Leaderless - not quite

From a Guardian report on Occupy Wall St

"...The direct action committee lies at the heart of this success. Numbering anywhere between 35 and 50 activists, the committee is "empowered by the general assembly" to plan action. The committee includes campaigners, community activists and those with relevant organisational skills, some of whom live in collectives and already base their lives around a communal system. At the meeting in the park earlier this week, there were 12 of them, one sprawled on his front, taking minutes to feed back to the general assembly. The subjects under discussion included security, march procedure, how to deal with "autonomous" actions and how to avoid conflict with police. Members stress they plan only legal actions, but would not act against unlawful protest by individuals.

Although each course of action is taken semi-collectively, there are key things that only a handful of people know, or are supposed to know, said Mia. She said the decision to march on the bridge had been taken a week before the event, but in the end, it became an open secret. "We wanted to keep the location under wraps," she said. "We failed at Brooklyn bridge, but we had a contingency plan, which only six of us knew about."

The committee appoints several "pacekeepers" for every march, who make sure it doesn't go too fast or too slow, and it is they who decide on the direction. There are also informal "scouts", who keep an eye on progress, and "runners" who run back and forth between the various organisers telling them of any problems arising. One of the problems of the Brooklyn bridge march, they decided, was that warnings from pace-makers at the front about the threat of arrest if protesters moved onto roadway were not communicated to those further back. So the committee agreed to put in place a more formal system of scouts, runners and pace-keepers for the next march... "

SOYMB cautions participants in Occupy Wall St to be aware of the possible pit-falls of such a structure of organising. Direct-action is catch-phrase but it means different things to different people. It is meant to convey the idea that any action that any group of people take to try to improve their lot should be under their direct control. Who can have any objection to this idea? It's the form of organisation we have always urged workers to adopt for waging the struggle against employers for better wages and working conditions— only we in the World Socialist Movement tend to call it "democratic self-organisation". For others though "direct action" means the supposedly spontaneous action of small groups acting on their own initiative without being answerable to anybody "autonomous actions" as they are described above. When we use the word "self-organisation" we mean, 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. Yet many in the Occupy Wall St. movement 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" analysised by the American feminist, Jo Freeman, in 1970 in her essay on The Tyranny of Structurelessness. At that time in the womens movement the same emphasis was placed "on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main focus of the movement" as Occupy Wall St does today. Freeman showed that there was in fact no such thing as a structureless group, only formally and informally structured groups:
"Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature coming together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure itself in some fashion...the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can easily be established because the idea of structurelessness does not prevent the formation of informal structures, but only formal ones...Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power...For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit...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..."

This poses some embarrassing questions for Occupy Wall St. From the Guardian report we clearly see that there exists a group of individuals who make decisions, but as there is no formal structure they are in practice answerable to no one other than the claim that they are "empowered by the general assembly" (how so, is not described). They are de facto an unaccountable, self-appointed group of activists.

In advocating that we don't need formal decision-making rules and structures Occupy Wall St are at risk of fostering a perilous illusion, perilous because it can permit people to being manipulated by some self-appointed 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. Of course, we're not talking about the sort of structures practised by Leninist-type organisations, where the rules and structures are designed to enshrine control by a self-perpetuating leadership. 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 Jo 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.

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.

However, it is refreshing to hear from some in Occupy Wall St that it does go beyond the tokenism of the demonstration march.
"...Even those within the group say that Occupy Wall Street is a unique protest. Anthony Yenafuck, 28, a freelance graphic designer, from Idaho, said: "This movement doesn't look like anything I've ever seen. Most demos or actions are like: 'We're going to show up at this march, put out a press release', and then that's it." ..."
We witnessed it in 2003 when millions marched against the approaching Iraq War - for a single day. How different the outcome could have been if such mass protests had been repeated day after day.

What are you fighting for - what have you got ?
"...One of the most frequent questions asked of the protesters is about their demands, about what they want. However, what unites them is more often what they don't want: their rejection of what they say is a corrupt political and financial system which rewards the rich and neglects the needy. One of the key goals, the protesters say, is building a new system. "People ask about our demands, but we are not saying: 'We're powerless, we want to ask'. If anything, we are going to list our goals as we are building them," said Cowan. "It is about the world we want to see, a world we are happy to live in where we feel respected and our voices are heard and respected. It allows for continual evolution. We are building the community we want to live in and we're doing it in public." ..."

Occupy Wall St views itself not as a formal organisation but a movement that aims to support and strengthen the many growing grassroots struggles across the globe. Unfortunately, in practice, all groups like Occupy Wall St are sadly more than likely to fail to achieve their aims because those aims are entirely negative. They say they oppose corporatism, that they want to get rid of it, but they have nothing fundamentally different to put in its place. So they end up at best with a modified version of the system they "oppose". At worst, the time and energy wasted enables those who run capitalism to brush aside, to patronise, and even laugh at the protestors via Fox television. For a revolution to be any good, we have to be FOR something, besides being AGAINST capitalism.

Anyone can be against capitalism. But some people are just against BIG capitalism (the banks and multi-nationals) as if somehow "small'" national capitalism is a completely different thing, and perfectly nice. It's not. They're the same. Capitalism is commodity production for sale on a market. It is wage slavery. Concentrating on "nasty" finance-capital and the wheelin'-dealin' stock-market gambling of Wall St. and defining "capitalism" in those terms can only end up as a diversion from the goal of abolishing the capitalist system. Capitalism is not a place ("financial centres") or a thing ("corporations"), it is a social relationship dependent upon wage labour and commodity exchange where profit is derived from capital's theft of unpaid labour. The socialist case against capitalism is not dependent on capitalism being in a recession. Even in times of “prosperity” capitalism does not, and cannot serve the interests of the majority who are obliged to sell themselves for a wage or a salary to get a living. Unemployment may be lower and real wages may be rising slowly, but the basic fact of profits being derived from the unpaid labour of those who work remains. And profit-seeking dominates decisions about what, where and how to produce. Priorities are distorted as profits always come before meeting needs. The real power of capital is right here in our everyday live, we re-create its power every day because capital is not a thing but a social relation between people mediated by things. Until, of course, we decide as a majority to take the political action necessary to change our lives.

It's not enough to be "anti-capitalist". We have to have a clear idea of where we want to go.