Leaderless movements still develop unaccountable informal leaders

Evidence

In an iconoclastic 1972 essay, feminist activist and theorist Jo Freeman denounced the “Tyranny of Structurelessness”—that is, she claimed that when a movement insists it has no leaders, they emerge anyway; except, there are no fair and transparent mechanisms to select or remove those leaders. Often, a small clique of friends or the original members of a group end up exercising de facto power with no accountability. Freeman blames putative structurelessness for holding back the Women’s Liberation movement in the 1970s, and making it impossible to achieve real wins. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 100

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Anti-hierarchical movement structures fail to integrate and educate new members; Leaderless structures hide informal rules that exceed formal authoritarianism — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 772; Leaders and hierarchies inevitably emerge in large groups regardless of horizontalist ideals — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 901

Broader Connections

• Leaderless structures hide informal rules that exceed formal authoritarianism #expands (0.90) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 772
• Leaders and hierarchies inevitably emerge in large groups regardless of horizontalist ideals #corroborates (0.85) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 901