Responding to Definitions

 Al @ SMBIVA has a brilliant entry:

http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/10/definitions.html

I answered there, with this:

[Centralizers fail to understand anarchist critique because they think in terms of centralization, punishment and control.]

"...they really cannot accept that people can live together, cooperate and fundamentally disagree about a bunch of shit.

And yet - this is already exactly what happens, even under highly centralized regimes - be they familial, corporate or governmental.

The centralizing authority doesn't keep them together. It can only punish those who threaten the centralizing authority.

There are literally millions of people who go to work every day, working for a structured, punitive hierarchy - who get their work and play done, in spite of it. Who have to work around it, in order to cooperate.

I think one of the primary anarchist/decentralist critiques aims itself at this: why fuck around with the punitive authority in the first place? We already have ample evidence of people who cooperate despite its obstructive existence. Why not free up all that time and labor spent dealing with it, and have people who don't fundamentally agree do what they're already doing (cooperating, competing) without it?

And this isn't a very utopian position. What's truly utopian is the belief that punishment and authority can get women and men to have the same beliefs about society, to see things the same way, and therefore cooperate.

It's ass fucking backwards, really. It's washing up to take a bath..."

To add to that further, here:

Hierarchies exist to preserve themselves, to preserve the advantages that members of them accrue by having people do their bidding at the same time as those who serve pay (a wage allows the wage payer to give less than the worker produced) for the "protections" offered by the centralizing authority.

Since hierarchies overlap and compete for control of populations, they need the ability to brand their adherents - usually employing cultural, ethnic, religious, national or ideological cues to identify those whom they claim and those whom other hierarchies cannot automatically pirate.

In the case of economically competitive firms, the competition for skilled staffers reduces the need for branding. Remuneration and naked advantage provide ample motivation, and the operation of firms does not (at this time) depend upon the capture of dedicated laborers, especially when seeking skilled or accredited workers who have already demonstrated at least the appearance of fealty to the economic order by obtaining license to participate in at at a more profitable level.

The corporate hierarchy can dispense with the cruder sorts of fealty and identifying marks, because it divides more plainly the social population in which it operates, placing the hierarchy more openly in control of the resources of the group, and removing in many cases the ability of the subsidiary parts to change that hierarchy by franchise or active participation.

National, tribal, ethnic and religious hierarchies generally control a larger population group than the corporate power structures which inhabit their social space - and serve a different, though declining, purpose. The older state, tribal and religious hierarchies still rather obviously exist - but they no longer dominate the means of exchange and resource extraction, as they did for the better part of five or so thousand years. Instead, they now exist to reduce threats to those corporate and economic hierarchies which directly control access to labor and capital, and to police the consuming and laboring populations which remain subject to them.

In all cases, though - hierarchies exist to preserve themselves, with differing rates of success and failure.

Ideological advocates of state or social centralization seemingly fail to understand this, the purpose of power. Instead, they see it as a means to an end - instead of the end itself.

Power serves itself. It has no other purpose. Any power which does not maintain and employ its control over the population it claims, loses it. Any power or authority constituted for any other reason either evolves into a self-preserving hierarchy, or degrades into a weak and fractured stasis, one which often invites the intervention of outside, more powerful competitors who have the means to assert control with violence or the threat of it, and maintain the control of resources and the supply of protection necessary to prevent uprising, or to punish and quash it.

Once more around again: A centralizing authority exists to maintain the resources, loyalty and armed staffers which constitute its power.

Its purpose? To provide membership in a hierarchy of power. And any hierarchy or power which fails to do so ceases to exist as one.