Saturday, 23 April 2022

Time for Change, Part 3: Without Hierarchies?

Webbwood Falls
about 2 hours drive
east of Kincardine

This is the third of several posts that I would have preferred to publish all at once, were it not for the extreme length of such a piece. It will make more sense if you go back and read the whole series, starting with the first one, if you have not already done so. To briefly and inadequately summarize, I'll just say that overpopulation and overconsumption (and their consequences) are the most serious problems that we face. Overpopulation is going to take decades to solve, while overconsumption could be addressed quite quickly if certain obstacles could be gotten out of the way. By reducing our level of consumption, we could reduce our impact on the planet and give ourselves time to reduce our population.

The blame for overconsumption can be laid squarely at the feet of capitalism, with its insatiable hunger to accumulate wealth, its inescapable need for endless growth, its inability to tackle any problem that can't be solved by making a profit and its endless blaring marketing machine which convinces us that we must consume, consume, consume. It is important to note that the majority of that consumption is done by a minority of people, the top ten to twenty percent of the richest people in the world. Sadly (from my viewpoint), I am part of that group and I suspect that many of my readers are as well, even though we wouldn't call ourselves "rich".

In a previous post where I looked at the problems with industrialization, I had promised to have a more detailed look at our financial systems and our governments.

In this new series I am finally doing that. In Part 1 we looked at our financial system and saw that money is a tool that facilitates the accumulation of wealth by the rich, and a mechanism by which they control the rest of us. It does this by making it possible to keep score in the complex game that is our economy, and pretty much guarantees that the wealthy win. Unfortunately, our financial system creates money as debt, which must be paid back with interest. In order to do that, the economy must continually grow, or it will collapse. At the same time, the inevitable consequence of continued growth on a finite planet is also collapse.

In Part 2 I discussed the problems with hierarchies, especially with governments that have been co-opted by capitalism. The point being that overconsumption is our most pressing problem and hierarchies and capitalism are potent, and mutually reinforcing, agents of overconsumption.

So, I think I've made it clear that we can do without money and capitalism, but can we really do without hierarchies? I'll break that question into several parts today.

1) Are human beings naturally hierarchical? Are we doomed to drift back into hierarchical organizations even if we successfully get rid of today's hierarchies?

2) Are there viable alternatives? That is, are hierarchies necessary when we organize ourselves into large groups and take on large projects, or are there others ways?

3) Given the strengths of today's hierarchies and their success at propaganda, is there any hope that we can get rid of them?

We are repeatedly told that the answer to these questions is yes, no and no, respectively. But if we look a little closer, I think we will find different answers (no, yes and yes). Part of what will lead us to those answers is that, in order to reduce consumption to a sustainable level, we need to only do things that are really necessary—that actually provide the necessities of life to the human race. My definition of necessities is probably wider than yours, but it definitely doesn't include helping hierarchies grow and become more powerful, or helping capitalists accumulate wealth.

OK, question 1. Are humans naturally hierarchical?

In an earlier post I said that for most of our pre-history people lived in egalitarian hunter gatherer bands, and that we have evolved to be best suited to similar circumstances. One of my readers (Stephen Kurtz) objected, pointing out that people are naturally hierarchical—an assertion that he found to be obviously correct, but which just didn't sound right to me, based on my personal experience of living with other human beings. I have to thank Stephen, since his comment motivated me to do some reading that resolved this seeming contradiction. It seems that, yes, people do have innate drives to dominate and to submit, in varying degrees. So we can easily fall into the trap of hierarchical organization, with a few of those who prefer to dominate making it to the top, and the rest of us stuck underneath them. How then does one explain all those egalitarian societies in our past? And even a few remaining at present.

Well, it seems that we also have a strong innate resentment of being dominated. In small bands of people, where there is only room for one leader, most people realize that they cannot reasonably hope to be that person. If they let an upstart take over and run things, they will be stuck submitting to him for the rest of their lives, or they will have to leave the band. That is exactly what happens among gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, our nearest relatives. And it was probably our "original" state, as well, if you look far enough back.

Graeber and Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything spend a lot of time trying to avoid the question of whether our original state was hierarchical or egalitarian. I am not nearly so worried about this—I think you can argue that at one time our distant ancestors did live in primitive hierarchies like our primate relatives. But this was before we were fully human, and it was only when we found another, more egalitarian, way of living that we really became fully human.

At some point in our past, our ancestors realized that it was possible to prevent upstarts from taking over (with careful vigilance and suitable tactics to control them), and thus to live in an egalitarian society. You didn't get to dominate, but at least you didn't have to submit, and it seems that for most of us this was preferable. Over time, techniques for controlling upstarts were finely honed. These include ridicule, criticism, ostracism, and murder. Once such a system is functioning smoothly, it discourages would be upstarts from acting on their deviant impulses. And it provides a much less stressful social environment for people to live in.

I should note here that from most of the reading I've done on this subject I was left with the impression that these egalitarian bands lived pretty much in isolation. It has recently been suggested to me by a reliable source (thanks, Helga Ingeborg Vierich), that this wasn't so. She says, "bands, in fact, are temporary camping groups, part of a much larger community that shares the same dialect or language, numbering in the many hundreds, or even thousands, of people. Most of these people know each other, or at least know of each other through their individual social networks of friends and family. And camping parties do change in membership from camp to camp and so they rarely consist of the same households over the course of the year." This is supported by what I've read of the Anishinabek in colonial times (Cecil King's book on Jean-Baptiste Assiginack).

Living and evolving in small egalitarian groups fine-tuned our empathy, our communication skills, our tendency toward altruism and our dislike of being dominated. All these thing are innate characteristics of human beings today. So it seems very likely that we could indeed learn to live in non-hierarchical societies again, if given the opportunity. And there is little reason to think we would subsequently backslide into hierarchies. Especially if we keep alive the memories of how bad it was for most of us to live in hierarchical societies.

There will, of course, be an initial learning curve for things like consensus decision making. But excellent training materials and skilled trainers already exist, so this should not be an insurmountable obstacle.

In my recent post on money, I commented on differences in attitude towards the contributions of skilled/successful people in egalitarian societies and in our modern society. Such people in egalitarian communities see their contributions as part of their responsibility to support their community. It is just what human beings do, to the extent of their abilities, without expecting to go on to accumulate wealth, fame or power, or to set themselves above their fellows.

This is strongly in contrast to our modern society where successful people are expected to accumulate wealth, and to use it to accumulate more, without necessarily benefiting their fellows at all.

I think a parallel can be drawn here with differences between leadership in egalitarian societies and hierarchical societies.

Of course, in an egalitarian society, much less in the way of leadership is needed, and what is needed can be much more informal. Still, people will look to individuals with talent, skills and experience in a particular area to provide guidance, mentoring and leadership in that area.

A leader in such societies is expected to be capable and successful "economically", but also generous, impartial, patient and in control of his temper, a good orator capable of winning over an audience and skilled at settling disputes. But never arrogant, parsimonious (cheap), mean, overbearing, boastful or aloof. Because a leader was expected to be generous and help the unfortunate in his community from his own resources, he was often the poorest person in that community. (The content of this paragraph was picked out of various places in Christopher Boehme's book, Hierarchy in The Forest))

To sum it up, in egalitarian societies, a leader's role is to benefit his society rather than himself. To borrow a term from the Zapatistas, you should "lead by obeying"—always keeping in mind the needs and the desires of the people you lead, rather than your own personal ambitions.

In hierarchies people seek leadership roles for several reasons: more pay, more power and control over their futures, increased upward mobility and so on. A leader in a "front line" position is a modern hierarchy is not in that different a situation from a leader in an egalitarian society, except that he has above him a hierarchy which has some expectations of him that have little or nothing to do with the welfare of those he leads. The job is to get the working people to do what those higher up want them to do. But you can't do that without winning the co-operation of your workers. So this is a balancing act, but many leaders are oblivious and lead with their gaze focused upward, often with amusing results.

Still, leaders are an absolute necessity in a hierarchy, lest the working class rise up and start seeing to their own needs, rather than the desires of those above them.

2) Are there viable alternatives to hierarchical organizations?

We are told that large groups, living in more complex ways, tackling large and complex projects, require hierarchies to successfully organize them. This seems a self serving opinion, since such hierarchies largely exist to perpetuate their own existence and growth, and funnel wealth up to those at the top.

I'll admit that co-ordination is required whenever people work together. To borrow from Michael Albert (of Participatory Economics fame), probably about 20% of the work done in a typical modern enterprise is co-ordination work. At present that labour is done by a special 20% of the people in the organization, who occupy all but the bottom-most layer of the organization's hierarchy. It could just as easily be shared out among all the employees, as 20% of their work, completely eliminating the upper tiers of the hierarchy.

If we do away with the co-ordinator and owner classes, allow the employees to manage themselves and share onerous duties equally among each other, things would actually work much better. Without any hierarchy at all.

Workers who have a grasp of how the organization works beyond their own immediate task can cope better with the inevitable unexpected situations that always come up. When "shit jobs" are shared equally among all workers, a good deal of resentment is eliminated. Workers who manage themselves gain a sense of empowerment, are more highly motivated, and can innovate more effectively than managers in a hierarchy, because of their intimate knowledge of affairs on the shop floor. All this works best when owners are eliminated and workers can decide how much of a surplus to aim for and what to do with it when they succeed in generating it. In many cases, workers will choose more leisure time rather than additional material rewards. And that will also contribute to reducing overconsumption.

That's in larger organizations. Reducing overconsumption will mean taking on fewer large endeavours, so there will be less need for large organizations. As I have already suggested, today's large organizations exist primarily to promote their own existence and growth, and facilitate the accumulation of wealth by their owners. They serve little other purpose. Most of what really needs to be done could be done by smaller groups and eliminate a bit chunk of consumption in the process. With the benefit of reducing the amount of co-ordination required.

Borrowing here from Microsolidarity, I would suggest the people naturally function as individuals, duos (two people), crews (3 to 8 people) and congregations (30 to 200 people). Above that there is the "crowd", which is the larger community in which the smaller groups are embedded. We evolved in bands that were very similar to "congregations", and within those bands smaller groups similar to "crews" took on tasks that were too big for one or two people. In both cases, it seems to me that we evolved, and still have, innate abilities to function well in these kinds of groups.

A congregation should be based in an actual geographical area and be made up of the people living there. Their primary concern should be securing the necessities of life for themselves, a situation where producers and consumers are the same people and regulating supply and demand is greatly simplified. The individuals, duos and crews within a congregation will provide the mechanisms for actually securing those necessities.

Capitalism has done its best over the last couple of centuries to eliminate crews and congregations, because those types of group open up the possibility of co-operation, mutual aid and self sufficiency, and make it hard for capitalist hierarchies to control people.

So, it seems clear to me that we could indeed eliminate large hierarchical organizations and a lot of the effort and consumption that goes into creating and maintaining them, and still have, through self management and community ownership, much of what those organizations officially claim to be trying to achieve. As Noam Chomsky said, if you cannot justify a power structure (hierarchy), it should be eliminated. As I would say, you will have a hell of a time justifying most power structures.

Am I missing any other important roles that hierarchies play or situations in which they are needed?

One possibility is the military. Currently the military is set up in a very hierarchical way, so much so that we have trouble imagining it could be otherwise. In fact, though, the best militaries come from societies with a very flat structure, and the worst from societies with very rigid hierarchical power structures. The chaos of war rewards initiative at the lowest levels, similar to the peace time organizations I was just talking about. Which should cast some serious doubt on our assumptions about the military.

And of course the other thing is that militaries are currently necessary because of the conflicts for land and resources that arise between our hierarchical organizations (countries, primarily). Eliminate them and conflicts should be much smaller and less frequent, probably not requiring formal standing armies at all. Smaller organizations, making decision that they themselves have to live with, should get into fewer conflicts.

Many people will tell your that hierarchical organizations are necessary to co-ordinate our response to disasters. This is supported by the disaster myth which would have us believe that the people on the ground in disasters are largely helpless. But, in fact, people do a pretty good job of helping themselves, especially if they have access to the resources they need. What hinders people helping themselves in disasters is a lack of such resources, primarily due to fiscally conservative politicians who will not spend money on planning ahead for disasters. Small groups doing their own planning and keenly aware that they will suffer personally from the effects of short range thinking, are much more likely to do a good job of planning ahead, setting aside resources and training their people to respond in disaster situations.

We currently have large regulatory hierarchies, which are needed to control the excesses of capitalism. When those making decisions are the same ones who will be affected by them, better decisions will be made. People who can organize themselves to survive climate change, biosphere disruption and resource depletion will plan so as to mitigate these things at present and avoid them in the future. With capitalism and oligarchies removed, the temptation to seek short term personal gain instead of planning for the long term should be significantly reduced.

Of course, some will scoff at all of this, saying that this is just communism, which didn't work in the twentieth century and won't work now. What I am talking about is anarcho-communism, or perhaps, eco-anarcho-communism would be a better term. The communist regimes of the twentieth century were authoritarian communitsts, and from that came their problems. They made the mistake of throwing out the old owner/co-ordinating classes (aristocracy and bureaucracy) who had been running their countries and then replacing them with a new co-ordinating class based on the "party". The new co-ordinators were no better than the old ones. Little changed for most people, who had no opportunity to self manage, and who gave the party the absolute minimum of co-operation that they could get away with. As you might expect, this didn't work very well. But it is a mistake to judge communism on how it worked in those cases.

In Russia, before the October Revolution, the workers had already set something close to anarcho-communism, but when Lenin and the Bolsheviks took over they soon eliminated that, and set up an authoritarian state that had little in common with the sort of communism that I am advocating.

In my next post we'll look at the answer to my third question—given the strengths of today's hierarchies and their success at propaganda, is there any hope that we can get rid of them?

During the last few months I've been reading a number of very interesting books and websites, which bear upon what we are discussing. Here is a list of those books, along with a few that I've read previously, but that also have been a help.

Debt, The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber

Hierarchy in the Forest: the evolution of egalitarian behavior, by Christopher Boehm

The Art of Not Being Governed, by James C. Scott

Against the Grain, a deep history of the earliest states, by James C. Scott

Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid, by Andrej Grubacic

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World, by Michael Albert

Balancing Two Worlds: Jean-Baptiste Assiginack and the Odawa Nation, 1768-1866, by Cecil King

Websites

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