Liam redux

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

I’ve just experienced the tyranny of structurelessness in a squatted social centre in the rough bit of Whitechapel. It’s horrible and rather anti working class too. Let me share it with you in a holistic,affirming, inclusive, non-hierarchial and empowering way. I’ve put up a few bits and pieces about recent events in Mexico, particularly Oaxaca…

Liam
3–4 minutes

I’ve just experienced the tyranny of structurelessness in a squatted social centre in the rough bit of Whitechapel. It’s horrible and rather anti working class too. Let me share it with you in a holistic,affirming, inclusive, non-hierarchial and empowering way.

I’ve put up a few bits and pieces about recent events in Mexico, particularly Oaxaca so it seemed right that I should go along to a meeting not too far from here to discuss organising solidarity activity. There were a couple of familiar faces from HOV and a man I’ve seen somewhere before but can’t remember where among the group of fifteen or so. An agenda was agreed pretty quickly but it went downhill from there. The discussion on recent events morphed from anecdotes that participants had remembered from websites into a discussion on taking power. I very deliberately resisted the temptation to participate in this bit

Discussing what sort of solidarity activity to do later this week was just painful. One person said that the main problem was that papers like the Guardian and Independent don’t report what’s happening in Latin America and so the only meaningful way to show solidarity was to have a demonstration outside the Guardian’s offices. I suggested perhaps a demo outside the Mexican tourist office, inviting the press, issuing a statement condeming the arrests and circulating word of the initiative as widely as possible. A full forty five minutes later it was agreed to traipse around Trafalgar Square with a film projector showing videos of Oaxaca on the Friday night before Christmas. That’s a peak time to get lots of open minded Londoners interested in world politics. “Guerrilla cinema” it’s called. In that forty five minutes we’d been challenged to either lay our lives on the line the way you do in Mexico when challenging the state or chose the option of staying in our “comfort zone”. Well bollocks to that. I’d been planning to eat turkey and a couple of tins of Quality Street in Belfast next week. Guess which I chose.

Discussion of the leaflet was tragi-comic. It was suggested, in all seriousness, that we each produce our own leaflets. It was agreed that there be no name on the leaflet. Apparently by giving your group a name you are not being inclusive. As best I could work out in this sort of forum suggesting that someone chair a meeting is proof that you are a fascist. This just means that contributions sometimes ramble on or are competely irrelevant. What you also notice is that no one is ever very open about where they stand politically. Decisions are arrived at through a fake concensus as you gradually work out how the numbers stack up. It’s supposed to be lovely and unthreatening but it’s the very opposite. The dominant group gets its way without identifying itself as such.

Why is this method of organisation anti working class? Principally because it suits people who don’t have to get up for work the next morning or don’t get a bit twitchy for a pint at about half nine.. I walked out after two and a quarter hours with no end in sight. Most people who haven’t opted into an anarchist, squatting lifestyle can’t operate like that.

Now of course my problem (or one of them) is that this method of organisation is very successful at engaging militant, serious, radical anti-capitalist young people as tonight’s meeting demonstrated. Yet it’s fundamentally rubbish and as hierarchical as anything else.

Has anyone else had experience of working in these anarchist network, squat commune type things? Below is a link to an article on this subject which was influential in the women’s movement in the seventies.

www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

4 responses to “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”

  1. twp Avatar
    twp

    I couldn’t agree more Liam. When I was working with the Anti-Cap movement this happened all of the time. Usually, the top dog “anarchist” would dominate the meeting while simultaneously and sarcastically denouncing anyone who wanted structures. There absolutely has to be chairing, majority vote and time limits on speakers. On the other hand, we’ve seen how Left groups have abused these norms as well (a la SWP).In the end though, it’s not simply anti-working class, but it’s anti-democratic.

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  2. daggi Avatar
    daggi

    Now of course my problem (or one of them) is that this method of organisation is very successful at engaging militant, serious, radical anti-capitalist young people as tonight’s meeting demonstratedMy experience (similar to twp’s) leads me to ask that if this method of organisation is ‘successful’ – at what is it successful actually? It doesn’t lead to anything useful, does it? It doesn’t lead to much happening. You can (rightly) go on about the endless meetings of ‘left groups’, but, bloody hell, at least usually, something comes out of it, like it or not.The tyranny of structurelessness is one thing, but at the same time, the methods of organisation of many left groups are not exactly liberating either. Reading the Guardian‘s outrage on the BNP getting its members to use psuedonyms, meet up somewhere to go conspiratively to somewhere else for a meeting/conference, its use of encrypted email etc. – my first thought was “like Lutte Ouvriere, then”. At the same time, it would be pretty stupid of the BNP not to do this kind of stuff – and the same goes for LO, who have been banned in the past…

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  3. Phil Avatar
    Phil

    Jo Freeman’s pamphlet is a classic. These issues don’t go away, do they? Raymond Williams once described committee procedure as one of the great achievements of the working-class movement. Which does suggest that Raymond W. was a bit strange, but I think fundamentally it’s a good point. But I guess talking about the w.-c. m. wouldn’t have got you very far in that meeting.Ultimately what you want is discipline and personal engagement, which is one of those combinations that’s easier to talk about than actually achieve. I remember being amazed by the plenary at the first conference of the Red-Green Network (whatever became of that?) – one after another, floor speakers prefaced their comments with the usual phrases like “Following on from the previous speaker’s comments…” – and then actually did follow on. It was like having a proper discussion, only in a big hall with lots of people. Never experienced anything like that before or since – I wish I knew what the trick was.

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  4. Charlie Pottins Avatar
    Charlie Pottins

    I’ve experienced this sort of thing before, and know how those with strong personalities and/or manipulative skills can get their way precisely because there is no structure, set agenda nor even formal votes. I remember once after we’d decided one thing in a uni socialist society or union a bunch of anarchists etc would take their own contrary action which stole the show and disrupted us. I asked one kid how they had taken their decision, and got the reply “Well X said…” Behind the easy-going informality assisted probably by a fug of passed-aeound dope X, who was older, was able to run them like a gang. However its not just among anarchists, I remember once wandering in by mistake to what I thought was a social gathering cum “experience-sharing” discussion among a bunch of nice liberal “fems” and co-counselling types and finding they were coldbloodedly discussing how to remove some poor guy from office (I’d probably been next on the list if I’d not wandered in). The same faction, undeclared and undefined but able to identify each other came up with some novel way of running meetings without a chair but with each person who spoke choosing who spoke after them, so that while pretending to oppose “hierarchy” they simply fixed the discussion and excluded anyone who wasn’t in on their game. An alternative method where you have a regular chair is for them to decide at a certain point to sum up the discussion saying something like “Well, I think we can say we’re agreed that …” , at which their supporters assent, and the meeting moves on, with or without a vote, and you don’t have the chance to raise your objections, or you are being “disruptive”. Our old vice chancellor at Lancaster was adept at this, perhaps because he was a Quaker and they believe in concensus, or perhaps because he was keen on Business Studies and thought he was at a board meeting. So much for the easy targets. But twice in recent years I have found myself in meetings where an inner circle seemed to be the only ones who knew the agenda. One was a society where I was the new guy and the rest (mostly from a CP background I’d guess) were on the executive, and somehow they reached a decision without reaching my proposal or me knowing when if ever it was appropriate for me to speak. The other was when I stood in for someone at a Stop the War Coalition executive, quite a large body. The discussion seemed free-rangingg, and this time I decided to leap in, tagging on behind what some else said, and make the points I had to raise, without worrying whether it was the appropriate time to raise them or not. No problem. No one disagreed or said I was out of order. I was quite pleased. But I don’t think we took a vote, or minuted anything, because nothing happened about the issues anyway, and nobody mentioned them again. (Mind you that is also true of some STWC conference decisions we’ve voted upon).So while the kind of people Liam is talking about may be naturally prone to methods of hiding behind “informality” and “structurelessness” described, we may as well be honest and say they are not the only ones.

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