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Sometimes the least structured group can be the most tyrannical. Create a participatory and welcoming environment by adopting a transparent decision making process and promoting accountability within the group.
Leadership has a way of always entering into the equation whether you want it or not. The trick is of course to recognise that it will be there and find ways to make it accountable.
— Jo Freeman
Have you ever sat through an interminable meeting where everyone is theoretically on equal footing, and yet a few people are doing most of the talking? Where there’s no facilitator, for fear of introducing hierarchy, and so the discussion goes in endless circles, never quite sure when it’s finished? Where new members lose patience because their suggestions are ignored and their ideas left to float in the ether? Where those with the best informal clique links are able to run the show from behind the scenes?
Welcome to the tyranny of structurelessness.
Jo Freeman’s seminal 1970 essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” put a name to a persistent problem that plagues participants in non-hierarchical groups and collectives. Freeman argued that by claiming to eschew hierarchy, or even leadership, people are actually just making it harder to identify and hold accountable the leadership and hierarchy that de facto arises anyway. “There is no such thing as a structureless group,” Freeman argues, and people who pretend otherwise are, in effect, unilaterally disarming themselves when it comes to identifying and correcting decision-making problems within their group.
Accountability is what gives participatory democracy its bite, distinguishing it from a rote exercise in communicating preferences.
Structurelessness is often mistakenly conflated with absence of hierarchy, when in fact, effective non-hierarchical forms of organizing actually require a great deal of structure. Anyone who has participated in an effectively facilitated general assembly or spokes-council meeting will well understand this distinction.
To strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an “objective” news story, “value-free” social science, or a “free” economy. 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. Thus, structurelessness becomes a way of masking power.
It would be bad enough if structurelessness merely led to bruised feelings and longer meetings, but there is a further problem: It simply doesn’t work for long. If you’re engaging in any kind of long-term campaign, a lack of accountability and an organized process for incorporating feedback will often prove fatal.
So what’s the way out of a structureless organization that is inadvertently oppressive and not working properly? The best cure is prevention: Establish clear decision-making processes from the start. However, if you’re already stuck in such an arrangement, and wish to change the culture to something more democratic and participatory, what you want to press for isn’t hierarchy per se, but accountability.
Accountability is what gives participatory democracy its bite, distinguishing it from a rote exercise in communicating preferences. It involves the establishment of real consequences when the expressed will of the people is not implemented as promised. (By contrast, structurelessness provides plenty of ways to note collective preferences, but precious few equitable or effective ways to ensure they’re acted upon.) Hierarchy is a particular vision of how accountability is carried out, but for the hierarchy-adverse it’s by no means the only one.
There are as many organizational structures as there are philosophies of collective action. But they all share one thing in common: For better or worse, they acknowledge their own structure, instead of hiding behind unlikely and obfuscating assertions of structurelessness. That acknowledgment, and the accountability it fosters, is the only way to ensure effective and equitable decision-making.
Originally published in Beautiful Trouble.