It was the organizationalist Love and Rage Federation that popularized the Black Bloc tactic in the United States. The German Autonomist movement originally used the Black Bloc tactic hand in hand with defending squats that were organized in some kind of directly democratic way. The ZAD, even though it is championed by many anti-organizational anarchists, has its own alternative organizations and infrastructure organized through direct assembly. However important clashes with the police have been to defending the ZAD, the ZAD is not reducible to fighting the cops. The most insurrectionary battles in the USA–and throughout the planet– were in large part mediated by alternative institutions.

Horizontalist forms of organization have been used in every major libertarian revolutionary movement: from the Paris Commune, to The Free Territory, to anarchosyndicalist Spain, to anarchocommunist Shinmin, to EZLN, to Rojava. There is no historical evidence for an effective revolutionary movement devoid of organizations nor is there evidence for an effective revolutionary movement reducible to the affinity group model of organizing. Libertarian socialism and the organizationalist branch of anarchism are able to show concrete examples of real world victories– however limited such victories are, and however much they made internal mistakes. The relatively new post-left–and the relatively ancient anti-organizational anarchism–have so far been unable to show any kind of comparable victories.

Anti-organizationalists tend to demonstrate hubris about the effectiveness of purely anti-organizational approaches to changing the world and the ineffectiveness (or even immorality!) of any kind of formal organizing. If anti-organizationalists want to make such arguments about abolishing the means and ends of all formal organizations, then they better come up with some sufficiently relevant variables that warrant such claims. Given the lack of historical evidence on the anti-organizationalist side, and given the breadth and depth of historical evidence on the side of organizationalism, it is fair to say that the organizational wing of anti statism has more evidence to support its strategy and its vision of a good society.

Formal horizontalist organizations allow people to pool needs, abilities, tools, resources, and action plans on a variety of scales while keeping decision making power within the hands of people directly. Such organizations can interface with the public and advocate for their programs and reach out to people. By reaching out to people, anarchistic practices can become common and popular which helps against state repression. When anti-authoritarian movements are small in size and purely informal, then anarchists become separated from ordinary people, the working class, the dispossessed, and the oppressed and gain less capacity to do actions while being easier to repress by state powers.

Informal organizations and informal relations are necessary but insufficient for exhaustively encompassing a coherent revolutionary strategy. It is not the organizationalists who claim that formal and informal organization are incompatible. The anti-organizational wing of anti statism makes arguments for abolishing all formal organizations, whereas the organizational wing of anti statism do not make arguments for abolishing all informal organizations. Rather than adding some new strategy to anarchism, anti-organizationalism subtracts organizational and socialist dimensions of anarchism. Anti-organizational anarchism reduces a coherent diversity of tactics to informality, periodic actions, and perpetual unpopularity.

The affinity group is the preferred model of organizing for the informalists. Yet the affinity group model has shown to be most resilient when it interfaces with a broader movement that involves formal organization and when affinity groups themselves tend towards a degree formality, spokescouncils, and collective decisions. Furthermore, it has often been the libertarian socialist wing of anti statism that has utilized affinity groups in the most insurrectionary ways; just look at the Iberian Anarchist Federation. The anti-democratic wing of anarchism contradict their own principles when they support affinity groups given that most every anarchistic affinity group involves collective decisions without ruling classes and therefore operates via democracy of some kind or another.