“Organization is the form of every human association for the attainment of a common purpose.”
Source: The Principles of Organization, 1947, p. 10
Anarchism And Other Impediments To Anarchy (1985)
Context: Every organization has more in common with every other organization than it does with any of the unorganized. The anarchist critique of the state, if only the anarchists understood it, is but a special case of the critique of organization. And, at some level, even anarchist organizations sense this.
Anti-anarchists may well conclude that if there is to be hierarchy and coercion, let it be out in the open, clearly labeled as such. Unlike these pundits (the right-wing "libertarians", the minarchists, for instance) I stubbornly persist in my opposition to the state. But not because, as anarchists so often thoughtlessly declaim, the state is not "necessary". Ordinary people dismiss this anarchist assertion as ludicrous, and so they should. Obviously, in an industrialized class society like ours, the state is necessary. The point is that the state has created the conditions in which it is indeed necessary, by stripping individuals and face-to-face voluntary associations of their powers. More fundamentally, the state's underpinnings (work, moralism, industrial technology, hierarchic organizations) are not necessary but rather antithetical to the satisfactions of real needs and desires. Unfortunately, most brands of anarchism endorse all these premises yet balk at their logical conclusion: the state.
If there were no anarchists, the state would have had to invent them. We know that on several occasions it has done just that. We need anarchists unencumbered by anarchism. Then, and only then, we can begin to get serious about fomenting anarchy.
“Organization is the form of every human association for the attainment of a common purpose.”
Source: The Principles of Organization, 1947, p. 10
Source: Science and Sanity (1933), p. 64.
Context: Any organism must be treated as-a-whole; in other words, that an organism is not an algebraic sum, a linear function of its elements, but always more than that. It is seemingly little realized, at present, that this simple and innocent-looking statement involves a full structural revision of our language...
Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 50-59, as cited in Lyndall Urwick (1937;50)
Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 5, Historical Change in Civilizations, p. 137
Managing, Chapter Four (Two Organizational Structures), p. 64.
Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 4 : On Old Age
“Every organization should tolerate rebels who tell the emperor he has no clothes.”
2000s, The Powell Principles (2003)
“Every organ is a hormone-producing gland.”
The Fabric of Mind (1985)