Organising to change the world

In his Guardian article Adam Curtis raises the question of organisational structures. In regard to Uncut he explains:
"What you were seeing in that interchange was the expression of a very powerful ideology of our time. It is the idea of the "self-organising network". It says that human beings can organise themselves into systems where they are linked, but where there is no hierarchy, no leaders and no control. It is not the old form of collective action that the left once believed in, where people subsumed themselves into the greater force of the movement. Instead all the individuals in the self-organising network can do whatever they want as creative, autonomous, self-expressive entities, yet somehow, through feedback between all the individuals in the system, a kind of order emerges. At its heart it says that you can organise human beings without the exercise of power by leaders."

He goes on to compare the phenonomen with the hippie commune movement of the 60s:
"In many communes across America in the late 1960s house meetings became vicious bullying sessions where the strong preyed mercilessly on the weak, and nobody was allowed to voice any objections. The rules of the self-organising system said that no coalitions or alliances were allowed because that was politics – and politics was bad. If you talk today to ex-commune members they tell horrific stories of coercion, violent intimidation and sexual oppression within these utopian communities, while the other commune members stood mutely watching, unable under the rules of the system to do anything to stop it. Again, the central weakness of the self-organising system was dramatically demonstrated. Whether it was used for conservative or radical ends, it could not cope with power, which is one of the central dynamic forces in human society."

Curtis concludes:
"What the anti-cuts movement has done without realising is adopt an idea of how to order the world without hierarchies, a machine theory that leads to a static managerialism. It may be very good for organising creative and self-expressive demonstrations, but it will never change the world."

The Socialist Party is in existence to change the world and the importance of the means and methods of organising to achieve this objective is at its core. Uncut is of course no new manifestation of a style of organising.

In 2000 we had this -
"Reclaim the Streets is non-hierarchical, spontaneous and self-organised. We have no leaders, no committee, no board of directors, no spokespeople. There is no centralised unit for decision-making, strategic planning and production of ideology. There is no membership and no formalised commitment. There is no master-plan, and no predefined agenda. The direct action movement is an organic network of people taking responsibility for their own lives, expressed through local interventions, chaotic global connections and friendships. Reclaim the Streets spontaneously and temporarily emerges from a shared dissatisfaction with the way our lives are run for us, with the rat-race and a society based on exclusion and enclosure, profit and control. As a dis-organisation, RTS is mobile and furtive. It is there when people decide to intervene in public spaces, evoking the utopia of a better society."

Similar to Uncut, RTS were advocating spontaneous action of small groups acting on their own initiative without being answerable to anybody. The Socialist Party don't have any objection to the idea that any action that any group of people take to try to improve their lot should be under their direct control. It is the form of organisation we have always urged worker to adopt for waging the struggle against employers for better wages and working conditions—only we call it "democratic self-organisation" and extend it to embrace organisation on the political field to win control of the state with a view to dismantling it.

However when those who participate in Uncut use the word "self-organisation" they don't mean the same thing as people like us, namely, structured, democratic organisation, certainly without leaders, but not without some central decision-making unit such as a conference of mandated delegates nor without elected committees to plan and co-ordinate particular spheres of activity. The word "democratic" did not occur in the Curtis quote by the Uncut non-spokesperson and reflects the fact that Uncut rejects the idea of democratic control because this involves formal rules and permanent structures which they will see as bureaucratic restraints on the freedom of autonomous activists to act as they please.

This is the "ideology of structurelessness" described by the American feminist, Jo Freeman in her essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Like the 60s communes, cited by Curtis, the women's liberation movement of that time the same emphasis was placed "on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main focus of the movement" yet Freeman showed that there was in fact no such thing as a structureless group, only formally and informally structured groups. She writes:
"An unstructured group always has an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites...When informal elites are combined with a myth of structurelessness, there can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power. It becomes capricious...Informal structures have no obligation to be responsible to the group at large. Their power was not given to them; it cannot be taken away. Their influence is not based on what they do for the group; therefore they cannot be directly influenced by the group."

Lucy Annson of Uncut sees nothing wrong with some informal group of individuals taking the initiative, it being up to others to decide whether or not to go along with it. The latter seem suspiciously like followers to us. She may indeed argue that it was self-organised by empowered individuals in that there was no committee and no centralised decision-making, but there was some process by which decisions are made. There must be individuals or a group of individuals who did make these decisions, but as there is no formal structure they are in practice answerable to no one. They will be an unaccountable, self-appointed group of activists. Whoever they are, they will be, as Freeman pointed out, an informal elite, de facto leaders making decisions. In preaching that we don't need formal decision-making rules and structures those in Uncut are propagating a dangerous illusion, dangerous because it opens the door to groups of discontented people being manipulated by some self-appointed and non-accountable elite or vanguard. We insist that, on the contrary, "self-organisation" is only possible as democratic self-organisation, involving formal rules and structures, precisely to prevent the emergence of unaccountable elites. We are talking about structures that place decision-making power in the hands of the group as a whole, along the lines of the seven "principles of democratic structuring" listed by Freeman:

1.Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures.
2. Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to all those who selected them.
3. Distribution of authority among as many people as reasonably possible.
4. Rotation of tasks among individuals.
5. Allocation of tasks along rational criteria.
6. Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible.
7. Equal access to resources needed by the group.

The socialist justification for accepting majority decision-making is that people are not isolated individuals but only exist in and through society, and that when there is a genuine community (either society as a whole or some collectivity within society) the best method of deciding what it should do, on matters of common interest to it as a community, is by a vote of its members after a full and free discussion. Of course the field of community activity has its limits and some decisions should be left to the individual (what to wear and eat, for instance), but we are talking about matters which concern the community as a community with a common interest.

The SPGB shares Adam Curtis doubts about Uncut but claim for ourselves a solution. A supposedly spontaneous, unorganised anti-capitalist revolution such as advocated by Uncut would only end in disaster out of which either the present rulers would succeed in reasserting their control or a new set of rulers would profit from the chaos to seize power. If we are going to get rid of capitalism the majority is going to have to organise itself to do so—in a permanent organisation with a democratic structure. The very nature of socialism is one of a society of voluntary cooperation and democratic participation. People cannot be led into socialism or coerced into it. They cannot be forced into cooperating and participating; this is something they must want to do for themselves and which they must decide to do of their own accord. This is the basic principle that underlines the whole political activity of the Socialist Party. It commits us to opposing the whole concept of leadership, not just to get socialism but also for the everyday struggle to survive under capitalism. Democracy and majority decision-making must be the basic principle of both the movement to establish socialism and of socialist society itself, it can only come into being and work with the conscious consent and participation of the majority.