"Any person who has participated in a non-hierarchical kind of organization, even a small one, knows that, in the absence of mechanisms that protect plurality and foster participation, "horizontality" soon becomes a fertile soil for the survival of the fittest. Any such person also knows how frustrating and limited it is to have organizations in which each and everyone are always forced to gather in assemblies to make decisions on every single issue of a movement -from general political strategy to fixing a leaking roof. The "tyranny of structurelessness", as Jo Freeman used to say, exhausts our movements, subvert their
principles, and makes them absurdly inefficient.
"Contrary to the usual belief, autonomous and horizontal
organizations are more in need of institutions than hierarchical ones; for these can always rely on the will of the leader to resolve conflicts, assign tasks, etc. I would like to argue that we need to develop institutions of a new type. By institutions I do not mean a bureaucratic hierarchy, but simply a set of democratic agreements on ways of functioning, that are formally established, and are endowed with the necessary organizational infrastructure to
enforce them if needed."
"Autonomous Politics and its Problems," Ezequiel Adamovsky
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/3911
"In my experience, interpersonal conflicts within egalitarian
collectives are vastly more prevalent and difficult to address than most people think or hope. Apart from our complete lack of business experience and knowledge when Mondragan first started up, I would argue that the nature and long-term threat of interpersonal conflicts was one of the things we most under-estimated, were most surprised by, and were least prepared to deal with. Why that is, and how different things might be between our present difficulties under capitalism and a long-established parecon, is not intuitively obvious. No doubt
there are forces which shape and constrain conflict resolution under capitalism, including within our own alternative institutions, which may be absent in a future participatory economy. For starters, none of us has been raised, right now, to deal with one another as equals. We need to acknowledge that there are actually skills and training involved to deal with one another openly, with respect, to cut through the baggage of our classist,
racist, sexist socialization, to transcend the harmful elements of our own pride and egos, and so on. Acknowledging this is not the same thing as resolving it."
"Participatory Economics in Theory & Practice," Paul Burrows
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/15987
