Hate to agree with fake Makhno

 Cathy Levine's essay, "The Tyranny of Tyranny", is best read in the format in which it first became widely known among English-speaking anarchists - the second part of the pamphlet, "Untying the Knot", which begins with a piece by Jo Freeman called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness". The two articles were presented in the pamphlet as arguments for two different approaches to organizing radical oppositional movements: Freeman's being the classic formal structure of democratic centralism, and Levine's the small, unstructured, leaderless affinity group.

Cathy Levine's essay was presented as an explicit response to, and critique of, Jo Freeman's. This exchange took place in the context of the radical feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The "structurelessness" to which Freeman referred to was, in fact, the defining feature of the affinity group model that Levine advocated.

Over the past 36 years, since I moved to Chicago and became involved with an anarchist affinity group there, I have seen this kind of debate play out over and over again within anarchist circles: a few of the better-known attempts at formal organizations being Love & Rage, NEFAC (Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists), and RAAN (Red-Anarchist Action Network). The historical inspiration for these efforts is, of course, the document called "The Platform" devised by a group of exiled Russian anarchists in Paris after the Bolshevik takeover, including Nestor Makhno, the inspiration for my pseudonym, although this is one part of his legacy I wholly reject.

Although Zoe Baker's very long and tedious piece does not reference The Platform, its argument is distinctly organizationalist. One can best see this by going straight to the last paragraph, where she starts out by declaring that "Anarchist organisational structures and collective decision-making procedures are a necessary aspect of creating a horizontal association...", then goes on to make precisely the same kind of arguments that Jo Freeman did in 1970. If this is what Baker means by "prefiguring an anarchist society", then it is clear that there is nothing liberating or radical about it. The affinity group model favored by Cathy Levine, which isn't even on Zoe Baker's radar, is much closer to what I would consider an anarchist way of life.