"Hierarchy is needed for PCB fabrication!"

Could I direct you to !anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com? Thos community is probably better suited for a discussion, as !flippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is mainly a meme community.

managers are needed for efficiency

Whoever said that never worked in a corporate job lol. Also David Graeber made a good argument for why manager (as in hierarchical decicionmakers, not as in sorting out logistics) are a bullshit job. But who even cares about efficiency more than about human suffering? Capitalists do, anarchists don't.

Worker's cooperatives can and do run factories lol

I’ve been hit with the claim that mass production industries that are needed today would not be possible without a hierarchy. That due to regional limitations and the logistics of smartphone manufacturing, technology cannot be produced on the needed scale without a hierarchy of managers.

This is quoted in PCB fabrication, as well as other areas such as medicine and other mass produced goods.

Just because some people cannot image alternative pathways to reach a goal, it doesnt mean its impossible. But I would agree that current global production lines are incompatible with anarchism, as they use local / regional circunstances to maximize their exploitation through ressource extraction, low wages, lower safety regulations etc.

Managers, CEOs, states, colonialism, patriarchy and more hierarchical institutions are needed to protect this exploitation, to justify it and to further it through violence.

I dont really care about the ability to produce billions of smartphones yearly and I am sure a reduction of PCB production would be manageable for an anarchist society. But medicine should be way more accessible globally, so I think anarchists should have some answers ready. One I can think of is the end of medicine patents. Other answers were mentioned in this Lemmy thread Medicine production in an anarchist society

Horizontal hierarchies are better at handling complexity than vertical hierarchies.

Call me old school maybe, but I'm a fan of Anarcho Syndicalism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

The Mondragon Corporation is a federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque Country of Spain.

...

In 2024, it employed 70,085 people across four areas of activity: finance, industry, retail, and knowledge,[1] with 30,660 workers in the Basque Country, 29,340 elsewhere in Spain, and approximately 10,000 abroad.[2] Co-operative News has described it as the world's largest worker co-operative federation, the largest employer in the Basque Country, and the fifth-largest private employer in Spain.[3]

...

The corporation's companies manufacture consumer goods, capital goods, industrial components, products and systems for construction, and services. Services include:

Abantail: adaptive design optimisation

Alecop: engineering training

LKS Consultores: legal services

KREAN: architects and engineers

MCCTelecom: telecommunication engineering

Mondragon Lingua: translation and language schools

Mondragon Sistemas: automation, industrial computing, and telecommunications

Ondoan: turnkey projects in energy and environment

...

Mondragon co-operatives share a humanist view of business and a philosophy of participation and solidarity. The culture is rooted in a shared mission and a defined set of principles, corporate values, and business policies.[22]

...

Mondragon bases its culture on 10 basic co-operative principles: open admission, democratic organisation, the sovereignty of labour, instrumental and subordinate nature of capital, participatory management, payment solidarity, inter-cooperation, social transformation, universality, and education.[24]

The philosophy is complemented by four corporate values: co-operation (acting as owners and protagonists), participation (commitment to management), social responsibility (distribution of wealth based on solidarity), and innovation (continual renewal across all areas).[25]

These values are translated into basic objectives (customer focus, development, innovation, profitability, people in co-operation, and community involvement) and general policies approved by the Co-operative Congress, which feed into the four-year strategic plans and the annual business plans of the individual co-operatives, divisions, and the corporation as a whole.[26]

Wage regulation

At Mondragon, wage ratios between executive work and the field or factory work that earns a minimum wage are agreed by vote. The ratios range from 3:1 to 9:1 across cooperatives and average 5:1; the general manager of an average cooperative earns no more than five times the theoretical minimum wage paid in their cooperative. Most worker-owners do not earn the minimum wage because most jobs are classified at higher wage levels. The wage ratio of a cooperative is decided periodically by its worker-owners through a democratic vote.[27]

Personally, I think that the idea of 'abolish all hierarchy' is rather silly.

Instead, question and critique all hierarchy, and then use what you learn from that to design the most equitable system possible.

Mondragon is not perfect, but I would argue it is (at least in the west) the most well known functional antithesis to capitalist private ownership that actually literally works and produces complex things.

PCB fabrication exists because hierarchical systems can't assemble electronics without PCBs.

Making a PCB in a small chaotic team (or even alone, damn, who in hw didn't etch their own PCBs as a kid?) is totally possible and quite easy; now making them to tight specs to make them compatible with a vertical manufacturing giant is incredibly hard (yet doable).

I was running an anarchic hardware design and manufacturing shop until last year (now I just have a bunch of unused equipment at home; can't come up with ideas on what to do). The problem wasn't in production, the problem was in sales - monopolist shops took over whole distribution networks and won't let an outsider in without getting their cut.

What would you need electronics devices for, anyway? Other than run Android that's designed to be ridiculously complex and uniform, alienating system with a sprawl of flaws and horrible centralization; catering hardware for smartphone industry is exactly hard because of hierarchical system in existence. Sure, there is an ecosystem of apps... that get rewritten on a monthly basis, cloned and vibecoded in minutes. And operating system vulnerabilities get scaled worldwide in an instant as everyone has exact same system.

I'd say, we'd have way more beauty in the world and way more security if our hardware was not unified. And for that we'd need to get rid of hierarchical optimizations. Which is not going to happen... on a global scale, that is, I'm soldering my nonsence equipment in a non-standard way now and do not care.

Here is a customary link to my friend working without a PCB at all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo8qckXgNNw I just love rewatching this sick video.

Centralized, efficient mass production of goods to satisfy human needs does require some hierarchy, but under a society that has successfully abolished commodity production in favor of production for use these hierarchies would operate in a completely different way than they do now - not being born out of class antagonisms but rather out of necessity for coordination, never permanent but revocable and based on competency.

A project or a large production chain might have engineers, organizers - basically, whatever is necessary for the division of labor and for the end product to come into fruition. After all, how are you going to manufacture something like a phone without dividing up necessary tasks, having someone directing the production chain (which often consists of 1000+ people btw)?

Kropotkin and his anarcho-communism theory (which is the most developed anarchist theory afaik) does propose a solution as seen in the works such as "Fields, Factories, and Workshops" where the argument is essentially 'centralized production requires hierarchy, therefore we must have small localized production', or in other words, throw away hundreds of years of progress and return to medieval style-esque production which would greatly increase the total amount of work hours needed to produce goods to satisfy needs (assuming all the needed materials get supplied without issues), all for the sake of ideology and ghosts within the mind.

If we want to keep over-production, then we need hierarchy, but we don't actually need over-production.

::: spoiler Definition of letten When the surroundings let something happen.

When summer arrives there will be swimming letten.

The letten is bad for fishing here, let's move on. :::

The myth of [demand] sais that the reason there is over production is because the consumers demand it. However, most of this demand is artificial. We don't need to travel with plains, we don't need high resolution television, we don't need video games, we don't need cars, we don't need meat every day. This artificial demand comes from the normalization of these through advertisements and lettening.

By moving towards horizontality through democratic confederalism for instance, our needs are drastically reduced because we operate from the idea; Each according to their ability, each according to their need.

Managers are not needed because we can replace them with elected and withdrawable coordinators.

"Anarchism runs counter to the global direction of humainty and progress."

Anarcho-syndicalism is of course not a real thing

If the workers are motivated, they can self-organize. However, a hierachy in a production facility or across multiple is not incompatible with anarchy on a national scale. There can be different kind of jobs. There can be someone who just organizes logistics, replacing the manager.

All of this has nothing to do with political systems like anarchism or oligarchy tho. People like to mix them up, but these are economic systems; in this case even microeconomic.

Relevant answer in the Anarchist FAQ

The thing about extreme high frequency x ray lithography is that its literally black magic and the machines literally do not work if the operators don't wish they were somewhere else its that suffering that longing for elsewhere that escape that allows the light to get small enough to cut 4nm MOSFETs and operators' consciousness to leak through the pneuma into the chips that's why computers actually have at least the fractional residue of souls and electrical engineers are all soulless husks its also why all the Asian chip fabs need suicide nets to keep workers because their souls are literally being stolen and they know it and why the big american chip fab is in phoenix az so you can't tell

mr john electronics here, pcbs are dirt cheap and mass production doesnt need a hierarchy at all