is one of the most common responses I get when I talk to people (usually liberals) about horizontal power structures. It comes down to some version of “Well, that sounds nice, but what about the bad actors?” I think the logic that follows from that fact is backwards. The standard response to this issue is to build vertical power structures. To appoint a ruling class that can supposedly “manage” the bad actors. But this ignores the obvious: vertical power structures are magnets for narcissists. They don’t neutralize those people. They empower them. They give them legitimacy and insulation from consequences. They concentrate power precisely where it’s most dangerous. Horizontal societies have always had ways of handling antisocial behavior. (Highly recommend Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Christopher Boehm. He studied hundreds of forager societies, overall done amazing work.) Exile, public shaming, revocable leadership, and distributed decision-making all worked and often worked better than what we do now. Pre-civilized societies didn’t let power-hungry individuals take over. They stopped them. We used to know how to deal with bad actors. The idea of a “power vacuum” only makes sense if you believe power must be held at the top. If you diffuse power horizontally, there is no vacuum to fill. There’s just shared responsibility. That may feel unfamiliar, but it’s not impossible. We’ve done it before. Most of human history was built on it. The real question isn’t whether bad actors exist. It’s how we choose to deal with them. Do we build systems that make it harder for them to dominate others, or ones that practically roll out the red carpet? I think this opens up a more useful conversation.
What if we started seriously discussing tactics for dealing with domination-seeking behavior?
What mechanisms help us identify and isolate that kind of behavior without reproducing the same old coercive structures?
How do we build systems that are resilient to sabotage without falling into authoritarian logic?
I’d love to hear your guys’ thoughts.
Edit: It seems as though the conversation has diverted in this comment section. That’s alright, I’ll clarify.
This thread was meant to be about learning how to detect domination-seek behavior and repelling narcissists. This was meant to be a discussion on how anarchism works socially in order to circumvent individuals from sabotaging or otherwise seeking to consolidate power for themselves.
It was not meant as a discussion on if anarchism works. There is plenty of research out on the internet that shows anarchism has the potential to work. Of course, arguing a case for or against anarchism should be allowed, however that drifts away from what I initially wanted to get at in this thread. It’s always good to hear some “what ifs”, but if it completely misses the main point then it derails the discussion and makes it harder for folks who are engaging with the core idea.
So to reiterate: this isn’t a debate about whether anarchism is valid. It’s a focused conversation about the internal dynamics of anarchist spaces, and how we can build practices and awareness that make those spaces resilient against narcissistic or coercive tendencies.
Thanks to everyone who’s contributed in good faith so far – let’s keep it on track.
In my personal experience it really depend on what you are trying to build but most of the time it ends in the party/collective/space expelling the person from it. What can make this process less dramatic and damaging is the organizational culture you have in the space or the party. For example, in the organization that i´m part of when we reunite, all men are required to help in some domestic(cleaning, cooking or preparing the room for the meeting) and organizing(taking notes on the meeting/discussion, being the mediator of the meeting/discussion[1] and so on) task because we have perceived that this is a way to make the woman in the organization participate more actively in the discussions and we as an organization want them to participate more on these discussions. So we have a culture of doing that and for some time it has been a self-reinforcing thing. So if i stopped doing it, my comrades would call my attention to it and if i really took a stand against it, i would probably be kicked out of the organization. My hypothetical exit would galvanize no one because we have been doing this specific thing for a long time and everybody agrees that we should keep doing it.
In short: I don´t have a definitive answer but a good guess would be organizational culture. We, humans are very social species and take a lot of cues from the people around us and if we are able to create a good organizational culture in a space/party/collective people will mostly follow it. That said,it is hard to create a good organizational culture, people in the org or the space really need to want to make it happen but once it is create it is easier(or less harder) to keep.
[1] Counting and signaling the time that one has to speak, keeping the meeting on track, etc.
Bad actors are going to build their vertical power structures whether you like it or not. This is the challenge liberals are posing to anarchists: if you are unwilling to build your own vertical power structure then how do you stop the bad actors from building theirs and then using it as a cudgel against you?
Exile and public shaming are tools that only work against bad actors as individuals. They do not work when the bad actors team up and form a critical mass.
In the distant past, anarchism worked because everyone knew each other and bad actors had nowhere to hide to build their power structures and grow in strength. The agricultural revolution changed all this because of food storage and the potential for an outside group to attack and steal the food. People formed power structures and developed the first militaries in order to defend their granaries and this led to the growth of large cities where people no longer had the ability to know everyone.
Militaries also showed the power of hierarchies. Making decisions by consensus is slow. A military with a formal power structure has a huge advantage in combat against an unstructured tribe of warriors. This was proven again and again as the empires of the past conquered their neighbours.
But I digress. A large city where it’s impossible to know everyone is a huge problem for anarchists who want to prevent bad actors from forming a vertical power structure and taking over. There simply is no known social tool which can combat against the formation of conspiracies and elites within a large society.
In the distant past, anarchism worked because everyone knew each other and bad actors had nowhere to hide to build their power structures and grow in strength.
Sure they did - in the form of their own neighboring state. Then they invaded your peaceful anarchist society and you are now the great-great-great-(great…) descendant of their rape.
It sucks but you’re absolutely right. Read Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. The only way anarchism worked in that story was on an entirely separate planet that everyone agreed to leave alone because it was a fucking desert and not worth conquering.
I meant distant past before statehood was even a thing. That was before agriculture when all people lived in nomadic tribes. There were no neighbouring states because no one had fixed territories. Groups still fought among each other as they tracked the movement of migratory herds (mobile food supply) but there were no raids on granaries because there were no granaries yet.
The first agricultural societies had a really bad time. Their nutrition was extremely poor compared to the meat-rich diets of nomads. The nomads with their superior health and mobility had easy pickings on the crude granaries and poor defences of early farming villages. Statehood began when those villages began to work together and start their own militaries which led to specialized soldiers for the first time (as opposed to nomadic warriors who fought but also hunted and parented and everything else their tribe needed them to do).
Are there examples of stable horizontal power structures beyond ~1000 people?
The linux development team
That’s not really horizontal though, different people have (soft?) ownership of different parts of the kernel. It’s merit-based but not horizontal, which IMO is a fairly good system but doesn’t really fit the description.
It is also non-coercitive.
I would argue that when you have 1000+ people, you will necessarily have subgroups, teams, you wont have 1000 on 1000 communication. There will be subtasks, people a bit more specialized at organization and communication. Topologically, you will have a graph of people passing through specialized communication nodes. I think it is unavoidable.
There is no reason however for seeing these nodes as “above” the others. It is out of habit that we organize things as a pyramid, but the fact is if a dev or a maintainer disagree, they have no way to force each other. Resolution comes from overall consensus, and the reason why Linus Torvalds is often the arbiter of these cases is because he is very respected by the rest of the community, but whole forks have existed (and have been reintegrated).
Open source politics is quite different from what people are used to. The ability to fork a whole project gives a mean of resistance that no other organization has.
Fair points, maybe it does count after all