good post. since i’m here, i want to expand on a few things:
But effectively, it boils down to the difference between authority as in power over people, and authority as in knowledge.
i recommend using expertise to refer to authority as in knowledge — like you did later in your comment, as Andrewism does — to avoid confusion.
They don’t have the unilateral ability to fire someone (nor does any individual)
no criticism, just expanding:
i think it’s important that someone who is given by a role or responsibility should have a mandate: the role should be specific, and it should be temporary (for an arbitrary amount of time, or till the end of a project) or recallable by a vote.
Graeber notes in something i’ll link below: ‘If something has to be done, then it’s okay to say all right, for the next three hours she’s in charge. There’s nothing wrong with that if everybody agrees to it. Or you improvise.’
Crowdsourced decision making is meant to be for the bigger aspects, stuff like what the end goal of a project should be. Smaller, extremely specialized aspects should get handled by those best equipped for it, that’s not a hierarchy.
in Kurdistan, this is the difference between technical decisions and the political (‘moral’) decisions[1]. it’s the difference between ‘when should we have our next meeting?’ and ‘should we be nonviolent?’.
- technical decisions are low-impact; operational or logistical.
- political decisions are high-impact, with broad social implications.
the political decisions are consensus decisions, of at least 1/3 of the group. these are vetoäble by anyone affected who wasn’t present for the vote.
the technical decisions are 2/3 or 3/4 majority votes, of the minimum affected people.
tho, as Graeber notes:
And then of course, obviously the question is who gets to decide what’s a moral question and what’s the technical one? So somebody might say, “Well, the question of [when to meet] bears on disabled people, and that’s a moral question.” So that becomes a little bit of a political football. There’s always things to debate and points of tension.
only partially related, but this discusssion reminded me of an essay on the myth that management == efficiency: David Harvey, anarchism, and tightly-coupled systems
they’re referring to anarchist federalism, which scales in principle from neighbourhoods and work groups up to nations.
horizontalism does not create a hierarchy, because a hierarchy (from Greek, for ‘rule of priests’) is a structure which creates superiors and subordinates.
say there’s a community — a geographical neighbourhood, a nongeographical group with shared interests, a workgroup… — that holds meetings on their own self-management and needs. when their needs concern more than themselves, then they delegate someone to communicate their concern to a larger (‘higher’) group — a city, a region, an industry — on a mandate: that they are temporary (till the concern is resolved, till the end of a project, or for an arbitrary time decided by the group); that they represent the group consensus; and that they can be recalled for any reason, more specifically in the event that they aren’t fulfilling their obligations to the group they represent.
proposals go up a chain, and revisions/changes are sent back down the chain. this cycle continues until the smallest (‘lowest’) groups are in agreement, with that agreement communicated by the delegates up to the largest relevant group. with a population like the US, these rounds of consensing can be done in the span of a month: https://participatoryeconomy.org/project/computer-simulations-of-participatory-planning/.
this structure can take infinite forms, but those structures remain fundamentally similar and therefore compatible.
there are examples like anarchist Spain, the Zapatistas, and — aspirationally — Rojava, mostly in in the Rojavan restorative justice system. to be fair to Rojava: they have been under siege for a decade.
for some thought experiments: Can This Book Save Us From Dystopia? (43m), The Future of Socialism (15m).
when the GP says ‘this changes everything’, they mean that the temporary and recallable nature of holding a special role in society flips the current paradigm: where politicians can promise whatever they want and then fail to deliver, because other (economically-)viable candidates are few and they already have their position. there’s nothing in the current system that gives constituents the ability to immediately remove a representative who isn’t representing the people who elected them, or who uses their position to further personal agenda.
a system where the people directly involved in their work and their lives are also participants in their own work and their own life creates people who are invested in the world around them.