The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1972)

> The omnipresent problem which Joreen confronts, that of elites, does not find solution in the formation of structures.

"Structure" covers a wide spectrum though, from formal and rigid, to unwritten or very simple and mutual rules. I think despotic and alienating structures being bad doesn't make structure as such any more bad than, say, a bad book would make books in general bad.

I personally like the concept "order within liberty" a lot:

> You don’t know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You don’t know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!

by Gustav Landauer, who also said/wrote:

> One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talkers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another.

And I think the article you linked kind of agrees with that, even:

> While, ultimately, a massive force of women (and some men) will be necessary to smash the power of the state, a mass movement itself does not a revolution make. If we hope to create a society free of mate supremacy, when we overthrow capitalism and build international socialism, we had better start working on it right away, because some of our very best anti-capitalist friends are going to give us the hardest time. We must be developing a visible women's culture, within which women can define and express themselves apart from patriarchal standards, and which will meet the needs of women where patriarchy has failed.

Whether you call it culture or structure or organization, everybody seems in agreement that just wandering off and doing your own thing all the time will not yield great results, though one might argue about details. Is that impression wrong?

Two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 | 121 comments

I remember it coming up :)

I used to volunteer in an anarchist-led bookshop. "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" was one of the texts I was referred to upon starting in order to help me understand that one ought to spend a bit of time thinking about hierarchies (or the lack thereof) and their consequences.

This is my take on the topic given some reflection. Like money, hierarchies are not intrinsically bad. Like money, hierarchies are a tool for getting shit done. Money can be abused. Why? Because greed. Because the will to power. We know what money is good for, it is an abstraction that facilitates exchange and trade. What are hierarchies good for? Coordinated action via a chain of command. Hierarchies can be abused. Same reasons. Because greed. Because the will to power.

I've been thinking recently about a certain type of hierarchy where the stratification is highly ordered. Think military hierarchies. Each layer reports only to the one above. There is a strict chain of command. Orders must be followed without question. Because this special type of hierarchy emerges again and again (think about how we structure a very complex text even) I thought it must have a name. I couldn't find one so I'm suggesting isomerarchy. All from ancient Greek: we all know that iso means same, like isomorphic, isobar, and so on; meros is less familiar and means part or division, the study of parts and parthood is mereology[1]; finally, archon[2] means ruler from which we get monarch (literally rule by the one). Hence, isomerarchy. Funnily enough, both isomer[3] and merarch[4] are both existing concepts which rely on exactly this etymology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mereology

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomer

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merarches

So the difference between our opinions is basically that you think formal power is most important and informal power only a nuance to that, and I think informal power is most important and formal power only a nuance to that.

For me it's good to know that people still exist who can believe in the first. I also started out like that but the little experience I could gather from this world taught me otherwise.

This article is interesting, but too often misinterpreted.

People most cite it as an argument for why you need hierarchies in your organization. However, I don't think the article gets to claim such thing. Instead, it claims that one should not let structure be implicit, because then it degenerates in tyranny.

People are too used to think that structure == hierarchy that we assume that the corollary is that hierarchy is needed to avoid tyranny. David Graeber in his "Utopia of Rules" [1] makes a good counterargument: if your goal is to avoid tyranny it's little difference to have it implicit or explicit. In the later case, you are just giving some moral justification for it -- you legitimize it, in the most literal sense of the word. What you need is, if you want to avoid tyranny, a resilient and explicit flat structure, with mechanisms in place to identify and reject emergent tyrannies.

I understand, though, why we are becoming disillusioned about the word "flat" in the business world. Most businesses that try to go "flat" still have a vertical ownership structure. What "flat" actually means in that context is: "you have to figure out how to make money for me, but I'm not going to tell you how!" This creates a lot of anxiety, because at the same time that workers are told to feel empowered and take responsibility, everybody spends so much energy in figuring out what are the invisible walls of the cell, and what their patrons actually want from them. I think it takes a lot of alienation to really thrive in such environment.

That does not mean that flat is impossible in the business world, in my view, you just need an explicit flat structure that begins with your ownership model. A company that I know of that has such structure is Igalia [2] (discl: I don't work with them but have acquaintances there)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules [2] http://igalia.com/

BDFL is actually very primitive model - it is really very much alike some ancient kingdom system - it only works because it is counterbalanced by forking.