The Tyranny of Leaderless Activism
Leaderless organisation models became part of the ideology of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960’ and 70’s. It was thought a corrective to an overly structured society and to the resentment at the control others had over our lives. As long as second wave feminism concerned itself first and foremost with consciousness-raising, the model worked fine. When it was directed to different aims, some feminists began to question a quasi-religious belief in structureless organisation.
The marxist-feminist critique of Joreen Freeman poses the problem in terms similar to the discourse today on the dangers of new elites taking over British culture and politics. Do not let this stop you. The argument below is not to be mistaken for the ethno-national politics of Mathew Goodwyn. I do not agree that the governance of the country has been taken over by a woke elite. However, if you believe that most of politics is downstream from culture, then the argument that a new cultural force is transforming Britain must be taken seriously. This, in itself, is not the problem. If the last decade has seen universities, public institutions, and private corporation become a safer and more exciting place for women and minorities to express themselves, who would protest?
The problem is rather that elites by their very nature dissimulate their power and alienate those who are an important source of power. The myth of structureless could allow the movements of the left to become perverted by sad passions and irresponsible desires. It is leading many people to a horrifying place of their own making, but not their own.
The problem of elites and social media
The ideal of structurelessness has taken over political activism in ways that were unpredictable in the 1970’s. Back then Freeman described how it is a way for elites to sublimate their sources of power and social rewards. Freeman could not foresee how social media would mobilize resources into emergent social structures. Nevertheless, to appreciate the danger of the new elites today we need to understand Freeman’s analysis of the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’. She begins with the claim that, “there is no such thing as a structureless group”,
“Structurelessness” is organisationally impossible. We cannot deicide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one.
A formally structured group is not necessarily unjust. In fact, Freeman argues that formal structure is the only way to make everyone a part of the decision making. The danger is that a small group commands a larger group anonymously, in secret and without responsibility for the groups actions. This is why the nature of elitism is central to Freeman’s argument. Elites are not individual, but a group that masks it’s power over others. Elites do not want to be known, at their best, they are invisible. When they become known they become watched, and the mask over the power they wield is not so securely lodged. It is worth reminding ourselves that Freeman was announcing dangers inherent to the culture of political movements prior to the revolution of social media. The anonymity of group chat administrators, even to national policing agencies and corporations, is something that she could not have imagined.
A small group of people who have power over a larger group of which they are a part, usually without direct responsibility to that larger group, and often without their knowledge and consent. A person becomes an elitist by being part of, or advocating the rule by, such a small group
This should not be mistaken as the broad conditions of a conspiracy theory. Elites are not conspirators who deliberately take over a larger group. Elites are nothing more than a group of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. ‘They would probably be friends otherwise, and they would be politicly active even if they were not friends’. These friendship groups set up and function as networks of communication outside the regular channels. These informal channels allow for the control of information and decision making. The elitist and exclusionary nature of informal communication networks is not new. Such informal relationships had excluded women for centuries from participating in integrated groups of which they were a part.
In every profession, informal networks have created a uniquely equivalent to the ‘locker room mentality’ or ‘old school’ ties, which have prevented women- and some individual men- from having access to the sources of power and influence. Think, for example, of the cringe worthy Garrick Club as the antiquated reminder of what second wave feminism was dealing with, as a rule. It is in this broader context that the revolutionary power of social media is to be understood. Both as a powerful solvent to such men-only elites, but also the catalyst of other elites that will exclude women from decision making.
The second wave of feminism concentrated on consciousness raising of the exclusion of women from selection processes and informal communication. The next aim was to formalize the structures of decision making and the selection processes so that the exclusion of women could be confronted directly. The demand for formalized structures and process have been common to many movements seeking empowerment and equality. That is to say, all such movements have worked by undermining the privileges of an elite. This is why the myth of structurelessness is inherently corrosive to feminism for Freeman.
For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities that structure must be explicit not implicit. The rules of decision making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say the formalization of the structure of a group will destroy the informal structures. It usually doesn’t. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control. It makes available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large.
Social media brought new possibilities, with new sources of power and new forms of social reward. It also brought new forms of exclusion and alienation, even intra-group exclusion, in groups at the same pole of a debate. Instead of formalizing the informal patriarchal networks to prevent the exclusions of women, new movements are creating informal networks of their own. Again, this is not, in itself, a problem. Previously new left men had access to resources needed by the women’s right movement- such as mailing lists, printing, presses, contacts, and information- and women were used to getting what they needed through men, rather than independently. This structured who could be in the feminist elite and who was excluded. In itself, women creating their own network of resources and forms of social reward is not damaging to feminism, however this process is producing new elites excluding women. This is an old problem with ne media.
As the [feminist] movement has changed through time, marriage has become less universal criteria for effective participation, but all informal elites establish standards by which only women who posses certain material or personal characteristics may join.
There are many different prerequisites for joining the elites at any time, but there a few common themes. Characteristic concerning one’s background, personality, allocation of time. The movement began with elites who were middle class and married (or living with someone), being between 20–30 and university educated. Women who were feminine and ‘nice’. At the same time as these prerequisites operating, there were characteristics that would mark one as deviant, namely, being too old, working full time, “particularly if one is actively committed to a “career”, not being “nice”, and being avowedly single (i.e. not being actively heterosexual nor homosexual).”
Now married women with careers are less effective, if not totally excluded, from many movements driven by new social media platform. However, this does not mean that women who are passively supporting the group, as a voyeur awaiting new posts, nor the women who actively participate in the harassment, are aware of being excluded. The quick and easy exchange of information and the well rehearsed scripts obscures the decision making by the sovereign group members. Not to mention the selection of those who are sovereign. Indeed, the participation of many in the movement probably relies on this engineered ignorance and the promotion of the myth of structurelessness.
All this started when everyone had smart phones with cameras, around 2013. Footage of police violence against black people went viral, and soon racist comments and behaviour of others caught on camera become inflammatory material online. However, feminists were not to be outdone in this new medium, and toxic masculinity and TERFs became a target of harassment. Lots of videos shaming people online accusing them of offensive or unwanted behaviour have followed. The hatred that is generated by this material is concentrated in group chats. The problem is that the new medium of secure anonymous group chats is not as reliable as people are led to believe. The myth of structurelessness underpins the irresponsibility of an elite in relation to the group chat members who cannot hold them to account. Not just for selection of the elite and their decision making, but for actions the group chat members are not informed of.
A small group of activists have decided not to wait for wrongs to be caught on camera. Rather than wait for that unlikely event, they harass and abuse the target to provoke a reaction. A mobile phone or voice recorder is always on the ready. The reactions can be posted online as the reason why the group started the abuse in the first place, when in reality it is the effect of years of abuse. This tactic may have begun haphazard at first, with people provoking any sort of violent outbursts, but it soon became guided by research and the scripted performances perfected with practice. These scripts can be performed before any audience, or to any victim. Those who might otherwise have been contented with a role in the group find themselves the victims, and being excluded, harassed, and abused. These abuses include housing men to incapacitate them with drugs, casual public spiking and sexual assaults.
These groups exacerbate the injustices that Joreen Freeman pointed out in her essay half a century ago. A group of 6–10 friends have grounded this group in Berlin. They have enlisted a broader circle of friends there that do not necesasrily share the confidences of the core group, but who are willing to harass the victim in the early stages of the campaign. The rest of the group members, included those in aligned groups in other cities, do not know how the victims or the leaders in Berlin. The vast majority do not know how this all starts, nor how it proceeds beyond Berlin. Even the more passive voyeurs might post a photo of the victim to make his whereabouts known. They might post information about what he is doing, saying, drinking or eating, to make him vulnerable to calibrated scripts. They will read the directions for the group that are posted in response. So even the most casual and passive member both sends and recieves information. It seems to each member that the exchange of information and instruction is transparent and symmetrical.
The reality is that group chat administraters control what the group chat knows about the victim and how little the group chat knows of the actions of the original core group. The Telegram ‘channel moderators’ give out instructions for some sort of scripted performance, abuse or acts of violence. Its “channels” allow moderators to disseminate information quickly to a large number of followers in a way that other messaging services do not; they combine the reach and immediacy of a Twitter feed, and the focus of an email newsletter. In other contexts and campaigns, these channels are clearly overcoming the shortfalls of ‘structureless’ activism prior to smart phones and Telegram. In the summer of 2020, Lukashenko suggested that his opponents Belerus were backed by the massed armies of Nato. In truth, as the Guardian put it, ‘his nemesis was a 22-year-old blogger working from a room strewn with pizza boxes 300 miles away’. As liberating of the possibilities for protest as this is, the dangers should be acknowledged. The danger of a small circle of friends misleading a multitude to abuse a stranger in a public spectacle of shaming and dehumanization. This spectacle of punishemnt should point to the dangers of an elite dissimulating their sources of power to accuse, pass judgement, and punish people as an example to intimidate any opposition. This includes voices of moderation like my own.
Paradoxically, the myth of structurelessness has created what Freeman calls the “star” system. In absence of any traditional means of establishing group opinion and planning, certain women have ‘caught the public eye’. These women might be vocal about not belonging to or representing a group, but are nonetheless selected by the press to be the spokesperson for the movement. Rather than these two forms of organisation being opposed as they were in Freeman’s day, they have coalesced in campaigns of harassment and abuse. The feigned structureless movements online have dovetailed with the #metoomovement in the public eye. So that the limelight is taken by Hollywood film actresses, which leaves the group chat administrators, and the Telegram chat moderators, to operate in the shadows.
While these ‘stars’ might be resented by the group chat administraters, principally because they cannot be removed by the movement, because the movement did not appoint them spokesperson, they to live off their light, in the shadows. As Freeman notes, these stars can be ‘viciously attacked by their sisters’ , often with them being forced out of the movement altogether. The women I met in Berlin had nothing but contempt for Emma Watson’s claim that people are mistake for thinking that feminism is just for the benefit of women. Indeed, the insiders of the activisim I am describing, insisted that it is. In fact it is to the destruction of men, not just the deconstruction of toxic masculinity. Whatever the destruction of men might mean, it takes on a very literal meaning for the scape goats who fall vicitm to these campaigns of harassment that last years. Meanwhile all normies and moderates are considered with contempt by the elites that provide them with their information and follow instructions. The broader membership is allowed to live out a para social relationship to any star they choose, and whatever form of feminism the star advocates. Meanwhile, the stars and group chat members act on the instructions of an elite that holds both wih contempt.
Thus, even women who are eviscerated in the informal leadership circle can serve to dissimulate the feminism the elites operate. When women are attacked now, the harassment reaches a level of vitriol and physical threat that were previously not possible. Where Germaine Greer was once chastised, women like Kathleen Stock can be chased out of jobs. However, at the same time, film stars and journalists have been incorporated into the group by participating in the campaigns of harassment. Suffice it to say here that this is mainly by trolling the victim on podcasts, articles, or by trolling him in the odd film scene or TV drama. The content of his abuse provides inspirations to script writers who pepper their script with key lines form the victims abuses, including lines that mimic the scene of sexually assault. The word soon spreads about what this films mean to those who are in the know. Not particularly likning these films or their lead actors/actresses, betrays a lot about your political point of view.
This gives the star system a new dimension. The star system of leadership no longer runs as an uncomfortable adjunct to the tyranny of structurelessness, it is key to it’s dissimulation. Membership brings each member, no matter where in the world, in virtual contact with the Hollywood film makers who are the stars of feminism. While their littel performances in the cripted harassment of the stranger are filmed and viewed on line, famous acters and actresses deliver lines to troll the victim in major films. The stars attract and flatter the members, while each member believing they are some how connected to their film star. Each member believes the group functions with symmetrical exchanges with film starts and baristas and bar tenders alike. When the group members see these film stars, it feels like looking in the mirror, because so much is projected in their para-social relationship. But also because both are performing to scripts that are celebrated by thousands on the group chat/channels.
The problem is that the Hollywood film maker does not know anything of the grounding members in Berlin, nor their prerogatives, or their abuses. They know only what they are told by a small group of friends in Berlin who are united by their suffering of father absence, and sometimes fat shaming and other forms of abuse. This informal inner circle decides on the rules and on who will become sovereign in the group. They choose the victim, and they choose what he will suffer. They know they are all too different from the Hollywood film makers, and the normies they despise. All but a small elite are kept from knowing the feminism they realise.