The Non-Hierarchy Trap & The Inflexibility Trap
Most of this post was written about three to four weeks after the George Floyd Uprising began. I got busy and returned after the November 3rd election to add and finalize the last couple sections. There is another blog post tangentially related to this one—and written around the same time—about the importance of motivation, numbers, and preparation for turning spontaneous movements into long-term organizing. That post can be found here.
This blog post is informed by my experiences in organizing in university and after graduating. You may have had different experiences in organizing, but from what I’ve seen and read, a lot of this holds true across contemporary leftist organizing in the United States.
With the spontaneous movement around #BlackLivesMatter in 2020, organizers are having the chance to experience spontaneous democracy. Specifically, this is the spontaneous democracy that is involved in normal people self-organizing into medium-to-long-term structures. However, a general idolization of spontaneous democracy can leave somewhat-experienced organizers blind to the difficult problems of real-life organizing. Our idolatry of spontaneous democracy should not get in the way of us setting up norms and structures that streamline organizing.
Sometimes, democratic hierarchies are more effective for organizing than the non-hierarchical structures associated with spontaneous democracy. However, contemporary activists sometimes keep a non-hierarchical structure around for far too long—that is, to the detriment of the movement. I call this the ‘Non-Hierarchy Trap’. Activists usually don’t take action on this until it’s too late: they’re nearly burnt out, or they realize their demands won’t get met unless something changes. What’s even worse is when they don’t realize this issue, and the organization peters out or becomes a tiny group of highly motivated but ineffectual activists.
While the Non-Hierarchy Trap often comes from overshooting good intentions, it is also possible for activists to overshoot their rejection of non-hierarchical organizing, resulting in too rigid of a hierarchy. When organizing structures become too inflexible—that is, when more flexibility would allow for greater success—I call this the ‘Inflexibility Trap’.
If not for the Non-Hierarchy Trap, I think many more organizing meetings would result in people democratically choosing to set up a democratic, hierarchical structure for organizing. These would be robust, transparent, and democratically accountable. Hierarchies in organizing—when set up well—can make organizing more effective. Importantly, they can be very useful for getting over the hurdle of effort required to turn a spontaneous movement into an effective organization of people who can get their demands met.
To me, the effectiveness of organizations’ structures is measured by how effectively work is being done to achieve the shared intended goals of its members. Are commonly repeated processes becoming bureaucratized so that there isn’t a lot of wasted effort put into repeatedly figuring them out from scratch? Are anticipated processes planned for in advance so that less time is required to figure them out in-the-moment? Is the organization flexible enough to change to meet the needs of the moment, and to productively resolve internal disputes? The Non-Hierarchy Trap results in a failure to address the first two questions, and the Inflexibility Trap is a failure to address the last.
The Non-Hierarchy Trap
The Non-Hierarchy Trap occurs when activists keep a non-hierarchical structure around for far too long—that is, to the detriment of the movement. It commonly comes about in a couple ways. The first way is that people may come into the movement with the preconceived dogma that non-hierarchical organizing is the most effective form of organization. This seems to be what happened during the Occupy Movement, and is one of the popular criticisms for why it wasn’t as successful as it could have been.
The second way I see the Non-Hierarchy Trap arise is more common than the first, and it emerges out of the behavior of well-meaning, somewhat-experienced organizers. It comes out of one of the unspoken rules and norms of anarchist thinking: that spontaneous democracy is good. I generally agree, and in any case, spontaneous, non-hierarchical, democratic decision-making is almost unavoidable for all new leftist organizations and movements.
Many somewhat-experienced organizers come in with a desire to protect the sanctity of spontaneous democracy within recently-created organizations. But this can lead those organizers to hesitate to propose setting up a hierarchical organizing structure—even when they might think such a structure would be useful. These organizers are worried that inexperienced people will defer to the organizer’s input and be too hesitant or shy about proposing their own ideas. The organizers think this is undesirable because it gets in the way of people working things out ‘truly democratically’. The organizers also want to give people more practice at ‘doing democracy’.
While all of these desires are good, this leads many organizers to choose to respect ‘spontaneous democracy’ by sitting on the sidelines of the conversation, only acting as a resource if people ask for their input. This is a self-defeating way of going about things.
From my experience, this is what tends to happen with those formative early meetings:
Organizers set up a meeting time. People now have an idea of who the people with experience are—they’re the ones who set up the meeting.
In the meeting, organizers will usually wait for other people to float the idea of setting up a hierarchical structure. For reasons described in 3 through 5, this idea may never get floated, even when it is a good idea.
Newcomers to organizing might interpret an organizer’s respect for the process of spontaneous democracy as an endorsement of Non-Hierarchical Organizing in general, not merely limited to the spontaneous origins of the group.
People also don’t want to risk looking dumb—if the organizers aren’t proposing hierarchical organizing, it can spark a worry that there might be something clearly wrong with the idea that they’re not seeing. People don’t want to look dumb for proposing something that everyone else already knows to be a bad idea.
The organizers take this as a sign that people have democratically rejected hierarchical structures in organizing. They go along with this because they respect democratic decision-making, and because bringing it up now feels like putting a thumb on the scale.
In this way, it becomes an unspoken norm that “Non-Hierarchical Organizing is a satisfactory organizing structure.” The group has fallen into the Non-Hierarchy Trap.
The non-hierarchical structure stays around until its inefficiencies sink the group, or until the complexity of the group’s goals essentially forces them to take on some form of hierarchical structure. In both cases, the Non-Hierarchical Trap has weakened the group’s power by keeping non-hierarchical organizing around for longer than would be most effective.
Non-Hierarchical Organizing is often not a satisfactory organizing structure. Inefficiencies mean that people have to do more rote and repetitive work, and usually this brunt work falls on the shoulders of the most motivated organizers. You have a much higher risk of your most motivated organizers getting burnt out.
Additionally, Non-Hierarchical Organizing can be unwelcoming to newcomers, especially in complex projects. These interested-but-unexperienced newcomers often don’t feel confident about their ability to self-direct their organizing work. They worry that they don’t know what they’re doing, and they end up not doing anything because they don’t want to do something that is seen as a mistake by the rest of the group. In other words, they want a level of guidance that Non-Hierarchical Organizing does not provide. The sort of thoughtless NHO structure which is produced by the seven points I described above is more likely to turn away newcomers, instead of training them to become more effective organizers. Newcomers are often too afraid to ask for a change in organizational structure because: (1) they aren’t confident that they know what is best; (2) Non-Hierarchical Organizing has become an unspoken norm; and (3) the most experienced organizers already have a lot on their plate, and they don’t want to bother them (see the previous paragraph). Not being able to fold in new volunteers means that there won’t be enough people to do the hard work of organizing—let alone to scale up organizing beyond the easiest demands.
Organizers realize just how big of a hole they’re in when they realize that they’ve reached capacity, and that they will burn out if things don’t change. Either the organization gets more hierarchical, streamlined, and explicit about people’s roles in the organization; or people experience burnout and the organization dies. Don’t wait until you’ve reached capacity—avoid falling into the trap in the first place.
So this message is directed toward organizers: You might feel a desire to recuse yourself from the initial organizing conversations for the sake of not interfering with spontaneous democracy, but you can’t sit this one out—people are depending on your experience now more than ever. Your input is useful for us to get over the hurdle of effort required to transform the energy of spontaneous movements into effective organizing. At the very least, you should explicitly mention that there is nothing inherently wrong with democratically voting for a representative structure, and that having a democratic hierarchy might be an effective structure for the group.
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Anarchists tend to agree that some representative structures are fine if they are democratically accountable, and if the structure can be opted out of through non-coercive rules of free association. Anarchism doesn’t necessarily mean the elimination of hierarchies (read here ‘representation’), it means the elimination of unfair, coercive ones. Hierarchies are still generally required to solve collective action problems.
Effective hierarchical organizing has several benefits: people get burnt out less, it’s more welcoming to inexperienced newcomers, and the organization is more capable in time-sensitive or extremely complex projects. The motivation to complete a complex project might force an organization to adopt hierarchical structures that divides labor and makes organizing more effective. However, it’s often better to come prepared beforehand with those norms and structures instead of figuring them out on the fly—again, to reduce burnout, to increase the number of newcomers who turn into serious organizers, and because your organization might have to respond to an unexpected, time-sensitive problem.
Hierarchical structures don’t require there to be a small group of leaders. People can (and should) rotate out of positions of leadership. This is useful so leaders don’t get burned out, and the redundancy makes the organization more robust. Depending on its size, a community might be able to get away with a large number of representative decision-makers, who discuss and debate until they come out with a few potential policies, upon which the entire population can vote on which of those policies they want.
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All this isn’t to say that non-hierarchical organizing is always bad. It has its place, and people may democratically decide that it is the most effective way to go about doing things. I think non-hierarchical structures are good on a small scale, but can run into issues when we want to scale up the organization; or when we have to coordinate against direct state repression or other urgent, time-sensitive conditions that might take us by surprise. And, as I described in the last three paragraphs, we can still have representative decision-making in organizing that stays true to anarchist principles.
[ 2021/04/16 EDIT: I have since become more open to the potential effectiveness of more-horizontal organizing since reading Jo Freeman’s ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ and Hélène Landemore’s ‘Democratic Reason’. We might have rotating meeting facilitation and rotating juries of decisionmakers instead of a democratically-representative hierarchy. The problem is less that we are lacking a hierarchical organizing structure, and more that we are lacking an organizing structure at all. ]
The Inflexibility Trap
Whereas the Non-Hierarchy Trap usually only affects new organizations, the Inflexibility Trap can strike in both new and established organizations.
In short, the Inflexibility Trap is when an organization has too inflexible of a hierarchical decision-making structure, and is unable to adapt to new situations and problems. These new situations can require a shift in tactics, strategies, or modes of decision-making. If organizations fall for the Inflexibility Trap, they won’t make these shifts, and upon reflection, even people from the organization might realize that they could have achieved more of their goals if somebody had spoken up and made the argument to adapt.
Inflexibility in this way can cause organizations to be:
too electorally focused, or
not electorally focused enough to put pressure on politicians, or
too focused on lobbying politicians rather than educating and organizing communities, or
too focused on promoting policies to communities without enough focus on how policies actually become law, or
too focused on a specific type of tactic (such as localism or direct action), while lacking a scalable, long-term strategy, or
too focused on a specific type of structure or long-term strategy (such as vanguardism), without the capacity to act effectively in the present because nothing they are capable of doing fits the long-term strategy well, or
too focused on appeasing donors at the detriment of their ability to take on the most effective strategies, or
lacking the internal discussion or democratic control that is necessary to effectively respond to changing organizing circumstances
None of this is saying that electoralism, anti-electoralism, direct action, or vanguardism, et cetera are incapable of success, or that an organization will necessarily fall into the Inflexibility Trap if they exhibit one of these tendencies. I am saying that we get problems when organizations fail to focus on their issues and goals, and are structurally set up to be far more attached to specific tactics, a strategy, or their organizational structure. I see the Inflexibility Trap as the problem of an organization incorrectly valuing the ‘means’ of a top-down decision-making structure over the organization’s ‘end’ goals. It is the extreme opposite to anarchic non-hierarchical organizing.
Organizations can fall into rigid, hierarchical, pre-decided patterns of acting either intentionally or unintentionally. New organizations that enter into organizing with clear ideological standpoints on tactics or strategies are usually foreclosing other potentially more effective ways of achieving their goals. If their ideology is too non-hierarchical, they can fall into the Non-Hierarchy Trap. On the other hand, if they have an ideology focused too much on centralization and hierarchy (like many Marxist-Leninists) they can “intentionally” fall into the Inflexibility Trap. They might create specific rules that exclude certain decentralized tactics, or they might not trust community members to effectively take on the bulk of self-directing and self-organizing. They might also subscribe to a type of centralization that prioritizes a small group of leaders and experts, who in practice are rarely replaced or cycled out—even if they are technically democratically elected.
Organizations unintentionally fall into the Inflexibility Trap when certain norms emerge. The main norms that promote unacceptable levels of organizational inflexibility are those that prevent people from questioning the organization’s bureaucratic structures, make it dependent on certain individual experts, or an unwillingness to jeopardize liberal-philanthropist sources of funding. In these cases, path dependence really takes hold—in practice, this means that the organization addresses issues through the path-of-least-resistance within the organization. Nobody really questions how they’re organizing themselves into a dead-end, and individuals focus simply on doing their own job. It’s like the organization is running on autopilot—they have a way of doing things, and they’re not very responsive to situations which demand critical interventions in their projects or which demand new structures of organizing.
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A prominent example of the Inflexibility Trap hurting an organization and its goals was the #8CantWait project from Campaign Zero. This project for reforming police departments was started before the George Floyd murder, and was premised on the need to get the ball rolling on police reforms. But after the George Floyd uprisings began, the popular discussion around police quickly moved from ‘basically nothing’ to ‘defunding and abolishing’. In this context, the reformist project of #8CantWait was actually a major step backwards in the conversation, and gave politicians and police an easy way out without having to doing anything meaningful. Campaign Zero was unable to adapt to the new situation of the mass uprisings, and instead hurt their goals.
Brittany Packnett Cunningham, a co-founder of Campaign Zero, ended up leaving the organization, and Samuel Sinyangwe released a statement on Twitter for why #8CantWait had its problems. Sinyangwe wrote:
“Unfortunately, the roll-out of the [#8CantWait] campaign and the messaging around it were flawed and detracted from the broader, transformative conversation happening in this moment. The initiative was rushed, and despite calls from myself and Brittany Packnett Cunningham to slow things down, it went out anyway.”
#8CantWait ran into many of the issues that leftists regularly criticize non-profits for, and I consider this a very good example of the Inflexibility Trap. Packnett and Sinyangwe both meant well, but the inflexible non-profit structure of the organization pushed the harmful campaign through nonetheless. I can even imagine that in-the-moment, lots of people were simply focused on their individual task, and nobody thought it was their place or responsibility to really reevaluate the project. There was no meaningful reconsideration of #8CantWait to say, “Hey, I know we already put a lot of work into this, but #8CantWait is too incrementalist for the moment.” The size of the organization, combined with the unquestioned bureaucratic hierarchy, helped create problematic inflexibility for #8CantWait.
Non-Profit-style philanthropic funding is another major source of inflexibility. Rich funders want to see results, which pushes through projects—gives them an inertia—even when they are no longer relevant or helpful for the values and goals that are the organization’s mission. Rich philanthropist funding also promotes rigid, inflexible hierarchies—the philanthropist wants a point person / board of directors that they can talk to, get updates from, and direct the organization through. This top-down control structure begins to pervade the whole non-profit. The non-profit is nudged to take on an undemocratic, dictatorial structure that is characteristic of a capitalist business. Meaningful democratic, bottom-up decision-making is suppressed.
When democratic structures are suppressed, the organization only really undergoes changes when problems become evident to the people at the top. This usually occurs after the organization has run into the problems of the Inflexibility Trap. If people had meaningful bottom-up decision-making power, then they could have shifted their strategy, and the organization might not have had to face the problems of inflexibility.
Finally, while this is not necessarily seen in Project Zero’s #8CantWait, another source of inflexibility is a dependency on specific experts or leaders. Problems can arise if an organization becomes reliant on specific people—that is, if there isn’t redundancy of expertise or leadership. The organization can crumble if one of those key people becomes unavailable, or if other members of the organization no longer want to associate with that person. Perhaps a key expert or leader needs to leave to care for a family member. In worst-case scenarios, a person is revealed to be a sexual predator, and the organization is faced with the decision of firing a person they have grown to rely on, or using their bureaucracy to suppress the accusers. In this way, inflexibility to changes within to the organization can be a major problem. Lack of redundancy can be intensified by the efficiency-focused tendencies that philanthropic funding encourages.
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I think it is useful once again to address organizers directly, this time with a few tips that may help avoid the Inflexibility Trap. It’s good to be aware of the problem, so your organization doesn’t grow into the Inflexibility Trap like a frog in slowly-boiling water.
First, continually reaffirm the goals that your organization wants to achieve. Constantly doing backwards planning is a useful way of thinking throughout the entire organizing project. It helps make sure your organization always has a plausible path toward achieving its goals of organized communities, working-class power, specific policy changes, etc. Start by thinking about your end goals, and work backwards to determine what you need to do in the present to build towards ultimate success.
Second, explicitly aim to create redundancy of expertise, leadership, and funding. Learn collectively and discuss current events in meetings. If there seem to be experts, encourage them to share and teach people about their sources and how they go about learning. Rotate leaders out, and maybe have an apprentice-style approach to leadership positions (for example, the next person in the leadership cycle could shadow the current decisionmaker, or the leadership group could rotate out one-by-one). Demystify knowledge and leadership—these things are not natural-born abilities, they are learned through practice, and your organization should be structured to give people that practice.
In terms of redundant funding, try to have multiple sources of funding so your organization can handle the loss of any single source of funding. It can also help to have a rainy-day fund. Perhaps most importantly, make sure that your sources of funding don’t twist your organization into a rigid top-down hierarchy. Democratic decision-making (and not simply democratically-elected representatives) isn’t just an ethical value, it’s an effective way to combat problematic inflexibility within organizing.
Finally, I want to re-emphasize the usefulness of meaningful, consciously-promoted democratic norms in organizing. It’s very useful to tap into people’s distributed knowledge—both the knowledge they bring in from their lives, and the knowledge they have from doing the on-the-ground work of organizing. Their closeness to the organizing work gives them direct knowledge about what can be improved. People can also help keep the organization focused on its long-term goals. The organization needs to make it a norm to regularly reevaluate and update their tactics, strategies, and common practices, through a process of democratic participation and control.
These Pitfalls Are Avoidable
These common pitfalls are not inherent to organizing, they are mostly the results of contemporary tendencies. My hope is that when people are aware of these problems, they adapt their organizing behaviors to avoid these traps.
This post has my suggestions for organizers about how to avoid these issues, but the most important thing is to be aware of these traps, and to consciously act to avoid them. My hope is that the Non-Hierarchy Trap and the Inflexibility Trap will become meaningless and ridiculous—that in the future, commonly held norms will lead people to say: “Who would ever have fallen for something like that!”