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  • Most cooperatives elect committees / boards to manage day to day operations to avoid having to consult everyone on every decision.

    I tend to take issue with anarchists who take legitimate criticism of hierarchy and the risks involved as a moral precept. It's not a useful way to think about the world. Its liberalism.

    You're right about the abstraction and its utility, but its not entirely unreasonable to be reluctant to use hierarchies to solve problems. Like a bulldozer or a gun. The outcome doesn't depend entirely on the tool. Hierarchies are expedient, of course. That's kind of the point.

    • Exactly, it's a useful tool that evolved to solve specific types of problems. What people are really worried about is accountability, and that's what's really important to focus on. I think another aspect to this is that hierarchies can form in ad hoc fashion even within flat structures. Charismatic individuals tend to place themselves at the center of decision making process, while people who are introverted are less likely to speak up. When implicit hierarchies form that can be a lot worse than when they're designed consciously, this is a great read on the subject https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

  • However, the dismissal of hierarchies is a reactionary position because their structural purpose facilitates scaling complexity

    They mean efficiency.... Not complexity. Inherent complexity scales with the problem and its optimal solution. Hierarchies actually make a trade to add complexity and increase fragility to ease difficulty. In horizontal structures you'd have to do something across all your units which is simple but scales in difficulty across how many units you have. In a hierarchy you'd have to interact with the abstraction in the applicable way if it exists, which is more complex to understand but may be more efficient and simpler in comparison.

    So instead of having to ask 50 people who have the same function in different regions, you could ask 1 person who has power over that function in 50 regions. At the same time, if something were to happen to that one person you've just lost functionality in 50 regions.

    Also how is the dismissal of hierarchies a reactionary position when reactionary politics is inherently hierarchical? There are no horizontalist reactionaries because horrizontalism has never been the status quo ante for millenia? Are we just writing big words for fun?

    Consider how we perceive other people: when we speak to someone, we don’t track the billions of cells in their body or the firing of individual neurons.

    What? LOL. Are you serious? is this a serious argument? Where's the camera? You think I have the option of sitting there with a microscope looking at cells? Telling all my friends, if you were really my friend you'd let me open up that cranium and peep those neurons firing.

    The middle of the article is making an argument more for syndicalist sectarianism rather than Marxist Leninism. You cannot really fault vanguardists for not saying red philosopher kings out loud.

    The end of this article is extremely hand wavy. They basically state that transparency and accountability are "hard" and then cite an example from CPC, which honestly begs more questions than it has answers. What is the CPC actually doing other than arbitrarily "choosing" these things? How do they prevent themselves from not choosing them? In hindsight how effective was the campaign vs how effective could the campaign have been? Were decisions that could have made it more effective made for the right reasons? How about the decisions that made it less effective were they made for the wrong reasons? How did they align their incentives? How does this system improve?

    It ignores the fact that the CPC is self described as a consequentialist entity -- meaning it won't prioritize transparency since its actions are not required to meet deonotological facets (like transparency) of right and wrong.

    Likewise the advocacy of Marxist Leninism specifically means that it tacitly endorses the practices of democratic centralism which tend to add occlusion rather than transparency this is not addressed anywhere.

    It ends with just a statement:

    When imbued with transparency, recursive feedback loops, and a mandate to self-correct, hierarchy becomes a bridge to collective awareness.

    Okay, so like why doesn't just every communist hierarchy do that? Why hasn't every communist hierarchy historically done that?

    Feels like this is just ChatGPT for the left.

    • Hierarchies actually make a trade to add complexity and increase fragility to ease difficulty

      This just isn't true. At least when it comes to software or circuit design, which I am familiar with, the employment of hierarchies drastically simplifies both the design and the designing process. Let me give you a simple example problem that is pretty general and one I had an actual assignment on.

      Say you have a system with M clients and N workers. The clients generate jobs which are given to workers who process the jobs and send back results to the client.

      If you want all the clients to directly interface with all the workers, then you need to at the bare minimum (for a single job)

      1. Broadcast the job to every single worker (so every job generates N messages)
      2. Every worker needs to send back to the client a confirmation if they can handle the job or not. This is M confirmation messages
      3. The client may receive a yes from multiple workers, so it needs to select a single worker and tell everyone who will perform the job. This is another N messages.
      4. The selected worker can now perform the job and sends back the result to the client

      This is a total of 2N + M + 1 messages for a single job, which can be serious processing overhead depending on the nature of the task.

      Now you could reduce this overhead by sacrificing reliability or by reducing the connectivity of the network, but there is a more efficient way.

      Add a single controller. Now the process becomes

      1. The client sends the job to the controller.
      2. The controller sends a job to some worker. The controller knows which workers have spare capacity because it has memory of how many jobs it gave to which worker and how many jobs have been returned.
      3. The worker sends back the result to the controller
      4. The controller sends back the result to the client

      All in all, 4 messages. All while not sacrificing connectivity in the network or reliability.

      Now you might argue that the controller itself is overhead, and it is, however, if you remove the controller you need additional overhead in the workers and clients to handle the logic that the controller is doing. In fact, it's even more overhead in that case because the workers and clients need to handle much more messages and a more complex logic. And this is multiplied over many workers and clients instead of being in just 1 controller.

      You might also argue that this is just a dumb college homework problem, but it is a very general type of problem because the workers and clients can represent a huge class of actors from humans in a company to robots on a factory.

      The only actual downside of this system is that there is just 1 failure point, that is, the controller. And this is true. The hierarchial version is more fragile against adversarial attacks. But it is also easier to defend a single failure point than defending an entire network of more autonomous actors. So this is a tradeoff rather than a true downside.

      • I generally agree with the scenario you've set up but there are some misunderstandings here.

        This is a total of 2N + M + 1 messages for a single job, which can be serious processing overhead depending on the nature of the task.

        This is a measure of difficulty not complexity. You're right that with a large network size this makes a lot of data that is more difficult to process, but it's actually simple not complex. The complexity of this is still fairly simple a linear O(n) because your messages grow linearly relative to the amount of jobs your process.

        A more complex scenario is that if your design had a flaw that generated 2N2 + M + 1 messages by adding a superfluous for loop somewhere, then your complexity would be O(n2) relative to the amount of your jobs your process.

        If you're digging a hole difficulty is based on how mechanized/big your shovel is relative to the size of the hole. If you're digging a 2x2 hole 6 feet down with a gardening trowel it's hard, it's easier with a full size shovel, it's incredibly easy with a backhoe.

        If you're digging a hole, complexity on the other hand is what you must do to prevent all the ways that the earth can collapse on you based on the dimensions of your hole, the type of soil you dig in, etc. A 2x2 6 foot hole straight down is a less complex than digging a 2x2 hole 6 feet horizontally into a mountain, because your hole can collapse not only based on the sides but from the cave-in above. Despite removing the same volume of earth you have a more complex task because you must scaffold to remove the risk of cave-in. There's also dimensions of soil composition etc.

        Complexity typically affects difficulty but difficulty never affects complexity. Sometimes complexity can also be fully detached from difficulty it depends on the actual problem.

        You are making the same mistake OP made.

        The controller sends a job to some worker. The controller knows which workers have spare capacity because it has memory of how many jobs it gave to which worker and how many jobs have been returned.

        This is where you hide the actual complexity in controller based designs. The complexity of offloading the state management from the individual node to a controller node is not simple in the general case. Hierarchical organization here only reduces the difficulty of processing by reducing the amount of data overhead. Reducing complexity here comes through standardization of nodes in the system not through hierarchical organization.

        You can make really simple assumptions about capacity if your network is made of nodes that are all the same (and your workload domain is well bounded and understood), however as soon as you vary the specifications of the nodes and the workload requirements this becomes an incredibly complex calculation to figure out where a job can go based on available memory, compute, storage and other needs.

        This becomes even more complex if you need to handle specialized functions that exist only on certain nodes and not others, such as availability of NPUs for AI tasks, availability of hardware enabled transcoding for media management tasks, availability of randomization hardware for crytpographic tasks, etc.

        Ultimately this is why horizontal job runners based on messaging middle-ware patterns (0mq, rabbitmq, Kafka) still exist and are used in highly complex environments.

        Moving on to the social implications of this approach, reducing complexity this way is quite literally not applicable to human systems. You cannot ensure fungible nodes for humans where each node has the human equivalent of 32 GB RAM, 4 VCPUs at 3.2 GHZ and 100 GB storage. If we did that to humans that would be called eugenics.

        You cannot make the complexity from non-uniformity in human systems superfluous like you can in computer systems. It's immoral. Humans are not computers.

        I can program a system to work any way that I want sure. If I want local durability I can make a mesh. If I want to lower the communications overhead I can centralize decision making in a controller structure.

        I cannot program humans in the same way and nor should I think about it as such because:

        1. Humans are not computational machines, they have their own motivations, biases and needs
        2. Programming humans this way is not just impossible but at best is just paternalism by another name warts and all.

        To apply system design to humans a system has conceive at minimum of the dimensions of power and faith to be durable against:

        1. Humans with powerful roles in the system who are acting in bad faith causing harm for personal benefit
        2. Humans with weak roles in the system that are acting in good faith against a resilient system that is effectively harming them
        3. Humans with powerful roles in the system who are acting in good faith but are making mistakes that lead to harm that they do not recognize/dismiss
        4. Humans with weak roles in the system that are acting in bad faith against the system
        5. Humans with powerful roles in the system that are acting in bad faith against the system.

        This is a level of complexity that is much harder than designing a job runner with specific properties for your use-case.

        Socialist theory-crafting in 2025 at the level of typical systems design maps is not helpful or insightful. It's the equivalent of physics research in 2025 using the Bohr model. In tech terms, your base of concern should start at things like durable consensus algorithms and Byzantine faults. If you start there you are ensuring that the technology you apply to your social organization explicitly protects in priority order the values or outcomes you specify. I think this is a viable method for human organization especially because it encodes the typical outcomes and injustices that are part of the system's function explicitly. Everything is a trade off.

        However concerning yourself with communications overhead is a 20th century problem. We have technological solutions that minimize those concerns, we simply haven't developed political systems matching our level of technology. Building durable cybernetic systems like Project Cybersyn or OGAS are the pathways to ensuring a systemic socialism when these systems are open, transparent to average citizens and developed in partnership with their needs.

        TL;DR, my criticism here is that we are talking about aspects of systems design that are only important historically and the conversations focus ultimately misleads us in how we build these systems, leading to worse outcomes. We are mainly talking about the difficulty of human communication between horizontal and vertical structure, but not about the complexity of human relations those systems apply to.

    • They mean efficiency… Not complexity. Inherent complexity scales with the problem and its optimal solution.

      No, I meant complexity and I even gave concrete examples throughout the article.

      In horizontal structures you’d have to do something across all your units which is simple but scales in difficulty across how many units you have.

      Maybe read up on the concept of division of labour.

      So instead of having to ask 50 people who have the same function in different regions, you could ask 1 person who has power over that function in 50 regions. At the same time, if something were to happen to that one person you’ve just lost functionality in 50 regions.

      No, you have a delegate for the 50 people. Why you'd claim that delegates have power over people the represent is beyond me. I guess people growing up under capitalism naturally have slave mentality.

      Also how is the dismissal of hierarchies a reactionary position when reactionary politics is inherently hierarchical? There are no horizontalist reactionaries because horrizontalism has never been the status quo ante for millenia? Are we just writing big words for fun?

      Did ChatGPT write this?

      What? LOL. Are you serious? is this a serious argument?

      Yes it's a serious argument.

      You think I have the option of sitting there with a microscope looking at cells?

      You should put a bit more work into your trolling. At least try to engage with the point being made.

      The middle of the article is making an argument more for syndicalist sectarianism rather than Marxist Leninism. You cannot really fault vanguardists for not saying red philosopher kings out loud.

      Syndicalists literally advocate the same thing as Marxists in terms of organization. You'd know that if you spent any time learning about the subject you're attempting to opine on.

      The end of this article is extremely hand wavy.

      I literally give concrete examples, but sure bud.

      It ignores the fact that the CPC is self described as a consequentialist entity – meaning it won’t prioritize transparency since its actions are not required to meet deonotological facets (like transparency) of right and wrong.

      LMFAO what are you even talking about?

      Okay, so like why doesn’t just every communist hierarchy do that? Why hasn’t every communist hierarchy historically done that?

      They have and continue to do so.

      Feels like this is just ChatGPT for the left.

      I'd be so insulted by that if you weren't such an obvious troll.

      • No, I meant complexity and I even gave concrete examples throughout the article.

        Yeah but you're not disentangling complexity as an independent factor. You squish it into difficulty and other factors, and you ignore those other factors when they're against your argument.

        Beyond that scaling complexity typically means that the larger your problem size is the less complex it is per size unit. e.g. A country of 500 people is more complex to govern per capita than a country of 500,000 people. You don't make it clear by providing actual data to that or against that effect. You have a couple of fuzzy examples in disparate dimensions but not a clear measure of what you mean.

        Maybe read up on the concept of division of labour.

        Division of labor does not mean that you must inherently create hierarchies and cannot do horizontal decision making. Hierarchy simply creates higher order functions, these functions don't need to be higher order if they are spread out across distinct units.

        Likewise as a Marxist you're doing yourself a disservice basing any argument on the division of labor when Marx identified it as one of the primary causes of alienation and a method of control in his theory of the social division of labor. Furthermore Marx advocated for the dissolution of the division of labor under socialism because division of labor is quite literally the basis of classism.

        No, you have a delegate for the 50 people. Why you’d claim that delegates have power over people the represent is beyond me. I guess people growing up under capitalism naturally have slave mentality.

        What are you even talking about? I'm literally saying horrizontalism vs hierachy is, you have a Department of Energy in every region or you have 1 national Department of Energy that controls energy in all regions. Of course the hierarchical Department of Energy has power over all the regions energy. Other wise what's the point?

        Syndicalists literally advocate the same thing as Marxists in terms of organization. You’d know that if you spent any time learning about the subject you’re attempting to opine on.

        Very funny because traditionally syndicalism has always had problems with sectarianism based on labor function, and even the largest and best syndicalist orgs in history have had horrible stances on women in the workplace compared to even just the Bolsheviks. The IWW historically was the only good one in that they accepted women and heard them out, but they were still fairly chauvanist in their gender relations.

        Did ChatGPT write this?

        You wrote "this is reactionary" without actually explaining how it's reactionary. That's not my fault.

        You should put a bit more work into your trolling. At least try to engage with the point being made.

        The point being made is just naturalism. There's no logical connection to be made between the reason that humans communicate human to human (rather than cell group to cell group) and hierarchical organization. This again just begs more questions for what the actual criteria is here. I have cells in my body that are designed to be expendable, so it naturally follows that some people in the hierarchy are expendable right? If that's right then on it's face it's gross, if that's wrong then why even create a naturalist argument? You don't engage with the trade offs especially the moral trade offs of following biological models in one instance and not the other.

        It's not even a good example because your argument rephrased is "Humans are an abstraction for a collection of cells", which is morally and factually wrong. Morally because humans shouldn't be an abstraction, and factually because there are aspects of human minds and bodies that are effectively not mapped/mappable to basal cell functions. E.g. why is a heart shaped like that is a question that cannot be answered by the collection of cells being abstracted, but why does TCP/IP use a 3 way handshake can be answered by the properties of network communication that are being abstracted.

        I literally give concrete examples, but sure bud.

        No you don't you say things like:

        Under democratic centralism, representatives remain recallable by their electors, policies undergo open debate before finalization, and all authority ultimately derives from and answers to the collective will of the working class.

        This is not an example, this is School House Rock USSR Edition. You're giving me the "United States has 3 branches of government that are governed by a system of checks and balances ensuring democratic representation that respects the rights of the people while enacting the will of the people." You don't actually engage with how democratic centralism worked in practice, nor do you ask any contra-positives regarding if demcen prevented the things you claim it supported.

        LMFAO what are you even talking about?

        Whole process people's democracy is literally a consequential model. It doesn't prioritize liberal deontological expressions of rights, it instead collects input from various strata and it prioritizes the analyzing the consequences of governance in hindsight. It's worked fairly well for China but as a consequential hierarchical model it is highly subjective to the whims of elites, meaning it's not possible to be replicated systemically. Taking the CPC at their word there is nothing technical about their process that creates systemic durability. It is simply that they choose to grade themselves in a particular way. They choose to be good people. An obvious example of this is that Xi notes that voting rights are important. In China people can only vote for the 2 lowest national congresses, every congress votes for delegates in the congress above it. So the question is what purpose does this actually serve? If the argument is that we choose to evaluate ourselves this way, we reflect the will of the people, why not directly elect national congresses? Why risk breeding patronage networks? Why not have deontological democracy instead of consequentialist democracy if the argument boils down to we choose to be good? It's not like the system is even set up so that the CPC can practically be defeated only rebuked.

        Likewise the Chinese congress system is incredibly complex, not very simple and creates an extremely large class of legislators. There's something like 100,000 legislators among all congresses, spread out on 5 levels and across multiple districts. It doesn't "scale complexity" at all.

        They have and continue to do so.

        This is quite literally not true. Easy example is voting in the USSR required ballot spoilage to vote against official candidates. There have been plenty of historical examples of creating ineffective feedback loops and lack of transparency.

        I’d be so insulted by that if you weren’t such an obvious troll.

        I'm sorry you feel this way.

    • syndicalist sectarianism

      Isn't this the boutique shop ideology created literally for some video game whose name I cannot remember?

      You cannot really fault vanguardists for not saying red philosopher kings out loud.

      I'm glad you understand. After all, it would be embarrassing to start talking about "philosopher kings" after having placed so much effort into developing the mass line and democratic centralisation precisely to give the people more power.

      What is the CPC actually doing other than arbitrarily “choosing” these things?

      https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/

      • Isn’t this the boutique shop ideology created literally for some video game whose name I cannot remember?

        ??? This is literally the observation that hard line Leninists make about syndicalism, that it fractures the proletariat around shop lines creating sectarianism based on labor function.

        I’m glad you understand. After all, it would be embarrassing to start talking about “philosopher kings” after having placed so much effort into developing the mass line and democratic centralisation precisely to give the people more power.

        Mass-lines and dem cen never actually transcended the supremacy of vanguard power when the original vanguard was alive. Dem cen specifically entrenched vanguardists and political opportunists.

         
                 https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/

        You don't get the point. You know how "systemic racism" describes a system that is durably racist that does not need to be occupied by good faith racist operators to make racist outcomes? Socialists need systemic socialism, a system that is durably socialist that does not need to be occupied by good faith socialist operators for socialist outcomes.

        You're not answering the question of how do we move from a system that is based primarily on elite choice. Xi Jinping explicitly set the agenda to prioritize poverty alleviation more than Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin. Fifth generation thought places an emphasis on this via the 8th Commitment and the 1st Must:

        • "Improving people's livelihood and well-being is the primary goal of development".
        • Must put the people first

        This begs the questions:

        • Why was this not centered in Third or Fourth Generation thought?
        • How do we ensure that 6th generation thought does even better with these types of commitments?

        Your article is focused on poverty alleviation that has mainly happened within the last 10-15 years, and the elimination of "extreme poverty". The reality is that "extreme poverty" is not a static measure, it's a relative economic measure. China has eliminated extreme poverty which is an amazing feat in it's own right. But the extermination of extreme poverty is a point in time redistribution.

        The more salient question for building socialism is: How to keep the system of redistribution up to date and politically durable over time such that extreme poverty is not recreated in another name? How do we push this system to eliminate poverty? How do we keep this system up to date and politically durable to ensure that poverty is not recreated in another name?

        The CPC itself does not believe that its system can be copied and applied in other places, it is not interested in that. It's interested in building socialism with Chinese characteristics. There is much to learn from the CPC, but there is an explicit disclaimer here that it works for China at the current point in time.

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