I mean, my take is that hierarchy is something which will inevitably occur whether it is planned or not. My go-to example is a book club. Even in something as mundane as a book club, you will have members who are collectively deemed as well read and insightful, and voilà - you have a hierarchy. To me, the important thing is being able to recognize these hierarchies and interpret how they influence social relations. OWS on the other hand had a very infantile interpretation of hierarchy where all forms of hierarchy or leadership were to be shunned. Still though, it got farther than you’d expect on such a primitive basis. <edit> And I must reiterate, in particular, even this naive approach did a very good job at undermining co-option </edit>

Naturally, there are various tendencies throughout the anarchist canon. I’m not particularly familiar with them all, but I could point to syndicalism (and extending from syndicalism, federation of syndicalist units) as examples of building up organizational structures within an anarchist framework, so its not like some revolutionary new concept or anything. There are theory and history behind such formations. It seems to me like the bigger problem is that a lot of people simply glom on to an extremely vulgar interpretation.

When it comes to the whole online tendency pissing contest though, I suppose my point is that no social movement can be boiled down to the application of one specific organizing strategy. I think if you take a deep enough look at any revolutionary struggle, you will find people applying a variety of different strategies, and more often than not, they compliment each other in achieving the end goal.