this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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I have no issue working under someone who considers my opinion and is generally more skilled than I am at doing a certain task
Is this still about sex
Yeah i think so
Yep, management and administration are necessary functions in a large-scale industrial economy, and we should do our best to orient society in a scientific fashion so as to make these necessary functions as useful and accountable as possible. Socialism is a good thing.
Those aren't exclusive. Collaboration and leadership can coexist, especially when the leadership is accountable to the led. Differences in skill and experience exist, period, so acknowledging this and accounting for it is the best way to meet everyone's needs best from everyone's skills and talents. It also allows those that have less skill to gain guidance and training in a less directly responsible manner.
It's not even just differences in skill and experience. The person who is busy cutting a path through the first necessarily cannot also see the entirety of the forest. The person who is taking the aerial view of the forest necessarily cannot be cutting through it.
There is a hierarchy of scale and complexity. It can be solved with voluntary hierarchies of work, but it cannot be ignored. Consequences of actions can take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, or decades to emerge. The people worried about the immediate consequences of individual actions are not going to have the capacity for also worrying about the long-term consequences of collective actions over time.
We know this. We see this all the time. And yet this axiomatic-bordering-on-religious stricture against hierarchy chooses to believe there's some way to handle hierarchies of complexity without hierarchies of coordination.
Yes, fantastic way to put it, again further illustrating why complex society requires different positions of focus, including different levels of organization. You cannot have local governments functioning properly without a cohesive central government, and a central government cannot properly handle or comprehend the complexities of local life without strong local governments. Democratic centralism and whole process people's democracy are proven tools of meeting the needs of the people.
I like to think about this in terms of levels of abstraction. People deep in a specific domain master its details, but those operating at higher levels need to understand how that work fits into the bigger picture. That’s where mediators come in. They're necessary to bridge the gap between specialists focused on implementation and leaders orchestrating many projects toward a shared vision.
Incidentally, you see the same dynamic in software development. When you assemble libraries into a project, you interact with their APIs which are the interface that defines what the library does, not how it works under the hood. Management, in this sense, functions like that API layer where it surfaces the essential functionality of domain work while shielding higher-level goals from unnecessary complexity.
Ultimately, human cognition has limits making abstractions a necessity for large projects. They let us focus on what matters at each level without drowning in details we can’t possibly hold all at once.
Yep! Another analogy I love is the tactician and the strategian working hand in hand to come up with a multi-sided and complete solution to a given complex problem.
Yup, another great example. I feel like people have a knee jerk reaction to the idea of authority without actually spending the time to think what problems authority addresses, and why it consistently emerges in different domains.
A big part of it is how overwhelmingly negative the use of authority is within capitalism. This is a deeply pervasive issue because the ready-made conditions of capitalism make all authority seem to be inherently evil.
Absolutely, authority under capitalist relations necessarily implies subjugation and people who've grown up in this environment have a hard time imagining how authority can function in a different way.
Honestly, what does this mean? If you abolish ownership, then working "for" someone changes in meaning.
Once ownership and profit are gone, working "for" someone stops meaning "for their economic interest" and starts meaning something very ambiguous. Don't carry over the emotional meaning from one mode of production to the other.
You might mean working according to someone else's plan. Is that working "for" someone? Maybe you mean working with someone who has the power to bar you from participating in the work or has the power to stop you doing certain actions?
It's not clear what you mean, so it would be helpful if you clarified.
Why the smug condescension?
Pretty sure you're just repeating what was already said to you...
Yes, exactly. This is why socialism is important, not just trying to form a more ethical capitalism. Management is critical. Tacticians, for example, often focus on the immediate, while strategians focus on the large-scale and long-term. They coincide and reinforce each other, and no one person can do both adequately. Production is similar, there is a need for those focused on the bigger picture of organizing and those focused on the small, and though those at the smaller end may be working according to grander plans not set by themselves, this is not done to enrich the grander planners, but to come to success for all.
There's no need to be condescending, the person you are replying to is a communist. They are trying to get you to see the merits of socialist organization, not simply attacking all management.
Yeah, no one is mad at you because they're libs. They're downvoting you because you missed the entire point and went off on some bullshit.
You say "working on someone else's plan" is what you mean by "working for". You then go on to talk about selling your labor. These are two different things.
Under capitalism, the capitalist doesn't make a plan. They make a bet. Part of that bet is hiring planners to make the plans that other people will work on. This is why I asked the question I asked.
When you and the manager both sell your labor power to the capitalist for a wage, you both work for the capitalist, but you don't work on the capitalist's plan. You work on your manager's plan.
If you take the capitalist out, and if we define "working for" as selling labor, then "working for" is abolished under socialism, even though hierarchy remains.
If instead the definition of "working for" is "working on someone else's plan", then we have a discussion about the fact that planning is a type of labor. In some context, planning can be done by the people doing the work at the expense of efficiency, which is fine when our goal is maximizing liberty. But there are other contexts where the work to be done and the planning are significantly arduous and complex enough that different people need to do the planning and the execution.
When this is the case, inevitably, anarchists start talking about "voluntary hierarchies" as the correct prefiguration, but this meme is raising the common objections from some anarchists that there is no such thing as a voluntary hierarchy.
Hence, the discussion below about the reality of stratified systems and levels of complexity creating naturally stratified labor distribution, which lends itself to hierarchy.
What are you 14?
You can't (exactly) work with someone when that someone has to manage several other people and make sure everything is going smoothly
I'd rather the means of production to not be split into several small independent workshops look up what happened in Spain for reasons why
What happened in Spain? Or do you have something I can read?
I don't remember exactly where I learned it (thanks capitalism) but essentially the Spanish anarchist model caused a bunch of issues to arise essentially the country was divided like Europe in idk 1100s
I think The Finnish Bolshevik video about it should be more informative than my half assed rant ever could https://youtu.be/3ufTFRGPrCM
or also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz9m8O1fxAs by Marxism Today
Thanks