anarchist critique of relations of power

An Anarchist Critique of Power Relations within Institutions (2020) by kevin carson.. via 19 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-a-carson-an-anarchist-critique-of-power-relations-within-institutions]

notes/quotes:

3

I. Introduction

Anarchism is a critique of the principle of authority and its negative effects on society. In the popular understanding of anarchism this is most commonly associated with the anarchist critique of the state. But the anarchist critiques of the authority principle as it involves the state are just as applicable to authority relations within institutions.

Just as in society as a whole, authority within hierarchical institutions serves primarily to promote the interests of those who possess it at the expense of those who do not. Authority shifts costs, effort and negative consequences downward, and shifts benefits upward; as such, it is a form of privilege. And like all forms of privilege, it creates fundamental conflicts of interest.

These conflicts of interest, in turn, result in all sorts of related inefficiencies and irrationalities. They take the form, in particular, of distorted information flows and perverse incentives.

aka: whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world

II. Distorted Information Flows and Irrationality

*When power intrudes into human relationships it creates a zero-sum relationship between superiors and subordinates..t In such an environment, it is impossible in principle for those in authority to receive accurate information about the state of affairs within an organization from those subject to their command. According to anarchist writer Robert Anton Wilson,

*aka: people telling other people what to do

*A civilization based on authority-and-submission is a civilization without the means of self-correction..t Effective communication flows only one way: from master-group to servile-group. Any cyberneticist knows that such a one-way communication channel lacks feedback and cannot behave ‘intelligently.’

*aka: the bravery to change.. to change your mind

The epitome of authority-and-submission is the Army, and the control-and-communication network of the Army has every defect a cyberneticist’s nightmare could conjure. Its typical patterns of behavior are immortalized in folklore as SNAFU (situation normal—all fucked-up)…. In less extreme … form these are the typical conditions of any authoritarian group, be it a corporation, a nation, a family, or a whole civilization.

Wilson, writing with Robert Shea, developed the same theme in a fictional format in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. “A man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger.”..t

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In Seeing Like a State James C. Scott makes the concept of metis (i.e. distributed, situational, job-related knowledge) do much the same work as distributed or situational knowledge did in Friedrich Hayek’s “The Uses of Knowledge in Society.” And like Wilson, he associates it with mutuality—“as opposed to imperative, hierarchical coordination.” Although Scott’s primary focus is on the state’s attempts to render society legible and subject to its control,..t the same principles apply to organizational leadership (“seeing like a boss”). Scott’s follow-up to Seeing Like a State was The Art of Not Being Governed, on the reciprocal effort by lower orders to render themselves illegible to governing authorities, and hence ungovernable..t This is equally true of subordinates within an organization who attempt to render themselves illegible to their superiors in order to evade control and exploitation.

james c scott.. art of not being governed

legibility and control et al

Not only had Wilson previously noted this connection between mutuality and accurate information in “Thirteen Choruses,” but (like Scott) he alluded to Proudhon:

pierre-joseph proudhon

[Proudhon’s] system of voluntary association (anarchy) is based on the simple communication principles that an authoritarian system means one-way communication, or stupidity, and a libertarian system means two-way communication, or rationality..t

*only thing we’ve seen to date: voluntary compliance

the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]

there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it

ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition

*The essence of authority, as he saw, was Law—that is … effective communication running one way only..t **The essence of a libertarian system, as he also saw, was Contract—that is, mutual agreement—that is, effective communication running both ways..t

*aka: any form of people telling other people what to do

**’contract‘ ness.. still not about legit freedom.. still a form of people telling other people what to do

5

Hierarchical organizations are, to use the phrase of Martha Feldman and James March, systematically  stupid. *They are incapable of making effective use of the knowledge of their members, so that they are less than the sum of their parts. **Because a hierarchical institution is unable to aggregate the intelligence of its members and bring it to bear effectively on the policy-making process, policies have unintended consequences..t

*as true as it may be.. makes no diff if we keep perpetuating non legit data.. need global detox leap to get us back to us

ie: need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs

**policy ness is part of the cancerous distraction

But in the real world, the point of markets isn’t that executives are clever and bureaucrats are dimwitted. The point is that nobody is all that brilliant.

No matter how intelligent managers are as individuals, a bureaucratic hierarchy insulates those at the top from the reality of what’s going on below, and makes their intelligence less usable.

rather.. deeper issue.. intellectness as cancerous distraction

III. Irrational Incentives and Conflicts of Interest

One of the central functions of a hierarchy is to tell naked emperors how great their new clothes look..t

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Ivan Illich, in Tools for Conviviality, used the term “second watershed” to refer to the adoption of technologies, organizational approaches, policies, etc., beyond the point of “net social disutility” or “counter-productivity.” The first threshold of a technology or tool results in net social benefit. But beyond a certain point, increasing reliance on that technology results in net social costs and increased disempowerment and dependency to those who rely on it. Rather than being a service to the individual, the technology reduces them to an accessory to a machine or to a bureaucracy.

ivan illich..

The classic example is the automobile. The cheap motorcar originally served those in areas of low population density, like farmers, who were underserved by in-town transit systems or intercity rail. But as towns and cities were redesigned around “car culture” (i.e. monoculture residential suburbs and big-box stores or strip malls linked by freeways replaced mixed-use communities where work and shopping were within foot, bike or public transit range of home), the automobile became a necessity for everyone. And most towns and cities continue to follow the urban design approach of the mid-twentieth century which created that state of affairs, even when that approach is clearly counter-productive and exacerbates social pathologies. The orthodox prescription for traffic congestion is to build new subsidized freeways, which only generate even more traffic as new subdivisions and strip malls spring up around the newly-built cloverleafs.

Privilege— coercive authority—is a mechanism for separating the good and ill effects of a policy or practice from each other, and diverting them to different persons or classes. Because of such authority, the privileged individual does not fully internalize all the positive and negative consequences of their behavior on a single balance sheet. When people deal with one another as equals, on the other hand, no one is able to adopt a technology beyond its net negative effects because no one is in a position to externalize the negative effects on others.

Where authority exists, dominant institutions are able to flourish well past the point at which they’re a net drain on society.

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Hierarchical institutions treat not only front-line production workers, but also customers or clients, as means to management’s ends. Edgar Z. Friedenberg coined the term “conscript clienteles” to describe this phenomenon.

A large proportion of the gross national product of every industrialized nation consists of activities which provide no satisfaction to, and may be intended to humiliate, coerce, or destroy, those who are most affected by them; and of public services in which the taxpayer pays to have something very expensive done to other persons who have no opportunity to reject the service. This process is a large-scale economic development which I call the reification of clienteles….

Taken together, a large proportion of the labor force [he estimated about a third] employed in modern society is engaged in processing people according to other people’s regulations and instructions.

Friedenberg limited his use of the term largely to bureaucracies directly funded with taxpayer money, and those like schools and prisons whose “clients” were literally unable to refuse service. The public schools, for example.

It does not take many hours of observation—or attendance—in a public school to learn, from the way the place is actually run, that the pupils are there for the sake of the school, not the other way round.

This, too, is money spent providing goods and services to people who have no voice in determining what those goods and services shall be or how they shall be administered; and who have no lawful power to withhold their custom by refusing to attend even if they and their parents feel that what the schools provide is distasteful or injurious. They are provided with textbooks that, unlike any other work, from the Bible to the sleaziest pornography, no man would buy for his personal satisfaction. They are, precisely, not ‘trade books’; rather, they are adopted for the compulsory use of hundreds of thousands of other people by committees, no member of which would have bought a single copy for his own library.

supposed to’s of school/work..

all the forms of people telling other people what to do

School children certainly fulfill the principal criterion for membership in a reified clientele: being there by compulsion. It is less immediately obvious that they serve as raw material to be processed for the purposes of others, since this processing has come to be defined by the society as preparing the pupil for advancement within it…. Whatever the needs of young people might have been, no public school system developed in response to them until an industrial society arose to demand the creation of holding pens from which a steady and carefully monitored supply of people trained to be punctual, literate, orderly and compliant and graded according to qualities determining employability from the employer’s point of view could be released into the economy as needed..t

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The problem with authority relations in a hierarchy is that, given the conflict of interest created by the presence of power, those in authority cannot afford to allow discretion to those in direct contact with the situation. Systematic stupidity results, of necessity, from a situation in which a bureaucratic hierarchy must develop arbitrary metrics for assessing the skills or work quality of a labor force whose actual work they know nothing about, and whose material interests militate against remedying management’s ignorance.

Most of the constantly rising burden of paperwork exists to give an illusion of transparency and control to a bureaucracy that is out of touch with the actual production process. Every new layer of paperwork is added to address the perceived problem that stuff still isn’t getting done the way management wants, despite the proliferation of paperwork saying everything has being done exactly according to orders. In a hierarchy, managers are forced to regulate a process which is necessarily opaque to them because they are not directly engaged in it. They’re forced to carry out the impossible task of developing accurate metrics to evaluate the behavior of subordinates, based on the self-reporting of people with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest. The paperwork burden that management imposes on workers reflects an attempt to render legible a set of social relationships that by its nature must be opaque and closed to them, because they are outside of it.

10

Each new form is intended to remedy the heretofore imperfect self-reporting of subordinates. The need for new paperwork is predicated on the assumption that compliance must be verified because those being monitored have a fundamental conflict of interest with those making the policy, and hence cannot be trusted; but at the same time, the paperwork itself relies on their self-reporting as the main source of information. Every time new evidence is presented that this or that task isn’t being performed to management’s satisfaction, or this or that policy isn’t being followed, despite the existing reams of paperwork, management’s response is to design yet another—and equally useless—form.

fuller too much law et al

11

In regard to the regulatory state that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, New Left historian Gabriel Kolko described the policy objective as “political capitalism.”

Political capitalism is the utilization of political outlets to attain conditions of stability, predictability, and security—to attain rationalization—in the economy. Stability is the elimination of internecine competition and erratic fluctuations in the economy. Predictability is the ability, on the basis of politically stabilized and secured means, to plan future economic action on the basis of fairly calculable expectations. By security I mean protection from the political attacks latent in any formally democratic political structure. I do not give to rationalization its frequent definition as the improvement of efficiency, output, or internal organization of a company; I mean by the term, rather, the organization of the economy and the larger political and social spheres in a manner that will allow corporations to function in a predictable and secure environment permitting reasonable profits over the long run.

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galbraith? (or stein can’t tell): On the contrary, planning for social needs requires organizations and decision-making capabilities..t in which the feedback and interplay between productive enterprises and the market in question is accurate and timely—conditions more consistent with smaller organizations than large ones.

yeah.. i don’t think so.. i think those are cancerous distractions..

if we want to address legit needs..  need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs

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Self-managed and user-owned organizations have always had these significant advantages over authoritarian hierarchies. But stigmergically organized activity on the commons-based peer production model, which came about in response to the possibilities offered by networked communications in the Internet era, takes the advantage an order of magnitude further..t Stigmergic projects like Wikipedia or free and open-source software design require far less, if any, coordination than more traditional forms of consensus-based management like those in cooperative enterprises.

so.. hello stigmergy ness.. actually not deep enough.. want/need mag beyond it.. ie: not about responding ness..

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“Stigmergy” is a term coined by biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s to describe the process by which social insects like termites coordinate their efforts through the independent responses of individuals to environmental triggers like chemical markers, without any recourse to a central coordinating authority. The term was carried over to the social sciences to describe networked forms of organization associated like wikis, group blogs and “leaderless” organizations with networked cell architectures. Yochai Benkler uses software development to illustrate the permissionless nature of stigmergic organization.

yeah.. not deep enough.. need beyond permission ness as well.. needs to come from itch-in-each-soul for the dance to dance

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Also, because they are permissionless, and can act without submitting proposals for central approval, they are also better at reacting to the surrounding environment than hierarchies. Any innovation developed by a single member or cell in the network immediately becomes part of the available toolkit for the entire network, which any member can apply in circumstances they consider appropriate.

any form of re ness as cancerous distraction

To use a term from military theorist John Boyd, networks go through the OODA process— Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—much faster than hierarchies. They “get inside the OODA loop” of hierarchies—they act faster, and force the hierarchical institutions to react to them. They *innovate, act, evaluate the results, and innovate and act again, with much faster iteration cycles than the hierarchies arrayed against them. As a result, networked insurgencies can go through multiple generations of tactical innovation with the speed of replicating yeast while hierarchies like the Transport Security Administration or the music industry are still fighting the last war, ponderously formulating a response to first-generation practices. It’s the **speed with which networks go through generational innovation, enabled by their permissionlessness, that is the key; they may fail much of the time, but they fail faster.

ooda loop ness.. as cancerous distraction

*not innovative if responding.. innovative response maybe.. but not innovative

**the speed (?) we need is a detox leap.. making permission ness and fail ing ness et al.. irrelevant s

[T]he primary determinant to winning dogfights was not observing, orienting, planning, or acting better. The primary determinant to winning dogfights was observing, orienting, planning, and acting faster. In other words, how quickly one could iterate. Speed of iteration, Boyd suggested, beats quality of iteration.

should be an obvious red flag we’re doing it/life wrong.. ooof

With the rise of cheap micro-manufacturing tools, intensive horticulture techniques and networked communications, we are approaching the takeoff point at which the productivity of cooperative labor achieves permanent victory over the forces of enclosure. Postscarcity technologies are growing in productivity faster than rentiers can enclose them. Postcapitalist transition is the end of humanity’s childhood.

rather.. all cancerous distractions..

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