Photo credit: Harvard SLAM
In the fall of 2016, Harvard University’s dining services workers — all 750 of them — went on strike for three weeks after months of fruitless negotiations with the administration about cuts to healthcare and the denial of a living income. This strike, the first dining services strike to happen term-time in Harvard’s history, and by far the longest, was only successful because of the tremendous amount of sustained internal organizing and external coalition building that kept hundreds of workers out of the dining halls and on the picket lines.
But that story of the Harvard University Dining Service (HUDS) strike is not mine to tell. I’m not a Harvard worker, and I didn’t risk default, foreclosure or impoundment to secure a better future for my family.
Instead, I’m a member of the Student Labor Action Movement, or SLAM.
Founded in 1997, SLAM supports workers’ causes on campus, and during the HUDS strike, it was the primary front for organizing Harvard students, who are often uniquely positioned on campus to leverage press attention and apply pressure to the administration. Prior to and over the course of the strike, SLAM members organized students across Harvard in a campaign that featured petitions, rallies and walkouts, and culminated in a several-hour sit-in at the site of contract negotiations that ended the same night as the strike did.
As one of the most progressive groups on campus, SLAM is non-hierarchical and operates structurelessly. This group structure (or lack thereof) draws inspiration from feminist and other radical movements in the ‘50s and ‘60s, which believed that structurelessness was the best way to achieve group democracy and reject constructs like hierarchy and the division of labor.
But while that all sounds nice in theory, the fact is — as I would learn through my SLAM experience — that structurelessness is impossible. Instead, not creating formal structures only allows informal ones to come through. And whether those informal structures are innocuous friend group associations or more sinister and embedded structures like white supremacy or patriarchy, they end up dominating the organization and running explicitly counter to the idea of group democracy.
In the late ‘60s, a feminist named Jo Freeman gave a speech where she called this phenomenon the tyranny of structurelessness, and talked about the different effects it has on structureless groups. In this speech, which was later published as an essay, Freeman identifies several key issues that these kind of structureless groups face. One of these is the creation of an elite, often based on friend groups and social hierarchies, that ends up setting the agenda and is not held responsible to the needs of the group.
Photo credit: Harvard SLAM
One weekend, we were planning to disrupt an alumni event where the president of the University would be speaking. Now imagine this: It’s late at night, there’s a group of eight people in a cramped room. They haven’t slept much, and at least half of them are hungry. And while they all know each other to some extent, some within the group — specifically, the white folks — see each other socially more than others.
Now, that’s the situation we were in. And we knew that there would be security, including Harvard’s own actual police force, at the event. But every time I brought up that we really needed to think through arrest procedures, my concerns were dismissed. I found myself, normally a pretty influential member of the group, being laughed at, even though I cited specific Massachusetts laws and even the case of the Irvine 11, a group of Muslim college students who were arrested for disrupting an assembly in California. It was all dismissed, and at the meeting, one of the white men looked up the law that I had been citing and they all marveled that it actually existed.
Now, fast forward to the day of the action, and, in addition to the manhandling that happened inside, this is just a small part of what happens.
The day after that, one of the college deans told us that we only narrowly avoided arrest that day, and reminded us that the school police force has guns.
Now, what’s the point here? I’m not telling this story prove that I was right, although I was. I’m telling it because while this scenario may seem power-blind, it wasn’t. That particular group of friends — which became what Jo Freeman calls “the elite that dictates the conversation” — was largely white. The power they had not only to speak over my voice, but also to dismiss my concerns — which were ultimately identity-based for me as a Muslim woman of color — was the power differential of white supremacy in action. And, because we were structureless, we had no protocols or procedures of accountability in place to address that power differential, or anyone who could adjust for it. Instead, what happened is what I like to call the normalization of white risk, where this group that claimed to be radical and intersectional instead upheld whiteness — and the comparatively lower level of risk white people incur when dealing with law enforcement — as the norm.
That wasn’t the only time informal power structures emerged in what we claimed was structurelessness. Freeman also talks about how structurelessness leads to power dictating who becomes the spokesperson and who speaks for the movement.
For us, that meant a very real tension between diversifying our spokespeople and tokenizing — and, sometimes, in my case, self-tokenizing — our members of color. We also alienated some of our members — myself included – and sometimes could have gotten things done more efficiently — and even more democratically.
Of course, none of this is to say that we weren’t effective or that we didn’t fight alongside workers for a really important cause. In a lot of ways, we succeeded — certainly in our stated goals of supporting workers toward their own victory. But I think that in some ways, we also failed. We didn’t create structures that effectively kept toxic hierarchies out of our group. We didn’t value everyone’s voices in the same way. And, most significantly, we didn’t do our due diligence in our efforts to support a highly democratic movement largely composed of people of color, especially women.
So I don’t know where that leaves us. Jo Freeman is clear about the many risks that come with structurelessness, and there’s clearly a need for accountability and rules and procedures that everyone, not just an exclusive elite, partakes in. She names several options to make groups less tyrannical in this way — delegation, diffusion of information, equal access to resources — all of which have worked for different contexts. But the struggle for us now is how do we come back from that? Freeman says that the groups that need structure the most often have the hardest time creating it.
As for SLAM, we celebrate our 20th anniversary this year, and I hope it takes a little less than the next 20 to figure this out. But what I’ve figured out is that to truly build a movement that really fosters group democracy, you need an active, positive commitment to it, not a trust that it’ll just happen if you say it will. That’s what Freeman learned in her experience, and that’s what SLAM — I hope — learned in ours.
Anwar is a poet, activist, and student studying colonization/decolonization and liberation theologies in the Muslim world. In between having opinions and getting vocal about them, she likes to read books, embroider various surfaces, look up etymologies, and stare at the stars.