The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1972)

The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1972)
jofreeman.com

Short version: if you try to avoid the problems of existing organizations by not having an explicit power structure, you instead end up with an implicit power structure. That is not a problem at small scales when the organization is for discussion rather than for getting things done. But it has many subtle problems.

At the bottom, there's a nice list of things to experiment with as organizations search for useful explicit power structures: delegation, responsibility, distribution of authority, rotation of power, allocation of work, diffusion of information, and equal access to resources.

Since this article is about women's movement issues from 40+ years ago, it can seem irrelevant. But given how non-traditional organizational models are of the moment (e.g., open source projects, holocracy, Occupy, BLM, twitter organizing), I think it's useful material for anybody who's shaping an organization.

A very interesting aspect of structureless entities is that it is very hard to form counter-narratives to them. If you look back at successful revolutions, then their rhetoric revolves around specific events that show everyone why something is unreasonable. For the American revolution, it was the Boston Massacre - a specific instance in time that the revolutionaries could use as evidence of injustice. The dismissal of Jacques Necker, a finance minister in Louis XVI's cabinet, led to the storming of the Bastille and in turn the French revolution. Change often revolves around a commonly shared notion of injustice.

Without an explicit power structure, it is hard to create the common ground necessary to ferment change. How can you find a specific experience that everyone can relate to when everyone's experience of the group is inherently different? How can you find that one thing within the structure that frames the overall problem, when there is no commonly agreed one to pin down? People will spend more time arguing about what the structure might be than finding practical solutions to problems.

This effect seems to be so powerful and unseen that it is becoming a fashionable method for preserving the status quo. It's popping up everywhere from businesses to nation states. My favourite example is the work of Putin's advisor Vladislav Surkov, a man who was once the publisher of avant-garde poetry and a patron of deconstructionist art. He has worked very hard to deconstruct war for Putin and create a structureless society. At its heart his doctrine is a heightened form of that same structurelessness this article discusses. Except its done at the national scale.

Inside Surkov's Russia, the Kremlin maintains control by ensuring that there is no explicit power structure - just shifting cliques in perpetual conflict with other cliques;

"""

[..] The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.

One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human-rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions.

The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hid...

"""