Left-Wing Organizations Confront Anarchy

Several years ago I read an interesting article about Transition House, one of America's first shelters for abused women. One thing that  drew my attention was its organizational history:

From the beginning they had allowed everyone to participate in decision making, and they tried to erase any distinction between women being helped and women helping. Everything had to be done by consensus, which meant that some things were never done. Now they have a formal board and an executive director with a corner office, and the transition happened after intellectuals within the movement began to criticize consensus meetings on a theoretical plane, pointing out that some voices were always louder and more powerful than others, and that bullies could use the very lack of structure to wear others down and get their way.

Just today I stumbled on an essay from 1971 that must have come out of experiences just like the ones at Transition House, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" by Jo Freeman. 

During the years in which the women's liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement. The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured society in which most of us found ourselves, and the inevitable control this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this overstructuredness. The idea of "structurelessness," however, has moved from a healthy counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right.

Structureless groups worked fine, Freeman says, so long as their main purpose was consciousness raising, but they failed when they began to work for more concrete social and political change:

At this point they usually foundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their tasks. Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of "structurelessness" without realizing the limitations of its uses. People would try to use the "structureless" group and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything but oppressive. If the movement is to grow beyond these elementary stages of development, it will have to disabuse itself of some of its prejudices about organization and structure. There is nothing inherently bad about either of these. They can be and often are misused, but to reject them out of hand because they are misused is to deny ourselves the necessary tools to further development. We need to understand why "structurelessness" does not work.

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. 

One result of the lack of real organization, says Freeman, is an absence of leaders who can speak for the movement. This leads, not to the democratization of speech, but the media's raising certain celebrities (actresses, rock stars, publicity hounds) to the status of de facto spokespeople.

You may recall that over the past few years many left-wing groups have experienced angry staff revolts and other kinds of internal turmoil, laid out in a famous article by Ryan Grim. One of the most important responses to this uproar is a long, thoughtful article by Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party, which was published on a web site mainly used by professionals in left-wing organizations and given the dry title "Building Resilient Organizations." But in form it is a savage take-down of all the fallacies and errors committed by angry young leftists, such as identity as argument (as a queer black person, I say. . .), maximalism, and, the one that interests me the most, anti-leadership and anti-organization attitudes:

Pretending formal leadership doesn’t exist can obscure hierarchies and create centers of informal power. Formal leadership, when healthy, provides clarity and transparency, which leads to greater accountability. This in turn fosters more avenues for support to develop new leadership.

Mitchell places part of the blame for recent institutional turmoil on social media:

The profligate and unexamined use of social media has amplified this particular trend. These platforms—owned and controlled by megacorporations—reward us for our ability to articulate or reshare the sharpest, pithiest, pettiest, most polemic, or most engaging “content.” There is no premium on nuance, accuracy, and context. There is little room for low-ego information sharing or curious and grounded political education. These platforms are ideal for, and give immediate reward to, uninformed cherry-picking, self-aggrandizement, competition, and conflict.

We are learning the damaging lesson that the performance of profundity can supercharge our arguments and points of view while obscuring scrutiny or accountability.

Interviewed by Michelle Goldberg of the NY Times, Mitchell said: "On balance, I think social media has been bad for democracy." 

I am reminded me of the Marxist attacks on "bourgeois individualism." If people want to change the world, they have to work together, and nothing impedes that like everybody posting angry rants about their personal troubles and whining that their bosses are oppressing them.

The experience of very left-wing people points away from anarchism, radical equality, and ideologies forged in social media battlegrounds and back to formal institutions, hierarchies, bosses, Robert's Rules of Order. As John Locke said a long time ago, real freedom requires order, and order requires institutions strong enough to maintain it. Freedom isn't free.