My number one problem when people very rigidly oppose formalizing hierarchy in organizing - to the extent you don’t even elect an executive to make decisions between meetings - is that if it’s not formalized it becomes a lot more subtle and harder to criticize and hold accountabl

Often when you’re dealing with consensus and “horizontalized” structures, what takes control is social capital. Who’s more charismatic? Who’s got the most friends in the org? Who’s seen as the most knowledgeable? And so on.

It makes it so that criticism of these things is moved into the realm of paranoia and intrigue - leaders will inevitably emerge and when they do they should be elected, recallable, and held to account.

You can’t have that type of accountability if your leadership can deny that they’re even leaders!

Also democracy is unintelligible unless the decisions are binding - which requires centralism. Centralism is tyrannical without democracy. Democratic centralism isn’t just a *type* of organizing, it’s implicit in all democratic structures.

Many parties (both ML and bourgeois parties) emphasize the centralism and neglect democracy - others (mainly more anarchistic tendencies) neglect centralism and overemphasize democracy. Both impoverish themselves.

Formalizing these things means we can take legitimately democratic approaches to them, understand them plainly, and use them to our advantage.