Jean Allen responds to Amelia Davenport, continuing the debate on scientific management.1
Introduction
In comrade Davenport’s Organizing For Power, she notes a central problem with contemporary socialist organization. Many organizations work according to an informal rule of thumb which fosters a culture of unsustainable engagement and burnout. With an underdeveloped separation of labor, these groups are often captured by a handful of people who possess technical skills which they are uninterested in teaching to others. Davenport lays both of these at the feet of a lack of organizational theory within the Left and proposes an embrace of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Scientific Management and an appreciation of Bogdanov’s work as a ‘Constructive Socialism’ which can surpass previous scientific socialisms as a corrective to this worrying tendency.
Comrade Davenport is correct that the ad hoc methods that organizers have developed over the last generation are insufficient for the task of running contemporary political organizations. More than insufficient, they are actively detrimental:
“Organizers,” through their personal charisma and promise of winning immediate gains, incentivize people to use their initiative towards their campaigns. Group members receive general tasks and an expectation to complete them, either by themselves or with a few other people. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the top-down orders of the leadership or democratic vote by the group; activists are tacitly encouraged to take on an unsustainable load, leading to burnout. Organizers don’t teach activists to draw healthy boundaries between their own needs and what is reasonable to contribute. If they don’t burn out, activists drop out as they lose interest in work that comes to seem increasingly futile.
Whether this is a product of a conscious choice against structure or merely the lack of it, we are left with a persistent culture of churn, with people entering organizations, being pushed to take on too much work, and leaving them without having imparted any kind of general lessons.
Davenport is also correct that we must replace ad hoc rules with a science of organization. She sees Taylorist scientific management as the way through this, arguing that:
Theory and practice aren’t two separate poles united dialectically; they’re one continuous process. Theorizing is just one part of the labor process. Whether it is drafting blueprints for a machine or solving a malfunction, every stage of the labor process requires both manual and mental labor. Beyond “scientific socialism,” we need constructive socialism. Constructive socialism has a long provenance stretching back to thinkers like James Connolly and Eugene Debs. It calls for the positive creation of new working-class power and the nucleus of the new society now, without waiting for revolutionary rupture. To realize this aim, our movement should make use of any technology suitable to the task.
At this point we part ways. While we do need to utilize all tools available to us, that has to be done with the knowledge that no tool is inert, able to be easily used towards any end. Attempt to hammer in a screw and you will quickly discover this: the screw implies the screwdriver. Taylorism confronted the complex problems of managing humans and solved this problem by treating people the same way one would treat machines, allowing engineering principles to be applied to the human body. We cannot extract class power from technological processes, least of all management science. Bourgeois management science is more than a justification for class rule, it is class rule in practice. Taylorism, Fordism, lean production, these are not just vague concepts, they are the way people experience capitalist domination in their everyday life. Even if these techniques narrowly ‘work’ within industrial production, they have only been able to deal with knowledge and organizational production through a program of deskilling and homogenizing. Deskilling can be useful, tasks can become overly baroque when they are in the hands of a single person. But deskilling is not a liberatory process, is not an empowering process, it has been, first and foremost, a way to discipline labor. It is easy to make an undemocratic, scientifically managed organization. Almost every firm operates this way.
That is not to say that there is not a science of organization. Such a science does exist but is not pre-arranged for us to find in the wild. Bourgeois management science is one aspect of it, but just as Marx was not able to just take English economics, German philosophy, or French revolutionary politics and transform them into a revolutionary political economy, we cannot just take management science and be done with it. Because bourgeois management science is the method and program of class rule, its theory comes from a manager’s perspective. Comrade Davenport seeks to resolve this by deskilling the manager out of existence while applying the manager’s program to our organization. This is a tremendously undialectical perspective. A science of organization would not be oriented towards the creation of a perfected assembly line sans manager. It would be oriented towards a constant expansion of our analytical lens, both continually integrating our new experiences into our plans, and by abolishing the separation between researcher and researched.
But as practitioners, we cannot just be concerned with the science of organization. Organizing is so often interpersonal, intuitive, time-limited, and contextual. We are dealing not with objective facts or with technicalities but with the insides of the human mind. In such circumstances, there is still, unquestionably, an element of science, but there is an element of craft, of art, as well. Consider the difference between a new and a seasoned volunteer reading a script. While a new volunteer may sound wooden, or drop into a robotic patter, a seasoned volunteer can make a script their own, improvise, and come off naturally even when they’re reciting something they’re recited a dozen times before. Outside of our knowledge about the world, history, political economy, and organizing, mobilizing others, and empowering others as equals is a skill, one that our society does not easily teach us.
We are faced with two tasks, then: how do we develop organizational science at the level of the organization, and how do we develop organizational art within individual organizers. How do you teach strategic thinking and technical skills, organizationally? How can you do this when what you are trying to teach is a subject which can only be learned in practice? We must make sure our comrades have not only the technical skills to support our campaigns but the political ability to make their own. Thankfully, we have a tool in our hands for this: democracy.
What is the point of democracy? Often we counterpose a positively coded democracy with the autocracy that people experience constantly in their day-to-day lives. But if we consign ‘democracy’ to being just ‘good’, we are laying the foundations for democracy’s undermining in practice even if we affirm it in word. Almost everywhere in the left democracy is affirmed at the point of decision and then cast aside at the point of implementation. This can easily lead to a curmudgeonly opinion: that democracy is a waste of time, that if it is such a good thing to sit in a meeting hall trading points of order or gaining consensus until our faces turn blue just to decide on the time of an event, that it would be better if we dropped it in the name of efficiency.
The Failed Models
This desire for efficient organizing has two outgrowths, the autonomous organizer and the non-profit activist group. Both seem more efficient than the messiness of democracy, and autonomous organizing often comes alongside a critique of organization which justifies it as radical. But while it may be more effective at certain kinds of advocacy, and might get a rally planned a few hours earlier than a democratic organization, these methods are no replacement for democratic organizing.
While these two tendencies seem different externally, they have the same practical effect: of hiding decision making and implementation behind mediating bodies, either the self-selected groups of friends which make up many autonomous organizations or in the managerialism of non-profits. This mediation can seem benign at first but will steadily become worse until the organization is either defunct or locked into a bad equilibrium. The fact that decisions are ultimately made by the autonomous organizer or their group of friends, or by the upper management of the non-profit, has a deleterious effect on the way that information is shared, on the meetings held, on the way decisions are implemented.
When one is acting with peers, making a collective decision, a person is usually able to speak not just honestly but analytically. They are able to self-criticize, to criticize an action their organization took, to look at material conditions, and argue that this or that action is inappropriate for this moment. Developing this sort of reflectiveness is key not only for the creation of good organizers but of good organizations, and it is a struggle in any setting to make sure there is a space for reflection. But when one is reporting to their boss, when one is speaking to a body of ‘members’ they have no organic relation to, the ever-present temptation to keep one’s analysis to oneself and engage solely in agitation grows.
Agitation – communication for the purpose of eliciting an emotional response, whether it’s anger, excitement, or triumph – is an important tool and a skilled agitator is something every organization wants to have. But we need to be absolutely clear on what agitation is and is not, and it is not a suitable replacement for analysis. When an organizer is trying to rile a crowd up, that is not the time for an in-depth self-criticism or perhaps dispiriting analysis of the current situation. But when it is clear that you are speaking to a body of members who, do not themselves make decisions, whose knowledge of organizing and the organization matters less than their approval of you, who you have no organic relationship to outside of being hired to manage them or being friends with the right people, then there is no inherent reason to be honest with them. There is no point in doing anything besides hyping them up.
But the replacement of good information with bad and analysis with agitation is not the only negative effect that comes from a lack of formalized democratic decision making and implementation. People are not stupid; they know when they do not have a real say. As more and more agitational meetings occur a variety of responses come to the fore: some drop out, some use the meetings for their own agitation, some seek to join whatever backroom may exist where decisions are made and analysis does happen. By the end, it’s questionable if such a backroom will exist. Bad information will have overtaken good, and once people are used to not having responsibility over the organizations they work in, it is hard to ‘flip a switch’ and add this after the fact.
Individualist organizing often begins with the idea that formally democratic organizations are inefficient, that the annoying work of getting people to agree could better be used to do the actual work, that the constrictions of organizing collectively are autocratic. What this actually emerges from is the autocratic way we do the work. What often occurs in volunteer organizations is that a handful of people end up dominating parts of the work. Comrade Davenport is correct in citing this as a problem, but it is more than a technical one. It also begins to degrade democracy at the point of decision. As implementation increasingly becomes dominated by a few people, those people increasingly become overdeveloped and overburdened. This leads to an ironic problem of delegation: just as delegation becomes more necessary key members become less capable of it. With a handful of people doing a dozen tasks, personal methods become organizational methods, and processes become baroque in a way that can only be understood by the individual using them. As this solidifies the idea of democratically deciding what those few people should do becomes more and more ludicrous. Steadily the argument that we are wasting time arguing about things becomes more and more relevant, and degraded democracy at the point of implementation becomes a degraded democracy throughout the organization.
What should be understood is that governance systems are far more than just the way actions are decided, they are informational systems that structure the way we interact with our work, the way we interact with each other. Because non-profits and individualist organizations have no need to justify their decisions before an open body, information is never shared in an open way, which has cascading secondary effects. Work becomes steadily more entrenched in a handful of people who do ‘know’ what’s going on, fewer and fewer people are able to integrate. But this is not an inevitability. What is the alternative?
Outside of a high school club or church group, most people living under capitalism have not had the experience of working in an organization that is democratically operating towards social ends. The life of the average worker is one of being told what to do without being able to respond, towards ends which would likely never exist without a profit motive, without the ability to influence the situation around them let alone change what task they are working towards. Indeed, even at the other end, your average manager may have the ability to make decisions but is still unused to that decision being made collaboratively.
We are not used to thinking about the organizations in which we operate, either because we have a one-way relationship with those organizations, or because at the top these organizations are reducible to a handful of people working on a handful of projects, and can be worked within in the same way as any group of competing cliques. So when we are forced to interact with an organization, where not just us but the people around us all have a say in our decisions, we can be instinctively territorial, we can instinctively form into cliques, we can instinctively think not of the wellbeing of us as a collective but just of ourselves and our projects. We can revert to the behavior I described above, agitating rather than analyzing, treating our comrades as an external force rather than as comrades in a shared struggle. But it says much that the failure state of a democratic organization looks a lot like the day-to-day happenings of a non-profit.
The Uses of Democracy
It is the task of every socialist to build a collective mind, composed of and larger than our individual experiences, and we only build it by continually working in a democratic way. This means more than voting or reading consensus on something at the point of decision and then dropping democracy afterward: we need to operate democratically throughout every step of the process, from conceptualization to decision-making to implementation and back. This is not done out of some bleeding heart sentiment that it would be nice to do. Because governance systems are information systems, the sharing of knowledge, skills, and experiences is the practical way by which we move from a unity of action to an ever-sharper shared strategic vision. We learn from doing, but only if we allow ourselves to learn. The more democratic our processes are, the broader they are, the more people are included in that learning. When we make decisions and implement them in a democratic way, the whole group, not just a handful of staffers, organizers, or cadre, learns how to be more capable. When we work democratically we all learn about ourselves, our projects, the organizations we work in, the society we live in. The more we work democratically the more capable we are at making new decisions collectively, the more nuanced those decisions become.
We cannot put this off; we cannot wait for some moment to give us permission to flip the democracy switch. We will never be able to competently make collective decisions until we are asked to, until we try to, until we fail to. By making and learning from these decisions, we are able to better our organization’s ability to make future decisions. By fighting and losing in an internal vote and moving together regardless, we learn that our individual opinions are only important insofar as we work towards them, and strive to be better. Each time we decide on an action together and implement it together in a broad and democratic way, we teach ourselves and our comrades that our decisions matter. The dispersal of technical skills is an important aspect of this but it is the easiest of the problems that face us. Dispersing democratic skills is far more pressing.
An organization that works to build up democratic skills would include these kinds of structures, as it develops:
- A significant and open debriefing process including an analysis of our material conditions and criticism & self-criticism, within group contexts and in writing.
- The creation of clear lines of communication and information exchange, publishing what can be safely and feasibly publicized, including these operational analyses and minutes.
- A focus on making as many decisions as is feasible democratically and including as many members as is feasible into the process of making decisions.
- A connected focus on making sure that implementation happens in as democratic a way as possible, that no task is the jurisdiction of a single person.
- A commitment to openly speaking about our politics in terms of our concrete goals and principles.
- An ability to connect our practical goals to the larger goals, the development of strategic and grand strategic logics within the organization.
- A commitment to be intentional when dealing with administrative tasks which often become the realm of a single person or handful of people. An understanding that our politics are embedded in all the work we do including administration.
- An acceptance that, on the one hand, these democratic decisions are binding, but similarly that the minority viewpoint in each vote is to be respected.
These are not just key to making a more ideologically ‘good’ organization. It is practically useful to make sure that one organizes in a democratic way. If we want to create an effective fighting organization we need to make sure that we are constantly developing our members into leaders. This means that beyond generalizing skills we have another task, “to develop and circulate capacities and skills, not so that workers meet some elite standard of privilege or prestige, but so that they are able to conduct struggle no matter the scenario or battlefield”.2 These lessons do not come naturally, and they are not imparted by creating a Socialist Bethlehem Steel.
The society we live in is riven with hierarchy and authoritarianism. Thus, the way our society thinks about organization, about management, about organizing reflects our authoritarian society. But that reflection does not necessarily have anything to do with efficacy, and this is especially true within membership organizations. When you make an ask of a comrade, that is in no way the same as an ask of an employee whose livelihood depends on following orders. Even if you are in elected or unelected leadership, your comrades are peers and equals, and effectively working within such a framework requires experience. The ability to work with your comrades as equals, the ability to develop your analysis based on your experiences and the experiences of your comrades, the perspective of the organization as not just yours but as the product of the combined effort of all of your comrades, this is what I mean when I say democratic skill, but these are key for developing the art of organizing. When those skills come together across an organization’s membership, they form the basis for the development of a true organizational science, which requires both theoretical development and the experience of socialists across the world.
Democratic organization is not just the addition of the good word of democracy in front of the act of organizing. It is not just holding votes, or managing consensus. It is a tool by which we teach ourselves and our comrades to be peers and comrades, and becomes more effective the more broadly it is instituted. It is not a perfect tool in every situation or by every metric, and I would not recommend that all organizations be run the exact way I have described. But for political organizations, democracy is the way that they turn their members into militants, the way they incorporate the perspectives of new members, the way we synthesize not just one person’s experience but all our experiences. It is the way we create something that is bigger than a mailing list, that is broader than a handful of paid organizers or a clique. It is nothing less than the creation of human relations, and, both internally and externally, it is the way we create the world we are trying to build.
- This was written before Davenport’s Materialist History or Critical History? for the ebook From Tide to Wave: Base Building and Communist Politics. – Editor
- Daniel Gutiérrez, Seizing the Times, Viewpoint Magazine (2020)