Part of an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list.
A lot of activist and cooperative spaces share an instinct: formal structure is the enemy. No leaders, no titles, no votes — just people showing up and doing the work together. It sounds like freedom. Jo Freeman, writing in 1970 out of the early women’s liberation movement, argued it’s actually a trap, and that the trap closes exactly because it’s invisible.
The claim: „structureless” groups aren’t structureless
Freeman’s argument is stronger than „informal groups can develop hidden hierarchies, so watch out.” Her claim is that a group with no formal structure is not organizationally possible. Structure forms whenever people do things together, whether or not anyone intends it. The only real choice a group has is whether that structure is made explicit — written down, voted on, open to challenge — or left invisible. Reaching for „structurelessness” as a goal is, on this view, a bit like reaching for a „neutral” news report or a „purely free” market: the ambition itself doesn’t remove power from the picture, it just moves that power somewhere nobody’s looking.
How the invisible elites form
If nobody’s been formally given power, who ends up holding it? Freeman’s answer: friendship networks. The people who end up running an ostensibly leaderless group aren’t chosen for competence or commitment — they’re the people who happen to be friends with each other, who talk outside meetings, who already trust each other’s judgment. Getting into that circle looks less like earning a role and more like getting into a club: you need something like a sponsor already inside, and a friendship that deepens until you’re accepted.
This isn’t a conspiracy. Freeman is clear that these are usually ordinary groups of friends who share both a social bond and a political project, and the two reinforce each other in a way that makes the resulting informal elite very hard to dislodge. And because the power was never formally granted, it can’t be formally taken back. There’s no vote to lose, no term to expire, no position to be voted out of — the influence simply exists, sustained by relationships nobody elected anyone into.
What it costs the group
Two concrete failure modes follow directly from this.
The first is what you might call the spokesperson problem. A group with no formal way of choosing who represents it doesn’t thereby avoid having representatives — the media and the public pick someone anyway, usually whoever is most visible or most articulate in public. The group ends up with a public face it never chose and has no mechanism for replacing, because there was never a formal process to begin with.
The second is a ceiling on what the group can actually do. Structurelessness can work reasonably well for building shared understanding among a small circle of people — what Freeman’s own movement called consciousness-raising. It works much less well for anything that needs task division, accountability, or decisions that involve more than a handful of people at once. Beyond a certain scale and a certain kind of task, the absence of formal structure isn’t liberating — it’s just a ceiling nobody agreed to.
The fix isn’t more structurelessness — it’s structure you can see
Freeman doesn’t argue for going back to conventional hierarchy. Her proposal is to make structure explicit and put it under democratic control, via seven principles:
- Delegate specific authority to specific people, for specific tasks, through a democratic process — not vaguely, and not to whoever happens to be around.
- Make that authority accountable to the group that delegated it, with a real mechanism for taking it back.
- Distribute power across as many people as reasonably possible, rather than letting it concentrate.
- Rotate tasks, since a role held too long quietly becomes someone’s personal property.
- Assign work by competence and interest, not by who’s liked.
- Circulate information freely to everyone — information is a form of power, and hoarding it is how invisible hierarchies stay invisible.
- Give equal access to the resources the group actually needs: tools, skills, contacts.
None of these principles eliminate power. What they do is make it visible, distributed, and revocable — which is a different thing entirely from pretending it isn’t there.
Why this matters beyond 1970s feminist organizing
Freeman’s specific examples — the social markers that got someone into an informal 1970s activist elite — are dated and don’t transfer directly to other contexts. But the underlying mechanism does: a group of people bonded by both friendship and shared political purpose, wielding real influence that was never formally granted and can’t be formally withdrawn, is a pattern that shows up anywhere people try to organize without acknowledging that organization is already happening. Cooperatives, open-source projects, mutual aid networks, and plenty of ostensibly flat workplaces reproduce some version of it constantly.
It’s also worth naming what this essay doesn’t settle. Freeman’s answer — formalize and distribute power through explicit, accountable delegation — is one response to the problem she diagnoses. It’s not the only one on offer even within traditions skeptical of hierarchy; consensus-based and affinity-group models, developed largely independently, propose a different route to the same goal of avoiding unaccountable elites. The two approaches don’t agree on everything, and we don’t think that disagreement is fully resolved. What both traditions share is the diagnosis: informal doesn’t mean powerless, it means unaccountable.
Did we get something wrong?
This piece is drawn from our own reading notes, not a translation of the essay. If something above misrepresents the argument, or just sounds off, tell us — publicly or privately, whichever you’d rather.
Want the fuller picture?
This is a survey, not the whole essay. The deep-dive version is here: deep-dive PDF.
What should we read next?
This is one piece in a loose series drawn from our own research reading. If there’s a thinker, an essay, or a tradition you think belongs in a series like this, we want to hear it.
