Informal organization is the insurrectionary anarchist principle that revolutionary organization should be temporary, task-specific, and non-bureaucratic: groups form around specific actions, accomplish or abandon them, and dissolve rather than persisting as permanent structures. Alfredo Bonanno is the primary theorist of this position.
The argument is structural, not tactical. Formal organizations — even anarchist ones — develop self-preservation instincts. A federation needs administrators; a union needs officers; a collective needs meeting facilitators and bookkeepers. Each function creates a role, and roles accumulate into a layer of organizational maintenance that competes with the organization’s stated aims. The more successful the organization, the more it has to protect, and the more conservative it becomes. What began as a vehicle for insurgency becomes a thing to be maintained, and maintenance displaces insurgency.
Informal organization responds by refusing to create what must be maintained. Affinity groups coalesce around shared trust and specific projects. Coordination happens through direct communication, not through delegates or committees. There is no membership list, no constitution, no treasury — and therefore nothing to bureaucratize, co-opt, or subpoena. This is not structurelessness: trust, shared analysis, and personal commitment are structures. But they are structures that cannot be separated from the people who constitute them and repurposed by someone else.
The critique has limits that Bonanno himself acknowledged. Informal organization works at the scale of the affinity group and the specific action. Sustained infrastructure — food systems, medical care, housing, education — requires forms of organization that persist beyond any single action. The tension between informality and infrastructure is one of the productive disagreements within anarchism: dual power and insurrectionary practice address different scales of the same problem, and the question of how they relate remains open.
Related terms
- Insurrectionary anarchism — the tendency that theorizes informality
- Alfredo Bonanno — the primary theorist
- Affinity group — the organizational form informality produces
- The Armed Joy — Bonanno’s text on immediacy and freedom
- Dual power — the infrastructural counterpart to informal organization
- Federation — the formal coordination mechanism informality critiques
- Recuperation — what formal organizations become vulnerable to