this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
34 points (100.0% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
1023 readers
48 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Read Tryanny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman
It is all about the exact phenomenon you describe, written by an anarchist
With pleasure! Thanks, comrade. :)
The absence of hierarchy does not mean the absence of structure. Conceptually, her work is not very rigorous. This is very common among American theorists who claim to be left-wing. Moreover, her theory seems to be seriously challenged if we are to believe the current social protest movements in Europe, in the dawn of surveillance capitalism, which, on the contrary, seems to be much more effective when they are spontaneous, decentralized, and horizontal (the french yellow vests, for example, a movement without structure which has freaked out the power in place like never before since perhaps the events of May 1968)
What has yellow vests accomplished through their spontaneous movement? I'm not French and haven't heard of anything coming out of those protests.
Either way, I'm sure dozens of organizations with hierarchy were involved in those protests, and that there were centralized, planned aspects within the movement just as there were spontaneous decentralized aspects