Anarchist Pragmatism in Union Power

Introduction

Anarchism has always faced a paradox when it turns toward organization. To coordinate large-scale change means invoking structure, yet structure risks the very hierarchy anarchists repudiate. Union activism makes this paradox tangible. On one hand, collective bargaining demands discipline, negotiation, and formal offices. On the other, anarchist ethics urge anti-authoritarianism, horizontal participation, and spontaneous initiative. The friction between these instincts runs through the entire history of radical labor.

Rose Pesotta, an anarchist inside mainstream unions, embodied this tension. She fought for rank-and-file participation while serving as a vice president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, a post that required executive authority. Her story reveals an unresolved question: can a revolutionary spirit survive within bureaucratic forms, or does it inevitably fossilize there? The question is not only historical. Every organizer working within NGOs, labor federations, or social‑movement nonprofits faces the same puzzle today.

The answer requires neither romantic purity nor cynical compromise. It demands an alchemy between ideals and machinery—treating institutions as temporary vessels through which collective energy flows. The task is to keep that energy liquid, preventing solidification into hierarchy. This essay explores how to preserve anarchist principles inside formal organizations, drawing practical tools from historical precedents and contemporary strategy. It argues that transparency must become theater, revocation must feel festive, and authority must remain visibly reversible. Only then can institutions serve liberation without swallowing it.

Living the Contradiction: Anarchists Inside Bureaucracy

The double‑bind of organizing power

Whenever an anarchist accepts a leadership position, contradiction becomes a daily companion. Structures confer effectiveness: they allow strikes to coordinate, resources to flow, messages to synchronize. Yet those same structures centralize decision-making and create distance between leaders and base. This oscillation—between efficiency and equality—defines the anarchist encounter with bureaucracy.

Activists often attempt to resolve the tension through individual virtue: remaining humble, avoiding titles, or resigning at intervals. But virtue alone cannot sanitize structure. The smarter approach is to redesign the environment so that hierarchy cannot accumulate. Instead of pretending authority is evil while secretly exercising it, wise organizers expose it to sunlight and constant circulation.

Rose Pesotta’s experiment in balance

Pesotta shows both the possibilities and pitfalls of this balance. She insisted on mass participation, yet at times acted autocratically to defend that very principle. Her tenure demonstrates that bureaucracy itself is not inherently incompatible with anarchism; permanence and opacity are. Her success came when she treated hierarchy as temporary scaffolding for collective action, not as career infrastructure. When that scaffolding hardened, she withdrew.

Modern counterparts face the same choice. Inside large unions or digital campaign platforms, anarchist organizers can cultivate procedural sunset clauses—every delegate or committee disappears unless renewed by open assembly. The point is not endless rotation for its own sake but keeping vitality higher than institutional inertia. In this design, leadership becomes stewardship of a current, not possession of a chair.

From anxiety to art

Rather than viewing bureaucracy as an infection, anarchists can approach it as artistic medium. The material is slow, rule‑bound, sometimes obstinate—yet capable of channeling massive solidarity when sculpted well. The discipline is to remain aware that the sculpture must dissolve after serving its moment. Treat your position as a temporary mask worn to crack the next layer of captivity. The skill lies in slipping it off before it attaches to your face.

By acknowledging contradiction openly, organizers transform moral paralysis into improvisation. The organization becomes a laboratory for constant unfreezing—an arena where procedure and spontaneity dance rather than duel.

Radical Transparency as Tactical Theater

Why information alone is not enough

Many activists equate transparency with posting meeting minutes or releasing budgets. While necessary, data dumps rarely shift power. True transparency is affective, not just informational; it must inflame curiosity and collective pride. When information remains dull, secrecy simply finds new hiding places. To destabilize hierarchy, disclosure must be dramatic.

Consider livestreaming negotiation sessions between union officers and management. Even partial broadcasts rewrite the ritual: members witness power dynamics directly rather than through sanitized reports. If livestreaming is impossible, daily audio summaries uploaded by rotating volunteers achieve a similar effect. Such acts transform the right to know into a public performance of ownership. Authority tolerates oversight only until oversight becomes entertainment; then it fears it.

Mapping power as an open secret

Transparency gains teeth when it visualizes influence. Digital power maps can display which committees, staffers, or departments shape specific decisions, with arrows of accountability that members can annotate. This cartography converts hierarchy from invisible architecture into visible conversation. Once people see the diagram, they begin editing it—re‑wiring chains of command toward greater horizontality.

Historical precedents exist. During Spain’s libertarian syndicalist surge of the 1930s, worker assemblies posted organizational charts on workshop walls and re‑drew them weekly to reflect shifting tasks. Power literally moved on paper, signaling to all that command was contingent. Modern software can resurrect that ritual in real time.

The role of narrative transparency

Facts alone bore people; stories move them. Use transparency to tell the story of struggle, complete with failures and contradictions. When leaders admit uncertainty, trust expands rather than contracts. Bureaucracies maintain control by projecting omniscience; radical transparency dissolves that illusion. The act of confessing confusion, of narrating experiments honestly, restores legitimacy to collective trial and error.

Transparency thus becomes not a compliance measure but a collective dramaturgy—the ongoing play of a movement rehearsing democracy before the real performance of liberation. Its scenes must be vivid enough to keep audience and actors interchangeable.

Revocation as Celebration: Ritualizing Reversibility

The need to make revocation joyful

Oversight mechanisms are common on paper but weak in spirit. Ballots, committees, or recall procedures often feel punitive, bureaucratic, or exhausting. To sustain anti‑hierarchical culture, revocation must feel exhilarating, not administrative. When people experience power turnover as collective art, they crave it instead of avoiding it.

Imagine a monthly or lunar‑cycle “eclipse moment” where all regular work pauses. Members gather to evaluate leadership, critique strategies, and experiment with rotations. Music, joking, and storytelling replace procedural tension. Authority expiry becomes festival, not crisis. Repetition of this ritual builds muscle memory: people learn that leaders expire naturally, like fruit, and new fruit always grows.

The Reversal Festival archetype

One practical embodiment is a Reversal Festival, a moving carnival of temporary empowerment. Construct a portable throne from workplace scrap—symbol of authority reclaimed from production’s waste. Parade it through departments. Each current officer climbs up, briefly recounts one decision they made, then steps down and yields the seat to a randomly chosen worker who announces what they would have done differently. Cameras document the reversal, but the only enduring record is a handwritten ledger preserved for one week.

This simple ceremony communicates three messages: power circulates, critique is legitimate, and leadership is not a career but a gesture. Theatrical inversion etches the principle deeper than any clause in a constitution. Psychologically, it converts resentment toward leaders into participatory play, reducing factional bitterness.

When adapted to community organizations, the same concept might use rotating “decision circles” drawn on sidewalks with chalk, where anyone entering must pronounce a public policy wish and then erase it as the next speaker steps in. The erasure is as vital as the declaration—it proves impermanence.

Symbolic deconstruction and re‑use

At week’s end, dismantle the throne and return the materials to production. Authority vanishes back into the common pool. The theatrical act of deconstruction underscores impermanence; even the symbols are transient. Participants witness the recycling of hierarchy into raw matter—literally seeing power melt back into everyday life. Repetition of this rhythm immunizes institutions against ossification.

Ancient festivals like Saturnalia and medieval charivaris used similar inversions to maintain social elasticity. The insight remains timeless: periodic chaos preserves the organism. When applied intentionally, ritual disorder keeps freedom breathing inside opaque organizations.

The role of the final oath

The festival concludes with a final caretaker’s oath, a single sentence promising a concrete transparency act before the next cycle. It might pledge quicker information releases, broader meeting facilitation, or rotating spokesman roles. The oath is read aloud, photographed, and pinned beside the time clock. Public reminders transform ephemeral vows into daily conscience. Such micro‑commitments link symbolism to logistics, ensuring spectacle fertilizes procedure rather than floating above it.

Revocation ceremonies re‑train collective desire. People stop yearning for saviors and start craving renewal. When that cultural shift takes root, bureaucracy can never again freeze into authority.

External Affinity as Internal Conscience

Why outside critique matters

Every organization becomes a closed loop if left alone. Successful anarchist pragmatism must weave constant external critique into internal life. The challenge is integration without dilution. Outsiders must have enough influence to sting but not to capture. Regularly inviting allies who are free of institutional constraints prevents self‑deception and keeps imagination porous.

Historical models illustrate this necessity. During the early Industrial Workers of the World conventions, guest radicals, poets, and agitators crossed from other movements to challenge formulas. These encounters incubated creativity but also controversy; both were indispensable. Likewise, contemporary labor networks can host open forums where community groups dissect union strategies in front of members. This practice converts vulnerability into power: admitting fallibility publicly inoculates an organization against hypocrisy.

The Open‑the‑Gates assembly

A modern adaptation is the annual Open‑the‑Gates Assembly. For one day, all formal boundaries dissolve—journalists, community allies, and unaffiliated workers are welcome to interrogate leadership on live stream. Officers must answer directly, with no pre‑screened questions. The event resembles a public trial mixed with street theater. The goal is not humiliation but reaffirmation of accountability before a watching world. Like medieval fairs where guilds displayed their crafts to maintain reputation, the assembly showcases moral craftsmanship.

Through such openness, an institution proves its faith in collective reason. The courage to host critique is itself propaganda of the deed. The longer you practice this, the less dependent your legitimacy becomes on titles or rules, and the more it arises from performative honesty.

Building parallel teams of experimenters

External networks also serve as laboratories for tactics too risky inside official parameters. While unions pursue negotiations, parallel groups can test wildcat ideas or direct actions, feed outcomes back, and push the edge of respectability. This dual-circuit system resembles biological homeostasis: the outer membrane detects change faster than the inner core can process it. Without this feedback loop, bureaucracies suffocate.

The anarchist mindset should treat critique not as nuisance but as circulatory necessity. External accomplices are the lungs through which the institutional body breathes uncertain air.

Institutional Craftsmanship and the Ethics of Temporality

Designing expiry into every office

The healthiest organizations record expiration dates next to every title. This principle can be codified through automatic term lapses, contingent renewal votes, or peer lotteries. The method matters less than the rhythm of uncertainty. When every officeholder knows their role dissolves unless renewed, power remains kinetic. The measure of strength shifts from tenure to trust earned each cycle.

Temporary authority aligns with anarchist temporality, which views stability not as virtue but as compost for the next emergence. Institutions should therefore include their own decomposers: councils tasked with reviewing outdated procedures and ceremonially retiring them. Burning obsolete bylaws once a year, even metaphorically, expresses healthy decay.

Adopting the chemistry mindset

Think like an alchemist rather than an engineer. Authority exists only long enough to catalyze transformation and should then precipitate out. This chemistry framing discourages fetishizing structure. When leaders grasp that their real role is to accelerate reactions—not to dominate—they work with lighter ego attachment. After reaction completion, the catalyst is removed; purity regains flow.

Movements following this pattern endure losses with less panic. Failure becomes lab data; dissolution breeds reinvention. Revolts from 2011’s occupied squares to 2019’s climate strikes demonstrate that vitality often survives eviction precisely because it migrated faster than repression adapted. Bureaucratic activists should internalize that agility.

Protecting the psyche inside institutions

Sustaining anti‑authoritarian discipline under bureaucratic drag can erode morale. Ritual decompression is essential. Collective storytelling nights, silent walkouts, or art sessions where members portray daily contradictions act as psychological venting valves. Without them, cynicism metastasizes. Remember that burnout is a political outcome engineered by hierarchy’s pace; slowing down periodically is strategic, not indulgent.

The inner anarchist must learn rest as resistance. Only a calm nervous system perceives the subtle point where pragmatism slips into co‑optation. Psyche protection thus belongs within strategic planning, not outside it.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To navigate pragmatic leadership while defending anarchist principles, embed these five concrete practices:

• Institute Sunset Clauses: Every leadership position, committee, or campaign automatically ends after a set cycle unless renewed by direct vote. This keeps authority provisional and sparks continual engagement.

• Perform Transparency: Transform information‑sharing into participatory spectacle. Livestream negotiations, co‑create visual power maps, and invite commentary in real time. Demystify leadership through drama rather than bureaucracy.

• Host Eclipse Reviews: Schedule monthly or lunar‑cycle gatherings dedicated solely to questioning decisions, rotating facilitators, and imagining alternatives. Add music and humor so oversight feels alive rather than punitive.

• Build External Mirrors: Formalize partnerships with unaffiliated collectives authorized to critique your strategies publicly. Rotate which ally hosts your Open‑the‑Gates Assembly each year to ensure unpredictability and truthfulness.

• Practice Ritual Deconstruction: At the close of major campaigns, decommission symbols of power—officer badges, banners, even office furniture—through visible dismantling or recycling. Demonstrate that leadership objects themselves are compostable.

These actions convert anarchist principles from abstract slogans into bodily habits. Over time, members internalize reversibility as pleasure, not punishment, producing an organization that self‑liberates continuously.

Conclusion

Balancing anarchist purity with organizational pragmatism is less a puzzle to solve than a practice to live. The tension cannot be eliminated because it is the motor of evolution. Every effective radical must inhabit contradiction with grace. By theatricalizing transparency, ritualizing revocation, and welcoming external critique, you keep power from coagulating. Institutions will always stretch toward hierarchy, but they can be tuned to decay before calcifying.

Rose Pesotta’s path anticipated this art: wield authority without owning it, guide structure without believing in its permanence. Her legacy reminds activists that leadership is not betrayal when it remains provisional and reversible. The future of anarchist pragmatism lies in designing organizations that breathe—grasping, releasing, re‑forming in rhythm with social struggle.

Ultimately, the question is not whether anarchists can work inside bureaucracies but whether they can teach those bureaucracies to unmake themselves. The measure of success is how easily power can move from hand to hand without losing its revolutionary heat. So ask yourself: what in your current organization is already solidifying, and how will you melt it back into motion before it freezes your imagination?