"Equality facilitates the exercise of power." - Mirabeau to Louis XVI, during the French Revolution
There is no escape from organization and structure. We may try to create groups without structure, in which everyone is equal: but the result is the opposite. Structure arises spontaneously as a few within the group accumulate influence and power - only without formal organizational structures, their power can be hard to see and harder to challenge. The feminist Jo Freeman ("Joreen") explains this in her famous essay, The Tyranny of Structurelessness.
We often have the idea that eliminating hierarchy frees us. This is a useful story for those who dismantle hierarchy, whether they be tech companies or activist groups. But it is often not the case. In reality, hierarchies diffuse power, delegating it to branches and closer to the people at the bottom. That may be helpful, as when one has access to a local elected representative, or it can be tyrannical, as in Southern states in the U.S. during the Civil Rights struggle. But as Mirabeau told the King, eliminating hierarchy increases the power of the centre over everyone. Equality may not be what it seems.
This episode lays the groundwork for next week's episode, Fanaticism Without Faith: The Internet and the French Revolution, when I talk about how a few men were able to take control of France while appearing to do the will of the people.
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Good evening. This is
Radio Free Beszel.
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I am Alphonse. Tonight:
hierarchy versus
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centralization. In the
first year of the
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French Revolution, one
of the revolutionaries
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wrote secretly to the king,
and told him that
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the revolution had strengthened
the monarchy
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more than years of absolutism
could. He explained
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that by wiping away the
aristocracy and many
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of the feudal structures
and local governments
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and assemblies, that it
had centralized power.
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He said, and I quote,
"Equality
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facilitates the exercise
of power."
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It is often said that hierarchy
is centralization,
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as though the two were the
same. But often in fact
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they are not. Often
these two things
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tend to be opposites
from one another.
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Consider a firm before
the era of cheap
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telecommunications. You're
a company operating
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across the United States.
with a headquarters,
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say, in New York City, and
you have operations
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in states around the country.
Well, you're
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going to have a hierarchy.
You're going to
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have regional heads in places
like Ohio perhaps
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or California. And those
heads have the ability
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to make decisions on their
own because they can't
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always refer back to
headquarters. And when you
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give them instructions
they have to interpret
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them on the ground according
to local conditions.
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But consider afterwards,
when that hierarchy
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is removed as many management
positions were
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removed in the 1980s
and the 1990s, and
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instead of having layers
of management
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instructions came directly
from headquarters,
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instructing the workers
what to do.
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In this case you have
uniformity. There's the
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same thing done across
the country. Commands
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are direct. There's no
possibility of local
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mediation or interpretation.
Even if you're
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a worker and you want to
change something, whom
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do you talk to? Your local
manager doesn't exist,
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and is the head of the company
going to listen
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to you? Consider the situation
of Amazon today
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where operations are uniform
and centralized to
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the point where workers
are actually monitored
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and even fired by artificial
intelligences.
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Hierarchy, in other words,
introduces the
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possibility that the layers
of the hierarchy will
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interpret and change the
commands from the top.
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I think the mistake
we make is because
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when we imagine eliminating
hierarchy
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we imagine eliminating control
altogether. But if
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you have an organization
that is pursuing goals,
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that needs coordination among
the people working
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in it. That coordination
has to be organized
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somehow. Hierarchy is one
way. Central control
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is another - and it's not
necessarily better,
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but then it's not necessarily
worse either.
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I'm not really making a
moral argument here.
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I mean, consider the Civil
Rights movement in
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the United States where
you had local police
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chiefs and local governors
in the south who were
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racist. And the Civil Rights
movement therefore
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appealed to the center.
They appealed to
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the federal government
to step in and ensure
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the constitutional rights
of black people. And
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this was hardly a new
phenomenon. For centuries
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peasants appealed to the
king over the heads
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of the nobility who were
oppressing them.
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But the real point
here is that you
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can't really eliminate
structure.
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If you remove it in one form,
it tends to pop up in another.
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There's a famous paper
from the early 1970s
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by a feminist who went
by the name of Joreen,
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titled "The Tyranny of
Structurelessness."
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I highly recommend looking
it up and reading
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it on the Internet. She
had experience with
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feminist activist organizations
in the 60s and
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the early 1970s. And what
she said is that most of
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these organizations attempted
to be egalitarian.
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Instead of having a leadership
hierarchy,
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they allowed everybody
to participate
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as equals - at least in
principle. That was the
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formal structure, but informally
what happened
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was that leadership arose
anyway. There were
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individuals with more
influence, groups and
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cliques within the organizations
that ended up
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leading them the way they
wanted them to go.
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But now the hierarchy
the structure
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was informal instead
of formal,
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and this meant the other
people, if they
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weren't happy with what
was happening,
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they couldn't necessarily
see how it was
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happening. There was
a smoke screen - the
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myth that there was equality,
that there
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was no structure. And
even if they could
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see what was happening,
there was no mechanism
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for pointing to it and trying
to make changes.
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She compared, in fact,
the lack of hierarchy
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in activist organizations
to the idea of
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laissez-faire economics
- the idea that the
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market if left to itself
will produce equal or
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at least fair results. But
that's not true. There
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have been experiments since
then with markets,
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models in fact, which simulated
a market, in
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which all participants
were initially equal.
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They had the same resources,
and all could
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engage freely in trades.
And the idea of
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trades in a market is
that if two parties
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engage in a trade, each
must benefit somehow.
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And yet as this simulation
iterated, inequality
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increased until eventually
all nearly all the
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wealth was concentrated
in the hands of one
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simulated participant. This
is a fairly general
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pattern. Very often we have
structures that appear
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to be equal, and in fact
in some sense are equal,
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but that produce very unequal
outcomes. This is
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true of the Internet as well.
In the early years,
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in the 1990s in the early
2000s, it was believed
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that the Internet was incredibly
egalitarian,
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because after all anybody
could create a
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website and anybody could
link to other sites.
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But in fact the power
in the Internet
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has become concentrated
in the hands
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of companies like Google
and Facebook. And
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this isn't surprising.
I would even suggest
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that the easier it is to
make links, the easier
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the communication, the
more uniformity and
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equality there is,
the easier it is
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for a hierarchy of this
kind to emerge.
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The question then isn't so
much whether you have
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leaders or elites or people
with more influence,
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but who they are and
how you choose them.
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The same pattern that
Joreen described
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in the 1970s actually
did take place during
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the French Revolution
Augustin Cochin,
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writing in the early 20th
century, describes what
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happened with the philosophical
societies - talk
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shops that had existed
for decades before the
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revolution. Now like modern
activist groups these
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philosophical societies operated
on the principle
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that everybody was equal,
everybody participated
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everybody got to vote.
But that's not what
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happened in practice -
because, Cochin says,
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before each formal meeting
of the society there
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was an informal meeting
where the most active,
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most enthusiastic core got
together, discussed
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the issues and decided what
their position was,
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and then contacted other
people in the
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group and put pressure
on them to go along.
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And then when the group
met it appeared as if
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the consensus arose organically
that the people
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in the group already wanted
the outcome that
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the secret elite had decided
on ahead of time.
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And it would often arise
without their action.
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And when this same activity,
this same model of
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governance, was applied
at the level of the
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entire country of France,
the result was,
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Cochin says, the revolutionary
terror. Now as I
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say, I'm not making a moral
argument about when
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hierarchy is beneficial or
when it is not. What I
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am saying is that the choice
you have is whether
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you choose your structure
of your organization
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or your society, or whether
it's chosen for you
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in ways that you may not
understand and may not
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have influence in. It might
be good sometimes
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to choose less structure
and less hierarchy;
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it might be good other
times to choose more.
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But the idea that we
can just avoid the
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choice altogether, that
we can just leave
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it up to what happens
spontaneously, will
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often produce outcomes
that we don't like.
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This is Alphonse for Radio
Free Beszel, www.beszel.ca.
8:52
Good night.