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Comment by ChainOfFools | Hacker News Reader

I seem to recall that the central takeaway from the essay tyranny of structurelessness is that when one affects to dispose of an official, formal and acknowledged power hierarchy, it simply reappears as an unofficial, informal, actively disavowed, and even more paranoid version of its former self.

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Yeah, the issue with social power is that it can't really be created or destroyed, just reorganized.

Similar to how if governments get too weak, you end up with warlords/gangs just taking their place, power abhors a vacuum and all that.

You mean businesses, not warlords.

potato, potahto

No, I was talking about when governments lose even basic ability to control the peace, when they can no longer keep the monopoly on violence expected of sovereign states. Haiti, for instance.

The first thing I thought of when reading the title about self-organising workers was: didn't we used to call that a "soviet"?

The difference is that in soviets (in the original sense) the workers held actual power. Bayer still wants full control over their workers, they just want to offload all the responsibility normally held by middle management to them as well.

They're trying to get rid of "hierarchies" without getting rid of the power structure. I don't see how this benefits the workers at all.

No, because self-organizing does not imply ownership of the means of production.

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