What Would a Non-hierarchical Society Look Like?

There are some things in our everyday experience that have acquired the sense of inevitability, of being ineluctable consequences of some divine or cosmic imperative. They seem “natural”, and we can scarcely conceive of their absence. Indeed, we rarely take the time even to consider an alternative to them, because they we simply assume their legitimacy. One of these supposedly natural conditions is that of hierarchy: the top-down arrangement one finds in a myriad of institutions that binds the members of an organisation or pact to the directives of higher-ups, who pass these directives down a chain of command for them to be implemented. Hierarchies, while being amenable to democratic input, are inherently authoritarian structures by their very nature. They necessitate that some individuals have a claim to more “authority” than others, and they necessitate some legal or other set of strictures to enforce the whim of the leadership.

It is widely assumed that, without hierarchy, our society would succumb to something approximating chaos. It would be akin to a herd of sheep without a farmer, wandering around with no sense of direction, easy prey to the wolf. This, of course, presupposes that organisation as such would be difficult to come by in a state of no hierarchy. However, while our prejudices may cast a skeptical eye upon the achievability of such a society, quite sophisticated attempts have been made to elaborate on how it could work. There is a strain of political thought called anarchism that calls for the elimination of hierarchy to the maximum extent possible, and for society to be run directly by the people in it (rather than having them vote for representatives who will make decisions on their behalf through a formal governmental machinery). Realistic or not, the philosophy of this movement is one aimed at humanity’s emancipation through the creation of conditions that will allow human creativity come to the fore in its fullest fruition, unfettered by the constraints of states, markets and other abstractions. This means that work must also become emancipated, made into a means to serve our interests rather than being an end in itself that dominates and degrades our lives; work must be turned into an expression of truly human creativity, facilitated by the moral force of voluntary association, cooperation and democratic decision making open to all. Only when people come to fully appreciate the meaning of their labour will humanity come to express what Marx and others called its “species character”. Until then, it is a cog in a machine, stripped of a sense of true connectedness with the product and meaning of its industry. Marxists and anarchists, while having many points in common (such as advocating the abolition of exploitative relations, and the emancipation of man and labour) also differ on key aspects. One of these is these is that Marxists call for the eventual “withering away” of the state, while anarchists call for its abolishment as soon as existing economic and social relations have been overturned.