Like I think a central state is needed for the first phase of the revolution, but the more brutal aspects is something I just don't want to do, even if I understand why they did them?
Like I think a central state is needed for the first phase of the revolution, but the more brutal aspects is something I just don't want to do, even if I understand why they did them?
My experience at OWS imbued me with the feeling that full horizontalism is not a practical mode of organizing a campaign against forces which are as organized and entrenched as the bourgeoisie of the imperial core. Not to say that a more anarchist method of organizing is useless. In fact, we had at least a dozen separate "committees" which operated in practice as autonomous affinity groups, and these committees did a tremendous job providing meals, taking care of sanitation, making sure everyone had dry clothing, directing marches, etc.
There were several tasks where autonomy and a lack of hierarchy posed challenges however. We had an autonomous group running security, but still experienced many cases of personal property theft, as well as a handful of cases of abuse. We had no unified media strategy and the reactionary press was able to interview hundreds of people who were either unprepared or disingenuous. We were unable to establish a liaison with anyone in the municipal government.
More importantly, we were unable to make any longer term strategic plans, organize anything which required an element of secrecy or surprise, or establish delegates or designated points of contact between the dozens of protest encampments established across the country.
The strictly horizontal nature of the movement had its upsides and downsides. It allowed the movement to swell extremely quickly, but the more the movement swole, the less agile and focused the movement became. Individuals were able to respond to individual situations rapidly, but the movement was completely incapable of making decisions, producing an official line, or reacting to shifting media narratives with anything approaching the urgency which was necessary. As an alternative to working out our internal contradictions, we left these issues unaddressed.
I think personally, I have ended up in the ML camp for a handful of reasons. I think it is important for a movement's leadership to be grounded in theoretical principles (informed by the material conditions, not dogma), while at the same time it is unreasonable to expect the entire proletariat to "read theory." I think it is important to have people designated as leaders, not for the sake of power, but for the sake of having a designated source of truth and direction instead of having hundreds of autonomous factions paving a course forward without any coordination. I think it is important to be able to establish a cadre which can plan more legally perilous forms of direct action without exposing them to the risks which come with planning such actions in the open.
Anarchists are generally skeptical of anything which involves hierarchy, let alone the establishment of new forms of hierarchy. They are also generally skeptical of any group of influential people meeting in secret to conspire among themselves. They should be. The more lines of separation there are from a movement's leaders and the masses, the farther away they are positioned from the front lines, the less responsive they will be. In its worst case you end up with the historical cliche of liberals arguing in a room about the contours of their new shiny constitution while the proletariat bleeds at the barricades. But I don't think there is a way to avoid building some degree of leadership and command structures entirely.
I agree with everything you've said about horizontalist organizing and have experienced the same both from occupy and CHAZ/CHOP. However I just don't believe that there's an alternative for any sort of popular insurrection type movement.
One of the key successes of Lenin was that they had among other socialist parties, a political party that was already a part of of the legislature that also happened to have a paramilitary wing. I highly doubt every action these paramilitary wings took were done by members of the centralist party or even really guided by them, chaotic protests and uprising will always have a horizontalist aspect to them by virtue of their size. Especially in contemporary western nation's, leadership is earned not given just because you call yourself a leader.
Overall, I think you need officials with political legitimacy who have governed some set of community organization for a long time to have ties to democratic centralist principals. But without that initial set of legitimacy, it very quickly ends up being viewed by outsiders as being nothing other than a LARP. At the CHAZ I saw people saying they made decisions by democratic centralism and literally no one gave a shit, but when Sawant and other established community leaders who are a part of democratic centralist organizations spoke, the movement very quickly picked up what they were offering as a reasonable strategy for things.
The point here is, if you're an ML/Trot and are a part of an ML/Trot party, your first goal absolutely needs to be establishing substantial amounts of respect and legitimacy within your community. Should you have that, you'd be incredibly successfully, but none of the existing ML organizations within the US have anywhere close to that level of legitimacy that they can command a movement predominantly driven by collective anger in general of the state of the world. Current elected democratic socialists also need to seriously consider abandoning their horizontalist approach and build a centralist organization to more effectively strategize.
I kind of don't understand why contemporary anarchists have supplanted federalist principles with horizontal absolutism.
I think it's partly the very individualist aesthetic that has permeated anarchisms since, like the 90s onward. There's an increasingly egoist stance of fetishizing ones immediate lived bubble of experience, with the trade-off of not thinking and organizing on bigger scales.
I kind of wonder if it's an internet thing. People on the internet love not reading and equally love building their beliefs around snappy platitudes. Anarchism means more than just "abolish hierarchies" but the internet is full of baby Anarchists who seem to stop there.
You seem to have a lot of experience with this, so correct me if I'm way off base, but it sounds like there needs to be a lot more discussion and work put into analyzing organizational structures to determine what is effective and what isn't, while also following ethical guidelines as much as possible to avoid unnecessary/unjust hierarchies and maintain democratic decision making? Seems to me like this is possible, but would require better knowledge of how to operate within those organizational structures, and I don't really see that being discussed much in online leftist spaces. Technology could also help, with things like DAOs serving as an organizational backbone that is less reliant on centralized authority.
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Reminds me of Valve Software and how they're finding that their flat organization style is really hurting them even though informal structure has started to develop anyways. It's purged any notion I had that such a pure organizational style can work, at least in their context.
Anyway, you have some good thoughts here. You're essentially restating what Lenin said regarding the believe in the need for a vanguard party or organization (well duh, he said he was an ML). Also, just thinking about organizational behavior and structures, the Marine Corps always put out this narrative that they were at the same time a top down command structure, but one that was proud that the small unit leadership could make decisions without the need from high level command (yeah yeah, imperialist foot solder scum, and so on and so on).