askchapo

Because they're so used to hierarchy based on oppression, pedigree and greed rather than contextual hierarchy based on actual merit and expertise.

I'd rather take orders about plumbing from a plumber rather than orders from a guy who bought a plumbing company but never did plumbing in his life.

We are all very used to the latter. We have people making public health policy who believe in homeopathy. We have car building companies run by guys who have never built a car. We have guys in control of armies who don't know the literal definition of genocide. People in charge of companies that make food that have never had to take a single class on human nutrition.

Of course people are going to be allergic to hierarchy when we're so used to the people in control being unfit for their role.

Hierarchy is a lot different when instead of a single dude being in power because he's a rich asshole, it's instead deferring to someone who has more expertise in the task at hand. Hierarchy doesn't have to be rigid either. The guy who you're deferring to about plumbing might suddenly have to defer to your experience in electrical work.

True, contextual hierarchy that is based around what needs to be done and who is trained to perform the task and can adapt based on what kind of skills are required isn't bad.

Like, I'm going to let a surgeon be the boss of me when it comes to surgery.

I think the 'self enforcement' approach to covid is a good example of why sometimes you do actually need to give authority to save lives. The important part is getting right who you give authority to. Right now we give it to the least qualified and most bloodthirsty people.

It depends on how you define "hierarchy," and that ambiguity is part of why some anarchists say "unjustified hierarchy," because some people say that having any sort of authority on account of having a managerial role in an organization is "hierarchical," to which those anarchists say "sure, but that's not what we're fighting against." I think this is a fair approach.

I expect if you get a lot of responses, then many of them are going to talk about rebelling against bedtime, and while there's surely an element of that in some cases, I think there are a few more productive answers:

The other obligatory answer is going to be the portrayal of basically every existing Marxist project that even momentarily succeeded in controlling a country, where there was a revolt supported by many people who wanted a better society but something something bureaucracy and then it was basically fascism. If you believe these narratives, in which these popular movements where probably the vast majority of people were fighting for liberation and forged their own chains due to those sneaky communists, it makes sense to look at the structure of those insurrections (as-reported) and come to the conclusion that centralization is evil (because this question is inevitably very tied to the "decentralization" fetish) and we need to have prefigurative communes or whatever. If you accept the aforementioned historical narratives and also believe that prefigurative communalism is structurally unable to topple capitalism, then it's very hard to avoid the conclusion that humanity is doomed, so what is there to do but hope communes can do it?

Lastly, I think it's worth mentioning that all of these conversations are inevitably going to be very informed by liberal philosophy (as is Marxism, I don't mean this as an attack), where there is a long tradition thanks to natural rights discourse of viewing governments as inherently unjust because they are contrary to human freedom (this is heavily slanted toward bourgeois freedom in our case, but I did say liberal philosophy), so it's understandable how there would come to be a fetishization of structures that are unlike what we recognize as governments and let everyone do what they like and they'll spontaneously (or with a bit of encouragement) do the right thing and that's the only way to have a truly just organization.

And if they are defeated, then that just means they were too good for our sinful world, so it's no mark against them. (Also even if they didn't actually organize that way, we can just pretend that they did because history only matters when it gives us cool stories or lets us own the tankies.)

Oh yeah, and there have been some historical communalist movements that did cool things, like the Communards, but it's also important to note that the Communards got obliterated.

I apologize because I'm kind of struggling to articulate myself properly because I'm a bit sleep-deprived at the moment, but hopefully I at least gestured at something useful.

is hierarchy in revolutionary organizations inherently bad?

No

No, people who say shit like that are toddlers whining about bed time

Imho you can't organize effectively beyond a certain scale without discipline, and that necessitates a degree of hierarchy. You only have to look at e.g. the SWP to see how that hierarchy can be abused though. It's not an easy problem

To me it seems to come partly from inexperience with mass actions or organizing. I was definitely more of an anti-hierachy anarchist/idealist at times in the past, but when I started getting experience with protests, I saw how groups that were too focused on "democratic" decision making in the moment couldn't act as effectively on the street when responding to police or other counter-groups. Like the importance of a vanguard in coordinating the mass of people in the macro sense, it's much more effective for working on the ground quickly.

Growing up in capitalist societies I think most leftists in the west see only the way hierarchies have been used to fuck people over, and have also been subjected to anti-socialist propaganda that paints any powerful leader of a leftist movement as inevitably tyrannical. What helped me get over this bias was understanding the war aspect of the class war, that it is an actual war with an enemy that wants us dead or enslaved, and in times of conflict history has shown how the effective organization and logistics of a group is an essential key to victory.

Quick surface analysis answer about this in the western world: We've never had good leaders or benefited from the system, so anarchism is the go to response. In the underdeveloped world, MLM is popular because they've had good leaders do good things for them.

I feel that it may be wise of us to consider that the anti-hierarchical points of anarchism may be a good thing to pursue in the imperial core. I often wonder if this is what is required to break the back of the social indoctrination of capital.

it makes problems, but so does everything, so honestly who knows

hierarchy has problems, complete egalitarianism has problems. i think you have to utilize authority to make hierarchy work long enough that people can be socialized to the point that without hierarchy shit doesn't immediately fall apart but that would take multiple generations the way capitalism took to socialize competition and rent seeking into people

If you are an actual leftist (of any particular stripe) who reads theory and isn't just LARPing some fictional revolutionary vision in your head, then what you are against are 'unjustified' hierarchies.

Hierarchies that are created through trial and error of revolutionary attempts are justified hierarchies. Hierarchies based on whose daddy owned what business, are not justified. Hierarchies based on people being chosen by a group to centralize and coordinate activity, and having more privileges associated with their increased responsibilities is a justified hierarchy. Giving people more power arbitrarily, through no consultation with the community, and then allowing them to use that power to avoid responsibility, is an unjustified hierarchy.

I'm in favour of democratic and meritocratic hierarchies, against hereditary and class-based ones.

People criticize MLs for hierarchical structures and claim that "power corrupts" yadda yadda, but this is idealist nonsense IMO. The slightest knowledge on the people who ended up in charge of the most historically important ML organizations (Fidel, Che, Rosa, Liebknecht, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh...) will show that no, power itself does not corrupt, since all of these people were never, ever corrupted. Mistaken? Yes, at times. Corrupted? No. The fact that MLs historically managed to consistently elect (in one form or the other) literally the most hardworking, selfless, knowledgeable and capable people such as the examples I provided, proves to me that democratic centralism is actually a good idea.

Can't defeat capitalism without an army, and an army requires hierarchy

It's more of an allergy to being murdered by the police, and a desire to not be ostracised by academia.

The other answers are excellent, but the understandable adaptation of Western left thought to avoid conflict is an important component, I think.

Every successful revolutionary organization was hierarchical. Being afraid of hierarchy is like being afraid of walls. Sure, if you build them poorly they might fall on you, but if you follow some pretty basic guidelines you have a reliable structure that will protect those within in with no set backs.

As of writing I see two thoughtful posts, one of which shows me the phrase I was looking for. I just want to reiterate that the idea of an unjust heirarchy is central to the issue. There are heirarchies worth opting into.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, for example, is graduated by belt level. It's heirarchy derived from skill in a sport. It's very useful for organizing competitions as well as being a good signal as to whether you want to learn from someone. If I'm a brown belt (proximate to black belt i.e. competency in the art) and your head instructor is a blue belt (between years ~1-5), I'm probably not going to choose to opt into your heirarchy - I don't trust that you're competent to the material you want to teach. I don't really want a collective teaching experience and I don't really care if a bunch of white belts think I deserve my black belt. Every technique I use against a new player makes a sound like the home run bat from smash bros, of course they think I'm competent - they're not a good judge. Such a thing is heirarchical in nature but it's opt in, useful, and practical.

Combat sports are special because your claim of individual competency gets immediate feedback. In professional endeavors especially because you gain a record of who you beat and who you lost to, how it went down, who was coaching you, etc. It graduates the people who participate even further than a belt system and that's... le good!

It is invaluable, but dangerous tool.

The stance I've arrived at is that hierarchy in a broad sense isn't bad, but rolling all of the powers into the same hierarchy is.

No one is going to be the best or the most insightful or most apt at everything. Also, spreading out parts of the roles not only allows more people to distinguish themselves, it makes transfer of power easier and reduces your vulnerability to decapitation approaches.

Someone's going to be the breaking wave crest, but we can still all be water.

Whats this with the badly disguised sectarian posts/comments again