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Title: Making anarchist organisations work ā Dunbarās number, administration and care Author: Andrew Flood Date: March 5, 2015 Language: en Topics: anarchist organization, self-organization Source: https://anarchism.pageabode.com/making-anarchist-organisations-work-dunbars-number-administration-and-care/
and care
There is a strong tendency, almost a rule, that anarchist groups tend to
fall apart once they have more than 20ā30 members in any city or 50 to
60 overall. Or at the very least an organisation that once felt like it
worked very well becomes one that feels sluggish and starts requiring
too much effort to achieve limited results in the longer term. There are
exceptions which mean this is not inevitable but why does this happen
and more importantly how can we avoid it in our organising?
The cause may be simply a limitation of our brains and in particular the
number of complex inter relationships between people we can track. Or,
more correctly, a failure to acknowledge that this limit means that
informality will fail and formal administration is more and more
necessary as group size rises. A lesson that is not just relevent to
anarchist but to all attempts at horizontal organisation.
For a group to work well at an informal level everyone needs to get on
and to understand how they relate to everyone else in the group and how
those people relate to each other. This is easy enough for 2 or 3 people
but impossibly difficult for 200. The complexity rises much faster than
the number of people in the group as I illustrate below (or skip this
section but watch the video at the end of it).
A-B
If there are two people A and B then each only needs to track one
relationship, the one between them.
A-B
A-B-C
When a third person C arrives then A not only has a relationship with B
to understand and a relationship with C to understand but also needs to
understands the relationship between C and B and how BC as a group
rather than two individuals relates to them. As anyone who has shared a
house will know a relationship with a couple is going to have
complexities beyond the sum of the relationships with both individuals.
A-B
A-C
B-C
A-BC
Aidan, one of the pre publication readers of this piece, told me this
section reminded him of some TV show I saw years ago about psychology
that talked about Shakespeareās Othello, and how at a certain point in
writing Shakespeare needed to understand the audienceās perception of
Iagoās perception of Othelloās perception of Iagoāās perception of
Desdemondaās perception of Othello. Thatās a good illustration of how
complex thing can become even when you are only dealing with the
audience member and 3 characters and of course the tragic results of
getting it wrong.
A-B-C-D
The arrival of a 4^(th) person D adds to the complexity as we now have
A-B
A-C
A-D
B-C
B-D
C-D
and also
A with BC
A with BD
B with CD
A with BCD
A-B-C-D-E
A-B
A-C
A-D
A-E
B-C
B-D
B-E
C-D
C-E
D-E
and also
A with BC
A with BD
A with BE
B with CD
B with DE
C with DE
A with BCD
A with BCE
B with CDE
A with BCDE
And I may have missed a couple with that last one, but tracking
relationships between 5 people has already become hard enough to simply
list the possibilities. The number of relationships to track increases
much much faster than the number of people involved. Pretty quickly you
get to very big numbers indeed. Itās an exponential relationship where
according to Reedās Law if the number of participants are N the number
of subgroups is 2^N ā N ā 1. For a group of 20 that is already 1,048,555
relationships to track.
Whatās above is a crude illustrative sketch but it turns out there has
been scientific study of this complexity. In particular a British
anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist who is a specialist in
primate behaviour called Robin Dunbar has written a good deal about
this. As often happens with science the number he suggests is the
maximum size for a group has come to be referred to as Dunbarās number.
A lot of recent interest in Dunbarās number comes about because of
social networking. While Iāve written in the past about the benefits for
organising of the Network effect where as the network becomes larger the
benefit of network becomes larger still, Dunbarās number represents the
cost side of that benefit. The ātransaction costā of communication rises
with the number of people.
The odds are the number of Facebook friends you have is some multiple of
Dunbarās number unless you are one of those people that do an annual
cull. In which case it might well come close to defining the size of
your Dunbar group. Otherwise perhaps the whole reason we spend so much
time staring at Facebook is in part down to the demands placed by trying
to maintain such large Dunbar groups. But that is for another
discussion.
Dunbarās number is defined as the suggested maximum cognitive limit to
the number of people we can maintain stable social relationships with.
That is relationships in which we know not only who each person is but
also how each person in a group relates to every other person in that
group. The idea that there is a maximum limit is an important one for
anarchist organising because it marks the line where informal
organisation will certainly fail and so where we will need formal
organisations or the much dreaded ābureaucracyā.
Iām generally wary of using concepts from evolutionary psychology
because they tend towards biological determinism and from there to the
acceptance of soft racism, sexism etc as part of some natural order. But
here we are on safe enough ground as Robin Dunbar calculated that the
maximum group size for humans would be 148. That some of us live in
cities of 10 million plus and nations over 300 million shows that humans
have long ago found ways to overcome the limitations of our brain size
in building stable social relationships. If we hadnāt you wouldnāt be
reading this on a technology that required the cooperation of tens of
millions of people to function.
Dunbar actually didnāt take group-to-one relationships into account so
his complexity grows considerable more slowly that the sketch I opened
with. But Iām not so much interested in the precise details as the idea
that the number of people with whom we can have strong relationships is
limited and itās very very much harder to maintain strong relationships
as group size increases. If that limit is 50 or 150 or 300 isnāt the
important thing, just that there is a limit and in terms of the lives we
live itās actually quite small.
Dunbar calculated that limit at 148 (normally rounded to 150 for
discussion purposes) but argued that this is very much an upper limit.
Primates maintain relationships through āsocial groomingā, in human
society this often revolves around eating together, drinking together
and other social rituals. All that takes up a lot of time. Dunbar
calculated that to actually maintain a group size of 150 would require a
lot of time devoted to such grooming, in fact about 42% of group time.
So numbers that large are only found when there was intense survival
pressure for people to stick together in large groups.
Dunbar suggested that we work best in small groups of 5 and that for
each time you multiply that group size by 3 you reduce the strength of
the relationships between people.
[]
At the level of the individual we can see that in most circumstances in
modern society we are in contact with very much more than 150 people.
When you catch a plane at an airport you are seeing far more people in
that space of time than any human would have seen in their entire
lifetime for almost all the time humans have been on the planet. Itās
only in the last 15,000 years that we have started to congregate in
larger numbers although before that date there may have been occasional
super gatherings of multiple very much smaller groups ā a bit like a
music festival.
Iām going to use the concept of a āDunbar groupā in most of the rest of
this piece to suggest the group of people we construct with whom we seek
to maintain stable social relationships. That is the group of people
where we maintain ārelationships in which we know who each person is but
also how each person in a group relates to every other person.ā Of
course we probably donāt think of it that way, rather we have those
lists of people we might ask to a party we were holding or that we go
for a pint after work with or, importantly for this essay, whom we try
to do intense ongoing political activity with. We need to know not only
how they get on with us but also how they get on with each other.
Most of us donāt consciously add and subtract people from that group but
if we look back over a few years its easy to identify people we have in
fact added and others we have mostly lost contact with. Dunbarās number
was based on the relations in a single group where everyone knew each
other, thatās an assumption that seldom exists in modern life where
instead each of us has relationships with multiple groups but those
groups may have little or a lot of contact with each other. The point
again being not to get hung up on the exact number but to understand
that limits exist.
In physical space city dwellers are continually not putting people into
their individual Dunbar group. I stop off on my way to work at a Lidl
every Monday morning, there is only ever one checkout in operation and
90% of the time over the last two years the same woman is working it.
We say āHiā in recognition but I know nothing about her at all, Iāve
certainly no idea how she relates to the hundreds or thousands of other
customers who must come in regularly and Iāve no relationship with any
of them. If management told her to build a personal relationship with
her customers that would be impossible. That we know nothing about each
other is not because either of us is a bad, uncaring person but because
itās impossible to communicate at that level with everyone most people
meet in their day to day lives in a city.
Politicians employ people whose sole job it is to track who they are
going to be meeting and remind them of their name and some basic facts
about them. Iāve talked to union organisers who try to retain one key
fact about each member they are trying to organise, they try to identify
and remember what that personās primary issue is. Try, in other words,
to create a false sense of having that person in your Dunbar group
because they are then more likely to trust you.
Finally this tracking ability is a talent that some people are probably
going to be better at than others. Itās not unusual for the sort of
people who are attracted to small political groups to be quite
introspective. In terms of organisation that can shape the way the
organisation appears to outsiders and how easy it is to engage with.
There are movements related to anarchism that long for simpler, small
scale societies where everyone knows everyone else. Primitivists for
instance. They want to live in groups smaller than 150 because they want
the simplified social relations that come with small groups.
The idea of spending my entire life in a small community horrifies me.
Iāve visited enough small islands and isolated villages in my time to be
aware of the unpleasant side of living in a society where everyone knows
every aspect of everyone elseās business. Very often group cohesion is
maintained by rigorously policing the groupās defined boundaries against
outside influences.
On the other hand there is mainstream liberalism and its understanding
of the state. This insists that because of something like Dunbarās
number civilisation needs strong leaders and rigid rules at its centre
lest it fall apart in chaos. Itās likely that the state as we know it
came into being at the point where agricultural surplus and storage
meant that in terms of production it became possible to exceed Dunbarās
number on a permanent basis.
At first that was done through the application of force to make most of
the populationās wishes irrelevant to those who ruled. The only strong
relationship that was needed to maintain coherence in society was the
terror the ruled felt for the ruler. A top down structure of power where
the King had a āDunbar groupā of trusted generals and princes and each
of those in turn a Dunbar group of captains and lords. All the way down
to the village strongman who ruled over the serfs. That is basically the
structure of rule of a lot of old empires and, as many commentators have
pointed out, Dunbar sized groups are often as the size of military
formations.
For a fair chunk of human history a ruling elite built a mass society to
serve them through brute force along those lines. The awful methods of
executions used by the Romans to maintain slavery or the German Princes
to crush the Anabaptists were a way of imposing coherence on those mass
societies. There is nothing like witnessing a crucifixion or the
physical dismemberment of a living conscious person with hot tongs,
muscle by muscle, over hours to instruct the masses on the danger of
stepping out of line.
But again we escaped biological determinism or the insistence there once
was on an iron law that says mass societies must just be based on
brutality. Over the last 300 years the naked brute force societies of
slavery, feudalism and early capitalism have been replaced by
representative democracies where the appliance of naked force is a
secondary resort. In some cases, notably the USA, the application of
brute force, including execution, is still fairly routine in order to
keep the population in check. This tends to be a requirement of
societies where there is a huge division between the rich and the poor.
In others like Norway and even Ireland the application of state force
against the population is exceptional, the building of an apparent
consensus is far more fundamental to maintaining stability. The club
comes out when it is needed but most of the time its shadow is
sufficient.
There have been large scale experiments in systems of direct democracy
that have exceeded Dunbarās number by several magnitudes, the Zapatista
rebellion in Chiapas which is now over 20 years visible being a well
known example. Rural ommunities there typically number 4ā700. So we have
already proved that you can exceed the Dunbar limitation in a mass
society without recourse to brutality, that is of course essential for
the anarchist project. If it wasnāt possible than anarchism would be a
utopian dream.
When I first became an anarchist the first organisations I was involved
in were tiny. The Anarcho-Communist Group was five students in the same
college engaged in a militant period of students struggle. Four of the
five of us also travelled to London together to squat and organise
around the Poll Tax. We were from Ireland and we also took part in
various anti-imperialist solidarity demonstrations demanding the
withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland. We didnāt have much
in the way of formal ways of maintaining group stability but then we
were living in constant close proximity and facing hostile external
enemies so cohesion was easy to maintain. We were also at the group size
that Dunbar suggests would have the strongest relationships.
I next became a member of the Workers Solidarity Movement. But again
this was a very small group, 5 in Dublin and one in Cork that initally
grew to 10ā15 after we joined. Which is more or less the size of the
second strongest releationship group Dunbar suggests.. We spent a lot of
time socialising together, in Ireland āsocial groomingā operates around
pubs and parties. For the first time I was part of an anarchist group
that did have formal collective methods like minute taking and chairing
but we were a close knit bunch so these were add ons rather than
requirements.
Over the following 20 years the WSM grew, peaking at perhaps 65 formal
members so entering the weakest relationship group Dunbar suggests. It
hit problems that at the time were hard to understand. For instance
members would have fallings out that seemed to be based about
misunderstandings. Or some members would develop very strong grudges
against others, often based around the idea that the other person was
not pulling their weight. Sometimes I knew there was little accuracy to
those feelings, I remember in particular being at the receiving end of a
heated drunken rant about the supposed laziness of one member in
circumstances where I knew the actual problem was the ranter was simply
unaware of the activity the person they were ranting about was involved
with. But that sort of stuff bred demoralisation on the one hand and
undermined commitment on the other, over time it proved very corrosive
indeed.
Retrospectively I think the problem was that we had reached a size where
people were exceeding a Dunbarās number limitation. Being in an active
revolutionary organisation subject to times of considerable pressure
requires a lot of collective feeling and trust and the social grooming
of pints after a meeting in the pub is only sufficient for quite small
numbers.
People have families, flatmates, friends and colleagues who must absorb
a lot of their Dunbarās number. By the time we reached 30ā50 members we
had crossed that line and trust between everyone in the group was
probably impossible to build informally. Dunbar has pointed out that 50
is āthe typical overnight camp size among traditional hunter-gatherers
like the Australian Aboriginals or the San Bushmen of southern Africaā
which isnāt far off the level I think I started to notice problems.
The other aspect is how Dunbarās number relates to care. We expect
people around us to care for us, to be aware of our lives, to spot
problems and intervene without being asked. Actually itās not really
people we expect this of, itās mostly women. In our society this
expectation tends to be very gendered, that is there is an expectation
that women will do the work of care. Likewise administration is
gendered.
I often heard people express at meetings a frustration with what I would
now call the lack of care they were receiving. This was actually
expressed in many ways, but most often as a frustration with some
failing where the solution should really have been collective and thus
the complainer should have been creating the solution rather than
bemoaning the lack of it. In other words a sense that someone should
look after them but without a willingness to collectively construct that
someone.
I was national secretary a couple of times in this period and in
recently comparing experiences with a woman who filled that role at
other times we realised that while she had experiences of members who
expressed feeling let down with her because she had failed to care for
them I didnāt have such experiences. And again because these
expectations are gendered the reality is she was probably quite good at
this whereas I would mostly not have even conceived of an expectation
that care was part of my role.
These problems were part of the reason for organisational crisis that
saw us lose many members, those who departed and stated reasons for
doing so very often expressed a sense of being let down by the
organisation. But as members the same people had generally not been
people who prioritised work around creating organisational solutions to
problems of communication and care. Instead communications solutions
tended to be rejected as āorganisational solutions to political
problemsā. Worse still care was rejected because people who found
conflict emotionally exhausting were seen as not really suitable for
political activism as things would be much tougher in our external work.
Now as an organisation goes into a crisis of demoralisation the need for
āsocial groomingā tends to increase while the willingness to put time
into it decreases. Or as I experienced things people became far more
likely to misunderstand each other, fight in an unproductive way as a
result of these misunderstandings, and maintain grudges more intensely
and for longer periods afterwards. On the way up the WSM had felt like a
warm, close knit community with a lot of informal mutual support, on the
way down very much less so. A surprising amount of ex members identified
āthe problemā as being with particular people, the more self aware ones
at least made that a particular type of person rather than named
individuals.
If we accept that Dunbarās number tops out at 150 and we think that on
average someone might have 120 people in their social network than as
WSM approached 30 lots of individual members were either having to drop
relationships with people outside of WSM or not able to put enough
effort into maintaining connections within WSM to avoid such
misunderstanding and overcome friction.
As I recall what happened is that people started to put their effort
into maintaining relationships with those most like them culturally or
politically. Informal sub networks emerged of for example those very
involved in Rossport who would hang out together after conferences, and
ring each other for a chat quite separately from WSM business. And as
with all group formation there was a tendency for those spontaneous
groups to also start to define themselves against the members who didnāt
fit into them. At least at times this also meant that members who didnāt
easily fit into any group felt excluded from the whole, and of course
this most affected those coming from already marginalised groups such as
migrants.
We were aware of the weakening internal social bonds although we didnāt
consider that perhaps the real issue was that we were too many to rely
on tight bonds as an organisational solution until it was too late. On
one level we had some grasp of the problem as we did do things like have
a joint meeting of all three Dublin branches once a month, try to
organise social nights and, later on, once a month have a meal after a
branch meeting to which we would also ask contacts. None of these really
worked well as they tended to only attract people who were already in
the core group that did or had socialised together. Retrospectively that
was really what we should have expected because in effect we were
demanding that members fit additional WSMers into their Dunbar group
which as a solution would have required excluding family, friends etc to
make room.
For anarchists to win we need to overcome the limitations of Dunbarās
number. The importance of the concept is understanding that this cannot
be a matter of becoming better, more caring individuals who spend more
time looking after each other in genuine ways. If you go āfull cultā and
expect members to cut connections with everyone else you might get to
150 that way. But we need to organise tens of millions as a transition
to six plus billion people becoming self organised. Being better people
wonāt do that.
How is this done? Thatās not so hard to answer in a general sense as we
already live in a mass society so we can see how this happens.
Mass societies develop collective understandings a of why they are and
where they are going which can be summed up under the term ideology.
Generally the most successful form will be seen as ācommon senseā or
āthe way things areā but itās ideology all the same. They are developed
from the top down, in the interests of those who have wealth and power.
But there will be other competing ideas of how things could be,
anarchism being one of those.
In the USA today for instance the āAmerican dream,ā now expressed
through the ideology of neo-liberalism, is a common point of departure
for many. If you work hard you can get ahead is something strongly
believed by many people who have worked hard and are stuck where they
are.
Religion is essentially ideology and for long periods of European
history the ideological cement in societies was that āweā are Protestant
while ātheyā over the river are Catholic and vice versa. Ideology was
what held the mass communist parties of the 20^(th) century together as
Russia sent tanks into Hungary in 1956 to put down a workers rebellion.
Itās a powerful glue for holding mass organisations and indeed whole
societies together.
So those who argue that organisational problems must have political
solutions are not entirely wrong. The construction of a better
ideological glue can overcome communication problems, at least for a
while.
But using ideology as your primary glue to hold people together comes
with costs, chief amongst those is the promotion of an unchanging
conservatism, since to enter into free discussion softens the glue. And
while political solutions might alleviate the symptoms they may not in
fact address the cause if the cause is indeed insufficient
administration and communications.
But, even or perhaps especially for anarchists ideology is important.
After all itās our common understanding of what is wrong with the world
and what needs to be done to put it right that separates us out from the
mass of society and caused us to seek each other out in the first place.
Ideology also has the major advantage of being easy to reproduce
faithfully and transmit over both time and space. It scales very easily
and doesnāt necessarily require a large group to produce. Indeed in the
networked age of social communication one person can create and transmit
ideology as never before.
The huge advantage a Dunbar group has is a very deep organic common
trust based on a deep understanding of where each other is at. In the
smallest groups on the Dunbar scale of 3ā5 people the work everyone does
is inevitably very visible. Loss of that makes organising very much
harder indeed. But at groups above 50 or so itās impossible to have that
trust organically generated and maintained. To deal with the problems
this causes itās important that expectations be formally stated and
visible rather than assumed as they are in informal small groups.
There should be clear expectation of what members are expected to do.
How much of their income should they be donating to financing the
organisation? How much work are they expected to put into its work? If
these things are clearly defined and visibly stuck to the resentment
over relative workloads shouldnāt be a problem providing members who are
not filling those collectively agreed expectations are removed from
membership on a regular basis.
There is a āyes butā here which is what if there is a good reason why
someone isnāt pulling their weight. The only workable answer is that
membership is defined by meeting the collectively agreed expectations
and if someone over time isnāt doing that they are no longer a member.
Another answer would be to ignore the situations of members not doing
what they have committed to. The problem with that it is quickly
corrosive in a couple of ways. Firstly it creates hostility, distrust
and suspicion, in particular where differences of political perspective
exist. Why should someone have a vote on what sort of work should be
done for instance when you never seem them actually doing any work for
the organisation. Why should a meeting have to spend time going back
over an issue for someone who seldom bothers to come to meetings. And
secondly resentment will mean other members in turn will be much less
motivated to carry through what they have committed to.
The third answer, the popular but I believe unworkable one is that a
judgement is made whether itās ok that someone isnāt meeting the
collective membership commitments. That seems wonderfully fair until you
asks the question of who is to make this judgement and on what grounds
will they make it?
The most useful approach is to treat membership not as badge of honour
but a combination of both political agreement and carrying out the
requirements of membership. When someone stops carrying out those
requirements then they are no longer a member. This isnāt new. In the
past organisations like the IWW have made that process transparent by
requiring members to have a card on which stamps were placed when they
filled membership requirements and the display of the card was a
requirement to vote.
Aileen commenting on a draft of this article noted āI like to take a
slightly different tack and say that the organisation has to have
agreement on what constitutes āworkā. This agreement is often absent.
Another anarchist women used the phrase āsocial reproduction of the
organisationā to describe the vital admin work that she does for an
anarchist group elsewhere. Itās a useful turn of phrase because it
mirrors the āreproduction of labourā that (most often) women do under
capitalism. Mirrors it because like domestic labour admin work is often
invisible and not valued as āworkā, in a gendered way. I think many
revolutionaries I have met do something similar in terms of their
understanding of what ācountsā as revolutionary work ā going to a
picket, attending a meeting, giving a talk, writing an article ā all
these are undoubtedly seen as real work (they are also in the main
collective and public). Spending a weekend doing layout, graphic design,
ringing people to arrange a meeting, fixing a database or the website ā
these types of work are invisible and donāt count. So there needs to be
an understanding on what constitutes āworkā, and understanding that
values all tasks equally and doesnāt have a āhierarchy of importanceā.
Many anarchists tend to avoid administrative work. Not surprising as it
is routine, often boring and there is little glory attached to it. No
one composes songs about the anarchists who must have ran the
administrative systems that got food and ammunition to the front during
the Spanish revolution. As with care, administration is often very
gendered, the burden falling mostly on women members, even when they are
in a small minority. The boys preferring to write the articles, give the
talks and be the visible external organisers.
Administration is often an area anarchists refuse to seriously discuss,
any serious discussion tending to be dismissed as āan organisational
solution to a political problemā even in circumstances where itās rather
obvious that the problem is organisational. Instead of ābureaucraticā
fixes we are told organisational matters can be dealt with by boosting
moral (see care), political agreement (see ideology) etc.
Those fixes work in small groups (i.e. where everyone has everyone else
in the group inside their Dunbar limit). But the donāt work in large
ones. Which is why an entire branch of anarchism has developed that
attempts to make that bug into a feature, most insurrectionists reject
formal (large scale) organisation and restrict themselves to small
affinity groups.
If you are an insurrectionist you probably have some theory that
explains how networks of affinity groups can create a revolutionary
situation. So most of this discussion is probably not that relevant to
you. Except of course that while you might imagine a revolution being
made by a multitude of small groups with no strong links between them
its impossible to imagine society being self-managed in such a fashion.
That manufacture of a laptop or the running of a hospital requires the
coordination of millions when you take into account all the materials
that must be extracted, refined, reacted, shaped, placed, trained for
and operated.
If you see a need for organisations of more than 50 or so to exist then
Dunbarās number requires that you embrace administration.
Administration is essentially processes of collecting information and
then storing and presenting it in ways that are accessible to those who
need to know. Generally, in an anarchist organisation, the membership.
Administration is also the workload of following the methods by which
decisions can be made from such information. For instance the planning
for and physical work of collating the texts of motions, preparing
multiple copies of an Internal Bulletin and physically getting it to
every member by the required deadline.
In larger groups that decision making process needs to be standardised,
so results can be tabulated across an organisation by having every
branch discuss and vote on the same text for instance. Administration
can also be standardising the way work is done with contacts so peopleās
impressions of the organisation are not primarily formed by whoever they
happened to talk to.
When well done, administration as distinct from decision making is often
almost invisible because it simply happens. Invisible because the entire
purpose is to remove sources of friction that can prevent organising
occurring or which causes organisational efforts to fail. If the
Internal Bulletin arrives in your hands in plenty of time you are
unlikely to give much thought to the work that made than happen because
you will be interested in the content within. Unlike success, failure is
very visible, no Internal Bulletin, no way of discussing motions. If in
terms of more public failure if, you have printed 50,000 leaflets for a
mass demonstration and all the members arrive to discover that no one
thought of how to get the leaflets to the meetup point, then that
probably turns the day into a total failure. If 20 boxes of leaflets are
just there then no one gives it further thought.
That 50,000 leaflet example isnāt being used accidentally but because
its quite a good example of a situation where the Dunbar limit is
important. If you want to distribute that number of leaflets within the
short space of time a demonstration is forming up for you need to be
coordinating with 50 ā 100 other people in a relatively complex
multistep process.
Letās break down the steps to use as an example;
is made that this act (leaflet distribution) will be the major priority.
This in itself might be quite complex, for instance if it requires
bringing everyone together in the same space at the same time for a
discussion at which such a decision can be made.
drafting the text
a whole set of sub processes around getting that money together, getting
approval for expenditure and communicating with the printer so that they
are confident enough about being paid to do the work
where they can be at least briefly stored. This is far from trivial as
if itās an A4 leaflet on glossy paper thatās probably 70ā100 boxes, each
of a weight that makes it hard to carry more than one for any distance.
at the right time and place from the distribution, communicating this to
people and ensuring they agree / are going to turn up
dispersed through the gathering crowd in a way that maximises
distribution opportunities
The complexity of the task should be clear from that example. But now
consider if you only want to distribute 1000 leaflets. Although all the
same stages are involved that is suddenly a very much easier task
because it can be carried out by 2 or 3 people. A chat over coffee or a
pint, a couple of last minutes phone calls and everything will probably
come together.
If you are an insurrectionist then the answer is perhaps only to
distribute small number of leaflets so that large scale coordination is
never required. Thatās the reason why informal scenes are dominated by
zines and one person / small group blogs. It may also be why informal
scenes are often quite dominated by argument and serious fallings out.
That after all is a mechanism by which a group is kept inside the Dunbar
limit, growth is dealt with through fragmentation and if need be
expulsion.
If you are a Leninist or some other variety of authoritarian socialist,
liberal or green the distribution process is simplier. One or two
leaders make the key decisions and then order the members to provide the
funding, do the collection & carrying, turn up for the distribution and
go to their pre-arranged points. Generally such leaders are at least in
part selected on their ability to get people to happily follow such
orders ā this side of the revolution.
If you are a business then you simply pay people to carry out all the
different tasks described, at differential rates according to how much
skill each tasks requires. Probably the person managing the process
overall gets quite well paid, the writer & designer pretty well paid,
the person organising the distributors gets an alright wage and the
distributors get as little as is legally required and as much as makes
doing the work attractive. Most cities have free newspaper distributed
during rush hour by precarious and often migrant workers in such a
manner.
By now the nature of the challenge for organisational anarchists (those
of us who see a need for groups larger than 25ā30) should be coming into
focus. Iād bet that very few organisational anarchists reading this
piece have ever taken part in anarchist literature distribution at this
scale & timetable. You have probably only done it as part of broader
coalitions using either the command or pay methods described above. And
thatās because the tasks described from fundraising to physical carrying
break the Dunbar limit in a complex enough way that defeats your
organisationās existing coordinating ability.
Leafleting is also a useful example as in most circumstances itās quite
a boring piece of political work that people will only put limited
effort into because the stakes are quite low. That is there is neither
much risk in it nor all that much to be gained out of doing it
successfully. If this wasnāt the case weād probably start using a lot
more of our brains on overcoming the obstacles. That is the reason why
the level of complex cooperation in a mass direct action or indeed a
riot often pulls in much larger numbers of people coordinating than low
stakes tasks. It is much easier to maintain a sense of group cohesion in
situations where group activity represents a real risk than for more
mundane tasks.
So how do we escape or at least minimise the effect of Dunbarās limit on
our organising? The answer is administration or to use a less popular
term bureaucracy. Above I described how capitalist organisations or
those of authoritarian political parties use administration to overcome
the limit. Unless we choose to believe we will never need organisation
above 30ā50 we need to find anarchist administration methods. Avoiding
administration isnāt a possibility unless we stay in small groups that
have no meaningful links between them.
The rules under which members operate have to transparent and formally
stated. What gets advertised on an organisationās web page for instance
or who can put out a press release in the name of the organisation. What
sort of training are new members required to go through. How much
agreement with an organisationās policies is needed to join and where is
that defined. How are those policies changed? What sort of spending can
an officer sign off on without consulting the organisation ( presuming
we donāt want to require a federation wide vote every time a paper clip
needs to be bought). And so on.
In small groups a lot of this is often simply done through trust. Itās
as organisations grow that major problems can occur as the Dunbar limit
is exceeded and so officers no longer have the sort of relationships
with the members where an informal trust really exists. Often it takes a
while for a crisis to arise because officers will tend to drawn from
people who have been members for longer and this means a combination of
respect for them and a relative lack of confidence of newcomers will
mean problems will take a while to be raised. But a crisis point is
often where a relatively new member replaces an old timer as an officer
and they immediately hit difficulties because they lack the accumulated
respect that gave their predecessor the required social status to fulfil
the role. The result can be paralysis as they both lack the social
weight to compel others to fulfil tasks easily and lack the trust
required to simply get on with it, make edge case decisions and risk the
consequences. On many of the occasions that Iāve witnessed such a
replacement it has gone badly and over time in WSM it meant that
officerships kept defaulting back to the same small group of long term
members.
A fix for this is training and also the development of Standard
Operating Procedures so that new people in roles will have a well
defined sense of what is expected of them and what they can demand of
others. You literally write down what the steps of a complex task are
and how they should be followed. This article actually arose after I saw
an outraged online reaction to my use of the term Standard Operating
Procedure and reflected on the lack of awareness behind that reaction.
Alongside this it would be a good idea to have new officers required to
come from a secretariat that had been carrying out the particular type
of work around the previous person holding the role. This would also
have the advantage of clarifying is someone has the skill and aptitude
for a particular task before taking in on in a major way. In an
anarchist organisation there shouldnāt be significant decision making
powers with a role so that sort of rotation system could be preferable
to an electoral one, although of course people could be elected (or
delegated) to the secretariat.
Such roles should simply be about administration of decisions that are
made by collective bodies that all members have inputs to. That
protection is far more meaningful than trying to avoid having such roles
or trying to rotate them constantly or even never having such a role as
a paid position. Paid administrative positions are going to be needed in
effective organisations with memberships in the hundreds because at that
point administration becomes a full time job. There are huge potential
pitfalls with bad implementation, just look at your local trotskyist
group for examples but thatās a discussion to be developed at another
point.
Modern anarchists have often built their organisational approaches
around a negative reaction to the manipulative and authoritarian
structures of the rest of the left. That is wherever the left put a plus
we have tended to put a minus. This hasnāt worked for us, rather than
building a negative mirror of authoritarian left organisation we need to
build an anti authoritarian model of organisation that fills our needs.
This isnāt just for us, in the sense of just for anarchist
organisations. The challenges of good administration on a mass basis is
the challenge of building a society without leaders and led, bosses and
workers. Itās a challenge that constantly rises in mass struggles with
the danger that otherwise people default to either a tyranny of the best
connected / loudest voices or copy the command systems they see in work
or mainstream politics. Very often it is already the case that the major
contribution anarchists can bring into such organisations is a knowledge
and experience of ways of organising that offer a genuine alternative.
Anarchists have both built mass organisations that minimise such
problems, such as the anarcho-syndicalist unions. We have spent a lot of
time understanding the work of others on the left that have developed
their own similar skills, for instance the Zapatistas in Chiapas.
Delegation rather than representation and Federalism rather than
Centralism being two of the key tools of such approaches.
Itās the challenge the left has always failed on, mostly because it
turns administration into command and as tasks become complex the
command becomes more distant and brutal. Again rule through money or
brutality being the requirement of command administration systems.
Our task is to break from that and break from its cousin, administration
through the invisible hand of the market. Here we can stop and consider
that we have in fact returned in a manner to one of the original
anarchist slogans, the one on the rear of the WSM banner.
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WORDS: Andrew Flood (Follow Andrew on Twitter ā or if you liked this
piece tweet me and let me know)
With thanks for disagreements, error corrections and suggested
modifications to Aileen, Aidan, Mark, Paul, Cormac and Martin.