I was recently asked to talk a bit in an organizing meeting with several new members about our group’s structure. At the time, we didn’t have any explicit constitution or even an explicit set of rules. However, from previous meetings, we all knew that we valued the concepts of ‘horizontal’ and ‘democratic’ organizing. In the meeting, I described the values, as well as gestured at their implications for our group’s near-future organizing structure. In future posts, I will discuss more practical instantiations of these organizing principles, likely also informed by my experience in this group. What I presented is essentially as follows.
On the topic of horizontal and democratic structures, I would like to discuss their benefits in terms of the following:
Replaceability
We don’t want our organizing to depend on any person or small group of people. Our group’s work should be able to go on if any one person has a family emergency or medical emergency, or if they simply need to take a break. In a worst-case scenario, somebody might turn out to be an asshole, and the organization doesn’t want to associate with them anymore. This is clearly a problem if the organization depends on them for practical functions. Another sort of worst-case scenario is if someone in the organization gets imprisoned, incapacitated, or murdered by the state. This is already bad, and it would be even worse if the organization practically depended on that person.
What this means is that we should emphasize things like the rotation of meeting facilitation to give everyone experience; group learning; internal and external training for useful skills like graphics and logistical work; and sharing access to resources, information sources, & social connections when it is safe to do so.
Effective Decision Making
(Informed by Hélène Landemore’s work in ‘Democratic Reason’ on what qualities about democracy makes it epistemically effective.)
Horizontal, democratic organizing is also an effective way of making decisions. Each person will have theoretical blindspots, or lack factual knowledge about politicians, or other bits of information. If we have more perspectives, and deliberate over the solutions with more people, we will have more chances to fill in each others’ blindspots. This makes a largely horizontal, democratic decision-making group better than a small group of decisionmakers.
We all agree about the political goals of this group, and we all want to see our political goals succeed. We can recognize that even when we initially disagree about specific strategies and tactics, it’s hopefully going to be a productive and helpful form of disagreement.
Making Explicit the Unsaid Norms & Structures
(Informed by Jo Freeman’s essay, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’.)
Sometimes, activists try to avoid structures in organizing because it’s too reminiscent of the hierarchies that we’re trying to abolish. This is a good concern to have, but we need to be careful not to let hierarchies and decision-making processes sneak in through the backdoor of unstated norms. When that happens, we are reproducing those hierarchies—all the while that everyone is saying that we don’t want hierarchies.
This means that we can end up with an informal structure which biases in favor of the decisions of older members and louder members. It affects who sets the agenda for meetings, how we decide what to do, who feels comfortable proposing suggestions, etc. The solution is not to make an explicit hierarchy; it is to be intentional and explicit about designing our horizontal, democratic structure to avoid these problems.
Broad Movement Building
If we want to bring in more people to build political pressure, can’t merely mobilize people, we primarily need to get people involved in the organizing process. Then, they can reach out to more people that they know, spreading the arguments for defunding and abolition organically and socially. (This will be much easier to do when Covid is gone, and we can talk to people face-to face.)
There is a danger of making backroom deals with politicians. It might work for a policy or two, but we cannot continually rely on the good will of politicians. What is won in backroom deals can be lost in future backroom deals—and capitalists have a lot of power in the backrooms. What we have as community organizers is the ability to build a mass movement with real bargaining power, and this is what can create lasting changes against elite actors.
Horizontal (but structured) decision making and organizing is suited for broad movement building. It includes more people; it increases the welcomingness of the group; it strengthens internal solidarity; it helps people discover what is important to them about the movement; and it increases people’s motivation, because they see that they aren’t merely laboring for the decisions of a small elite group of activists. People are drawn to the movement because they can see in our structure that it represents the values of a more democratic world—a world that we would all fight and organize to achieve. People learn the value of democracy by doing it, and our organizations should be places for that.
“I would not be a Moses to lead you into the Promised Land, because if I could lead you into it, someone else could lead you out of it.”
— Eugene V. Debs
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In summary, horizontal and democratic organizing is useful to us because it means our success is not dependent on any small set of people; and because while making our decisions, people are able to fill in each other’s blindspots. It is also useful because these values and practices make our organizing more effective at building a mass movement. And as a final bit of necessary nuance, we need to be explicit in exactly how we are ‘horizontal’ and ‘democratic’, lest we allow hierarchies and elite decisionmaking to become re-established though unstated norms. This explicitness can also help prevent burnout and the other problems I discussed in my post about the Non-Hierarchy Trap (which I might now prefer to call the Structurelessness Trap).