even hundreds of heads even if all of them deeply want to try. Which most often they don’t. This alienation from “the masses” so to speak happens the higher up you are, you start seeing everything as simply numbers, you need to make that abstraction to properly process things and decide, but in doing so you don’t realize the millions of entire lives full of hopes and dreams and struggles you are affecting. This is why leaders can order genocides, they are never the ones that watch them being committed, they just see papers.
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Any system first and foremost has to sustain itself and its authority, this is the highest priority, it has to be above any other goals, and sustaining a centralized system is much harder than sustaining a portion of a decentralized one, this is why they need censorship and purges and camps and police and information control and data gathering of everything every person is doing “just in case”, all of this effort could be redirected to actually making the lives of people better, but security comes first! Security always eventually eats liberty. What purpose is the liberation of people if that makes them end up in a system where they’re actually just as restricted as before?
On Authority addresses nothing of this. It’s just a bunch of smug self masturbation and "uhhm actually"s.
All these workers, men, women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for individual autonomy.
Nature imposes a necessity to do things in a certain way but this has nothing to do with how the decision making process of the people who are doing that thing is carried out. By this logic your stomach is being authoritarian when it’s hungry.
Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.
If you think nature is authoritarian the spinning wheel is just as much of an authority as the loom though! Both require things to be done in a certain way after all
Let us take another example — the railway. […] Here, too, the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested. In either case there is a very pronounced authority.
No, there is a key difference of relations and mechanics of decision making in both cases. Authority imposed and authority given are different things. A delegate has no authority, the purpose of a delegate is purely to help carrying out a mandate.
When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that’s true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.
He is being smug about not knowing the difference between delegation and representation. They are fundamentally different things though, and this is just a fact. He is mocking people for knowing things he doesn’t. How is this supposed to be enlightening?
The mechanics and relations of power are fundamentally not the same. The point is not to never have a position where someone has to follow the will of someone else, it’s to make sure processes and structures of things are laid out, approved, and can be changed and revoked by the people who are actually operating in them. It’s not to not have a social structure, but to have a social structure that can be taken back and molded
If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other
BUT THAT’S EXACTLY THE POINT! Centralization is a cancer. You fully kill it if you can, and if you can’t, you try to reduce it as much as possible. Showing proof that some things have to be centralized is moot, we can centralize that thing specifically and not centralize everything else.
but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight the world.
They fight preconceived notions that things have to be centralized when they really don’t have to be. A lot of things are like that.
All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society.
This has nothing to do with what’s being discussed??? Also: “Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will” -Frederick Douglass
Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon
If you are being dominated and opressed and by armed means you free yourself that is not imposing authority. That is uh. Freeing yourself. That is self defense. If these things are the same then… basically everything is authoritarian. I get now why people say “its a meaningless word” - people like this guy are the ones who are making it meaningless.
Anyway, same as before, this post is not intended as a “checkmate dumbasses” thing. I’m actually interested in talking and learning. I mean no ill harm. o/
Pictured: A fumo communist
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A more or less decentralised everything is quite nice and is ultimately the goal of establishing communism. however if we ignore the development first needed and you were able to implement that state of things now in a given area, it would find itself unable to defend against the totality of capitalism. A diffuse network while maybe more resilient tends to be much more impotent
Also I think you are fundamentally misunderstood about Engels. When he says"a revolution is authoritarian" he is drawing out the hypocrisy of pacifist socialists, who decree all power to the workers but then shudder when that power is actually used to enforce their freedom against the reaction of the bourgeois.
Engels is not muddying the idea of authority, rather he is illuminating why authority is meaningless on it’s own as a buzzword, and can only gain a revolutionary and freeing character when employed by the proletarian class.
Read If We Burn and Losurdo’s History and Critique of a Black Legend, maybe George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye or Counter-revolution of 1776 (forgot the author).
You need concrete answers to the questions posed by history. I don’t care if your answers align with mine or anyone else’s, but these are the real material circumstances that our ideals have to reckon with, they can’t be brushed over or ignored.
It’s Gerald Horne, no?
Tbh I’ve only ever come into contact with him via interviews and he feels a bit… idk Richard Wolff-esque in that he says a lot of stuff but he never really gets down to brass tacks. Maybe I forgot to take my meds before I listened to his interviews or the interviewers didn’t do a very good job or something though.
Is his writing any better?
Yes that’s right, Gerald Horne.
I don’t know anything about the author tbh, I just found the book to be a useful examination and refutation of the US founding myth. I have similar ebbs and flows of focus so I can’t confidently speak to the quality of the writing lol
People’s History serves a similar purpose but I think 1776 is more focused on the racialized class dynamics and power struggles that are relevant to a discussion on authority. But it’s been over a decade since I read the former.
If there’s a good book on the (largely defeated) liberatory efforts during Reconstruction, that could be good for this topic as well.
Thanks for sharing, I really appreciate it!
Fuck if I could just be in hyperfocus mode all the time, I tell you. I’d end up dying from dehydration or something but I really wish I could live in a world where I could just careen from one hyperfocus to the next.
These days I can barely muster the energy to hyperfocus at all and it legit feels like its own form of torture. But you didn’t reply to my comment to hear me vent about my bizarre personal struggles lol.
No I’m glad to hear I’m not alone in the struggle lmao
On Authority is a polemic. Engels wrote the polemic to dunk on people. It’s the 19th century equivalent of some comment in /c/the_dunk_tank. It’s not supposed to be serious theory. Polemics rarely are serious theory. And like the content of /c/the_dunk_tank, it’s funny if you agree with it, infuriating if you disagree with it, and “how is this shit remotely convincing why are you all laughing” if you’re on the fence.
If you want an actual critique of horizontalist orgs by someone who was in them, read The Tyranny of Structurelessness.
It’s not supposed to be serious theory.
People certainly treat it as one. It’s like a thought terminating cliché honestly. The amount of times I’ve seen people treating this work as if it would blow your mind and immediately stop all your silly little freedom thoughts is way too much to just ignore. Why specifically is it treated so specially, unlike the other work you linked?
I’mma read it soon and post what I think btw thanks.
It’s weird how the author somehow manages to define the word “elite” in such a way that excludes actually existing political elites (since those people are directly responsible to their organization)
Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities.
… And then uses this idea to justify the integration of groups into a hierarchical party apparatus. There’s hypocrisy in criticizing informal elites while openly embracing a larger hierarchical structure and elites. Good luck holding the head of the party accountable!
Also, some of the principles in the essay directly correlate with decentralized principles of organizing anyway - delegation, limited mandate, rotation in particular… the only one not explicitly mentioned is instant recallability. I’d question 2 and 3 mainly. Especially given the party apparatus she’s advocating for… otherwise everything else is already done by “informal groups”
I really struggle to conceive the idea of a “fully structureless” group this is advocating against anyway. Any group of people coming together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure itself in some way. We are people with different backgrounds and capabilities and ideals, after all.
I think overall though… the piece is mostly good. Past a certain size, you need to have formal structure and accountability with clear duties. You also need to anticipate that certain systemic oppressions are going to show up in your group and you need to have a way of accounting for this. I don’t really see why this means every other benefit of decentralization and horizontality needs to be abandoned though.
Decentralized systems are less fragile both to internal failure and external sabotage, you are all on Lemmy so you must know this when comparing it to the centralized Reddit. A centralized system has one failure point and the higher-up it happens the more catastrophic the consequences, and no amount of representative elections and internal purges are ever going to fix this inherent fragility, they are temporal mitigations.
This is definitely a problem of centralisation but I think this is a bit of a reductionist argument tbh.
Yes, there are always going to be issues like corruption and misconduct when there is leadership - people are fallible and that’s an incontrovertible fact of humanity.
But I’d pose it to you this way - the solution to a problem is not necessarily the negation.
Take the Flint water crisis, for example. This was caused by government and by poorly managed infrastructure and cost cutting.
How we attribute the blame determines a lot about our political outlook. An ancap is going to blame government and regulations. An anarchist is going to blame capitalism and hierarchical government structures. A communist is going to blame capitalism and bourgeois democracy. A progressive is going to blame neoliberalism. A conservative is going to talk about big government and make appeals to personal responsibility and, ultimately, they’re going to make a “let them drink lead” argument or something (idk lol, I’m not steeped in conservative political rhetoric.)
I’m going to impose upon your goodwill here to elaborate on my point about the solution to a problem not being the negation though:
The water infrastructure dumped lead into the water supply. The negation of this problem would be to get rid of water infrastructure. That might “solve” the problem but everything exists in dialectical tension and that means there’s always going to be ramifications and compromises inherent to every decision or action. Hence why the negation is not truly a solution, although it can be very alluring because this sort of reductionism is comforting in the simplicity and certainty it provides a person and it’s how you end up with people who take hardline primitivist positions of returning to monke and misanthropic positions of wanting to get rid of the human race entirely and so on.
So of course we will see problems in centralisation and hierarchy but it’s important to ask ourselves if the negation is truly a solution or if it’s just a way of transposing the problems into a different context; unfortunately decentralised systems are also prone to a lot of the same problems that exist in centralised ones but due to their diffuse nature, it can be far harder to deal with accountability and remediation and stuff like that.
In the most crass incarnation of this line of thinking is a thought experiment I like to use: if we achieved a truly decentralised or anarchist society in the country I live in, there’s a non-zero chance that a majority of people would support genocidal policies against the indigenous peoples here, or even open genocide. That’s not a risk I am comfortable with taking tbh and neither should anyone else who has a semblance of principles.
I have seen organisations established along horizontalist principles and a hierarchy and leadership structure always forms, except in these examples it is almost always de facto and not de jure. Personally, I would prefer explicit roles, responsibilities, and delimitations of power structures and hierarchies so there’s a degree of accountability and opportunity to rein in excesses rather than having organic ones that gradually form via accretion and a sort of “that’s just how it’s done” mentality because it’s much harder to deal with internal struggles imo.
How do you tell someone that they’ve overstepped when there’s no formal bounds to the scope of their role? How do you vote someone out of a position if they were never elected to it but they just gradually occupied the levers of power one way or another?
I’d argue that decentralised systems are more fragile because they lack sufficient unification to deal with these internal issues and because their de facto hierarchies are more porous in the sense that people can sorta worm their way in and become fused to the power they command.
With my example of genocide above, we see that there can be a distributed form of points of failure just as much as a centralised organisation can have a singular point of failure.
I’d also pose another thought experiment to you - in my country and probably yours too, we have a rotating cast of leaders in politics. Some countries like the UK and Australia seem to have a goddamn carousel of leadership. This is clearly more decentralised leadership compared to the USSR under Stalin or Cuba under Castro and so on. But I’d argue that there’s much more accountability built in, although it’s imperfect, with a system of one-party rule and one leader who occupies an executive role for a long period of time.
Sounds counterintuitive, no?
But hear me out - if the party under Stalin/Castro/Xi Jinping finds itself failing to meet the needs of the people and failing to be responsible, does that not risk the position of the leader and the party below them? In this system there is no kicking the can down the road to your successor to deal with it, there is no blame shifting on the previous leaders or parties or obstructionist politics like under liberal democracy. The buck stops with the executive and the party. Any major fuckups risk the entire government being overthrown by the masses if they are overly disaffected or harmed. And these errors are cumulative; people don’t easily forgive or forget when the government has seriously wronged them.
In my country, however, it’s always someone else’s fault and someone else’s problem to deal with and if nothing can be done about it then that’s because of what the predecessors did and because they have their hands tied by whatever the fuck election cycle is going on.
Is my country’s government the Platonic ideal of decentralisation? No, of course not. But it is somewhat more decentralised than single party, single leader rule and the problems that I’ve described as we slide down the decentralisation spectrum are liable only to increase the further down we go.
The ultimate decentralisation would be the ancap ideal where every person is their own petty autocrat over their own little fief but this is a product of hyper-individualism to the point of atomisation of society imo and it doesn’t resolve any problems that can’t exist under the rule of an autocrat that presides over a larger slice of the world. I guess except for things like genocide; you can’t really commit stuff like genocide on your very own one-acre kingdom.
Centralized systems depend on constant dice rolls and hope that the guy at the top ends up being good. With time, the dice eventually blunders, it’s innevitable, and this ruins the system and deeply affects the lives of everyone under it.
I would pose this question in response - does a decentralised system (as in a realistic one and not an ancap hyper-individualistic fantasy) not roll the dice in the hopes that the community or the majority will not make blunders or ruin it for people?
There was a time where communities in the US world engage in decentralised decision-making processes to lynch black people, no?
And even that counter-example is itself flawed because the counter-counter-example is when there was that real piece of shit in the US who terrorised his town and engaged in really heinous acts of violence that I’m not going to detail. Eventually he got lynched by the community and I think there were like dozens of bullets from different makes of gun found at the scene of his killing and nobody in the town would admit to seeing or hearing a single thing. The dude got exactly what was coming to him, if you’re familiar with his actions, and the community took measures to protect itself. It could have been dealt with in a better way, in a perfect world, but that didn’t happen in the lead up to his lynching. So there’s the other side of that argument, for whatever it’s worth.
Anyway I’m going to be otherwise occupied with things and I’ll try to get back to the responding to the rest of this so, uhh, I hope you like essays I guess?
Material conditions determine tactics, not ideology. Capitalism relies inherently on decentralization, while the socializing tendency in production and the combination of industry to prevent crises (monopoly) skews towards centralization under socialism. With the highest development of the productive forces centralization is inevitable, and this is one of the fundamental aspects of the fall of capitalism.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will” -Frederick Douglass
There is no power to concede; the evolution of society demands the end of class distinctions, and without them the state as an organ of class power ceases to exist. The proletarian “state,” as it’s the first to serve the majority over the minority, becomes superfluous with time.
This all just reads as “don’t worry, everything will just somehow work out! <3” and… I don’t really buy it.
The entire point of scientific socialism, and what elevated it from utopian pipe dreams, is discovering the elements in society that lead it towards the next, and I pointed out some that lead to centralization. You can’t just say “centralization is a cancer” and be done with it. I guess what you mean is that “everything will somehow work out [without struggle],” and this is sort of my fault for not including struggle between classes directly because I wanted to emphasize that, afterwards, new society isn’t formed out of thin air according to moral ideals but is based upon the momentum of old society.
We understand that the capitalists won’t give up their power willingly even when their system is in decline, and that it must be taken away from them by the people, still, class struggle isn’t divorced from material forces; the proletariat itself was created through the industrial revolution (introduction of machinery in production, concentration of production and labor). Human activity isn’t completely spontaneous, and mass revolution even less so; it’s not a question of anything being automatic or everything somehow working itself out without input—the transition can be sped up or slowed down, the emerging mass state can experience setbacks and victories, but in the end the capitalist rule cannot last forever, proven ex. with the fall of the rate of profit, and in its growing tendencies socialism will take root.
I guess what you mean is that "everything will somehow work out [without struggle],
No, even with struggle, you’re just saying that things will naturally eventually fall into place because they’re just destined to be like that. You’re not a prophet and you cannot predict what billions of different peoples will do and how. You never really even adressed any of the points I made about decentralization, you just said “nah that wont happen, this will happen instead, sorry”. There’s nothing I can even respond to that! It’s just fatalist nonsense!
You never really even adressed any of the points I made about decentralization
I thought it wasn’t necessary because of how shallow they are, and how they treat external realities as ideological methods of organization.
Terror isn’t just for sustaining a centralized system. There have been more or less decentralized systems oriented against imperialism and they have fallen even quicker to external sabotage as in Indonesia or Guatemala. For authoritarianism, it’s a meaningless word as it makes authority a motive force in itself, which is just a product of not understanding the class character of the state.
If you don’t understand the material trends of society and hold to socialism on that basis as the next step forward, you’re just an idealist with moral indignation against the current system and nothing else.
Authoritarianism is a measure of how monopolized and heirarchical the decision-making process is within an organization. There’s nothing meaningless about that, it’s a very specific thing. Now if you use the definition from Engels, where your stomach is authoritarian when it’s hungry, it’s definitely meaningless, but to pretend that is the only or even the main definition is just asinine.
Indonesia or Guatemala
Are you referring to Jacobo Arbenz and Sukarno? Those were pacifists who refused to arm themselves. That has nothing to do with decentralization.
If you don’t understand the material trends of society
You can’t! No one can! Society is not a monolith! It’s billions of people with different thoughts and feelings and ideals and desires and conditions, you can’t condense them all into a theory, you’re not smart for thinking you can. Guessing that society will definitely surely follow a very specific process to the letter is again, purely self-masturbatory fatalism. It’s Not Even Wrong.
Authoritarianism is a measure of nothing. Do you not just mean authority? For something to be an ism there has to be something constant about it, but authority is a response to external conditions, and when it comes to the state, can’t take on an independent, alienated character, but must conform to the character of the dominant class. This is precisely what Engels was trying to get across with his comparisons.
Wrt Sukarno’s govt., it wasn’t just pacifism. The CIA worked in the first place by bombing areas wanting to provoke separatism, when, surely, they should have promoted unity? In the final act the non-aligned government was undone by taking advantage of the disunity between the army and government, with gangster squads financed by the former able to spread out their terror and make use of the low centralization to hide their atrocities behind proxy groups.
To be clear, I never assumed anything would be followed “to the letter.” I predicted society will tend towards centralization/socialization and pointed out specific causes of this. Your response is “you can’t know, people have thoughts and feelings and free will!” Where do you think thoughts and feelings and ideals come from? Nothing? Do you think mass movements are a product of people coincidentally independently coming to the same conclusions?
You can’t know the individual thoughts of every person in a centralized system, and therefore can’t make any predictions about the outcome. And, in fact, by creating predictions from trends and tendencies you picked up, you’re being fatalistic (you even use the term “inevitable” in your analysis, which is clearly the sign of prophetic day-dreaming).
You’re acting like we, as Marxists, are starting from scratch and basing ourselves on nothing but guesswork. No. There are real, tangible, obvious trends in society, as in life in general. You’re making the same confused argument Jordan Peterson does when, in a Joe rogan interview, he says “we can’t predict climate change, climate just means everything and there’s no way to account for everything.” We don’t need to predict everything; not everything that influences a person does so to the same degree. Class interest influences people in a massive way, we see this most obviously manifested in what people from different classes view as ideal. The bourgeoisie has their free market, individual liberties, etc. In short they wish to roughly maintain the present or the recent past, that time in which their mode of production was most dominant. The petty bourgeois has their decentralisation, their small commodity production, etc., in short they wish to turn back the clock to the very beginning of capitalism, when their small commodity production was still predominant. And the proletariat have abolition of private property, equality, community, etc., i.e. communism, that mode of production in which the proletariat becomes dominant, universalised, and in that action it abolishes itself.
I’ve met countless libertarian proletarians, I was one of them in fact. Because societal trends are just trends, and society doesn’t simply collapse into what the majority of people (not that a majority of proletarians are socialists at all) will it to be, in fact, that happens very little. If your theory were true, states would have never developed in the first place, as they were against the interests of the vast majority of people living in stateless societies.
It’s okay to see trends and predict based on them, but to think the trends indicate a very specific thing is GUARANTEED to eventually happen, and to think henceforth that any other investigation of alternatives is pointless, is what I call self masturbatory fatalism
Just ignore all of the analysis of all the genius theoreticians. It’s totally just him saying “trust me!”
Things are right when they make sense and follow logic and empiric evidence, not when a genius says them. Tell me what they said and we may discuss it, to simply say “oh but a genius said so” is meaningless.
I wonder what those genius theoreticians did? Oh right! They analysed historical evidence, the material furnished by the natural sciences, production and how it developed, society and its laws of motion and even language at times. Additionally they analysed the goings on of the present and transformed that into practice, practice which merely furnished proof of their correctness! How about you actually read Marx? Maybe try basing your understanding of Marxism off of more than 2 pages that were written as a quick, but useful, polemic! Engles himself has analysed the class character behind the desire for decentralisation in more depth, try The Housing Question!
Engles himself has analysed the class character behind the desire for decentralisation in more depth
I’m confused, did he individually analyze the thoughts in each of the several billion existing people’s heads to understand why each of them desired for or against decentralization? Otherwise he’s simply engaging in nonsensical ramblings, no different than the armageddon predictions of a crazed preacher.
I’m at the dentist, so I cant really get into most of the points here, but this got me
Decentralized systems are less fragile both to internal failure and external sabotage, you are all on Lemmy so you must know this when comparing it to the centralized Reddit.
Yeah, but Lemmy is only slightly better cuz some instances have better admins. Hexbear is a Stalinist state, the authority invested in its admins and mods are what keep reactionary trash off our forum and keeps it a safe place for comrades of all kinds. You NEED authority for that
You could only get those admins and mods because those people could make their own Lemmy instance - had they made a subreddit their attitude would have gotten them banned by the higher ups. Because of being its own thing it gets to enjoy its own management consequences and not the consequences of everyone else’s management, which is why it’s not affected by Reddit’s shitty venture capitalist ideas.
All of the benefits you’re speaking of come from decentralization! As for needing a moderation team on a forum, yeah I agree, I don’t think there’s any other way of keeping an online forum good. But, I did say:
Centralization is a cancer. You fully kill it if you can, and if you can’t, you try to reduce it as much as possible. Showing proof that some things have to be centralized is moot, we can centralize that thing specifically and not centralize everything else.
So you’re saying authority is bad, until you need some authority. I agree. The argument is about being in favor of authority. I’m a historical materialist. I’m not opposed to decentralizing things when they can be, but I don’t think decentralizing things is the be all end all of of “freedom”. Trotskyists make arguments all the time against the “imperialist states of the USSR and PRC” and while I do think there’s criticism to be made about the policies they have had or continue to pursue, I don’t think any historical revolution would have been successful without some level of authority.
Freedom is not the only goal in decentralization, there’s many other tangible benefits to it
And, well, don’t be confused about me saying “we need some authority”, what I’m saying is “if there really is a tangible proof that a process NEEDS to have people in positions where their will has to be followed, that can be done when it is deemed necessary” but this is not me arguing in favour of rigid vertical structures. I am in favour of mods being rotated and elected and that people in the forums should be able to strip them of that role if they think it’s necessary, for example. The point is not to apply a single organization model for everything but to do the best we can
Yeah, On Authority makes pretty bad arguments. Big Engels L.
